Thanks HN!
The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales.
No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/.
In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever way to 10x, or make it go viral. A big motivator was Paul Graham's "do things that don't scale" post [1]. So we just sat down and talked to people.
I think it just comes down to fear of rejection in the end. Making a product, adding features, working on things and even showing your "cool" demo to friends isn't same as asking strangers for money.. because people can say a million nice things about what you have to offer until you ask them to put in their credit card number. Then the you get to know what they really think.
Some of it may be "morality" component, for lack of a better word. Some people want the world to be one where people and ideas advance on merit rather than via popularity or "knowing the right people", and act upon that hope subconsciously or as a justification for avoiding unfamiliar risk.
I'd wager it's also a bit more common among software developers.
Seneca once said "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." Too many people focus on the preparation and not nearly enough on increasing the likelihood of opportunity.
As a developer-turned-founder, a lot of marketing feels sleazy. Was it always this way? So much link-bait, fluffy posts that are really big ads, shallow content just for SEO, upvoting-rings on platforms, etc. There's so few who seem to put in an honest effort. I'm sure part of this is because Google is letting all this low quality stuff rank.
From day one, we've focused on honestly taking care of customers. Pushing customer visible bugs to the top of the list, following up when requested features are released, reprioritizing the roadmap to accommodate growing pain points, etc. It has has paid dividends over the years in the form of very strong referrals. Which are effectively pre-sold trials.
Maybe the first 10 will leave while you figure out where to go. That sucks, but it’s fine.
Crystal Pepsi was another example. Budgets couldn’t overcome the fact it tasted like nutmeg.
Modern era, I worked for a startup that got national media coverage before it was ready. I’m not convinced it was the right product and I know the founder could have spent way more time talking to customers in the ideation stage. But national media coverage created some bad months. I remember a several week stretch with more than 100 support requests in queue.
Fun times, in the Dwarf Fortress sense of the term.
In gaming industry you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one. Anthem, Marvel Avengers, Fallout 76, that game with 2042 at the end, Amiga CD32, Ouya. A lot of games as a service(and for most of them you pay upfront and afterwards). Everything is so much hyped to be the best thing since sliced bread.
How can you push too hard too soon, if people were turned off by the product?
Unless you're burning budget in an unsustainable manner... but that's not what OP said.
There is always a risk that the market won't like it. If you want a steady paycheque then entrepreneurship isn't for you (or isn't for you right now).
> Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it.
My biggest struggle so far is: How do I find those people to "sit and talk" to? Any advice on that?
Who do you expect to use this product day in and day out? And then make it even smaller and go look for those people on LinkedIn, Reddit, HackerNews, Twitter, etc.
Then just hit them up. You don't have to be selling necessarily, you can simply be asking about the problems they might have or looking for feedback on something.
Obviously this depends a lot on B2C or B2B, but there exists a community of people somewhere with the problem you're trying to solve or a company which is kind of a community :D.
If you can't find an audience, then I think that also answers your question.
So, you should go ahead and subscribe to my newsletter. It's pretty good:
What did one AAA battery say to the other?? Always be celling.
I was actually overwhelmed last year (my first as a freelancer on the side) and will scale back a bit to strengthen the foundations a bit better this year - but actually talking to people and when doing so always trying to create a little bit of value for them (and be it by 'oh now you mention that you need x, Paul over there is great and is actually looking for a way to sell x).
I am part of a business network and currently am working on providing a free short workshop for the people with online shops in basics about usability and conversion optimization. It will already provide them with the tools to make their shops better and also act as a marketing tool for deeper work on that topic with them (or a few of them).
And in parallel, as I am compiling the materials nonetheless I also will create additional ways to use the content in blog posts, Instagram and by creating checklists for others as a way to build an email list.
So this next to a day job and client work will probably be enough for me this year in marketing and business development work.
Let's see what comes of it.
[Edit typo]
It strikes me as imprudent to split it between Google, FB, and Twitter ads when I don't know what I'm doing.
Google Ads is complicated. Avoid it unless you are prepared to put in serious time learning how it works.
I tried Twitter ads a few years ago. Their demographics (knowledge of their customers are) was total garbage. Waste of money.
In general, do lots of small experiments and measure the results (clickthroughs, time on page, sign ups etc). If you can't measure anything meaningful, think carefully before handing over any cash.
If you’d have mentioned marketing a couple of years ago, someone would have shared the Bill Hicks post by now.
Marketing (not just advertising) really is an essential part of building product as it forces you to confront who might actually want the product and how you best go about talking to them and finding them.
He did a routine with a joke that worried Letterman, so Letterman made sure the segment didn’t air. In response, Bill Hicks went on public access television - there’s a really good show from Austin on YouTube - and used that as part of his own pitch.
A number of years later, after Bill Hicks died, David Letterman had Bill Hicks’ mom on his show. They talked about Bill Hicks and aired the routine. Bill Hicks’ impression of his parents was remarkably good.
I’ll share links then make my overwhelming point:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbHYqfYnhg
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B1NTmnG0hmA
When I watch Bill Hicks on marketing, I take it as being about ethics. We don’t have to monetize every little thing. And we don’t have to do awful things for pay.
Thanks for posting those.
One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed and improving SEO. A couple of years later, the site is now earning $10k+ a month .
Fast forward to now, my wife has a new job. I still hate ads, but I have become accustomed to that extra $300 each month and have had trouble talking myself into taking it down.
The moral here? I am working on that myself.
My joke since moving has been "I like my morals and will stick to them as long as it's convenient."
I've kind of thought about the moral of it myself. I ended up integrating Stripe to let people remove the ads. For a blog that might not make sense, but for a solitaire website where some people play an hour or two a day, it makes sense. I think the lowest pricing I had was a one-time fee of $5 and basically no-one uses it. I'm super surpriced how few people use it. But if you won't pay for playing, you're gonna get ads . And from what I can see, people are fine with this arrangement.
2: replace the ad with an ad for your thing
You don't even have to offer any perks. In my experience and in those I've heard, most people don't care about "rewards." They come to support. Just make a few tiers since people tend to pledge along them.
Edit: I see the ad sidebar now. FYI on my first visit I played for several minutes and this never opened
Tell me, have you set the difficulty on the first played game to some level that might artificially encourage further play? I only ask as I've not played solitaire in literally 20 years or so and everything on the game I just played on your site seemed to fall in to place remarkably easily... .
ed - spelling, grammar
Yes I have. Most solitaire games these days have an option of playing a fully random game or a winnable deal. The automatic deal when a user comes to the site is a winnable deal.
I'm trying to monetize a site I have but after a few impressions Adsense has left all my slots unfilled since. Of course, you can't contact anybody ... quite frustrating.
I had hosting issues in many of my companies and consulting projects, running from "WTF is this AWS bill $10k???" to "WTF did our 10gbit/s download just kick Heroku offline?"
But people can only appreciate the things I build for them if they are hosted well. So I took the obvious next step and purchased a small struggling hosting company. We then introduced nicer tooling that imitates the AWS and Heroku APIs if possible, to make using their servers as easy as possible for me. And now I can offer managed hosting to all of my consulting clients. For them, it's slightly cheaper prices and (in contrast with AWS and Heroku) they can just call me when things don't work. And for me, it's reliable high-margin revenue.
Great tip - thanks for reminding me about this.
For those of you that are interested, here's Joel Spolsky's really good analysis of this:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Going the other way of buying a failing hosting company would inherit its problems, mainly the lack of customers to break even.
One big trade-off is that I only have one datacenter so in cloud lingo, I only offer one availability zone with offsite backups. But then again, when AWS us-east went offline, so went most companies, because the proudly advertised multi-AZ failover didn't work that well in practice.
As for the APIs, I just limit the subset of APIs that I offer. Since this is used only for my consulting clients, my cloud only needs to support those APIs that they require. In effect, that means CEPH+PostgreSQL do most of the heavy lifting.
I've seen Cloud APIs explode in funny ways when customers actually arrive with Petabyte-scale datasets. In that sense, my customers are pre-qualified because all of them have had horrible experiences with Cloud providers over-promising and under-delivering. So once they are on my platform, dissuading them from wanting more APIs is very easy. "Would you like to continue to use my cloud at the current price? Or would you like to pay 3x the monthly spend just to use the Amazon cloud and gain API call XY? And please remember the last time they crashed badly and you could not reach any Amazon support by phone. Didn't they even bill you for EC2 while it was unreachable?"
And if they insist, I can always point them towards the Open Source project that Amazon/Heroku use under the hood. But in my opinion, most Cloud APIs don't add business value anyway. "Keep it simple" always wins out in the long run.
We've had exactly the same experience. From a business perspective it does mean that you can shift the blame if something goes down but it still impacts your product all the same. And you're left without the ability to directly fix the underlying issue. Most of our infrastructure runs on our own hardware out of a single datacenter and we've been able to get significantly better performance/ value. I love your approach of commoditizing your complement and acquiring a hosting provider.
...that said, one of the key techniques most people use for failing over between regions is changing DNS, which wouldn't have worked with Route 53 in this instance because its control plane is in us-east-1, so it's not like AWS looks spotless even in this analysis.
My customers want API compatibility with AWS and convenient deployments like on Heroku. So I needed a software layer to convert bare metal boxes into Cloud VMs and to imitate necessary APIs. And of course base images, buildpacks, etc. to convert a git link into a runnable docker image, like what Heroku does.
So basically I purchased them for all the scripts, tools, and stuff that happens between "Customer does a git push" and "Docker images are running on the correct bare-metal servers with the correct configuration"
Before, we had many situations where they asked me to take a look because something could have been a software issue but then turned out to be an AWS issue instead. That's always nasty if I need to tell my client "sorry you're offline, try calling Amazon". Even if they understand that there's nothing I can do, emotionally they still feel disappointed in me. When I use my own infrastructure, I can avoid these situations because it's in my power to make the necessary hosting repairs, too.
Turns out there is still a lot of money in selling technology to large enterprises that they can host and run themselves on an annual licensing model.
We were initially afraid of the long and high-touch enterprise sales cycles, complex procurement processes and enterprise integration requirements (complex permissions, LDAP auth, audit trails etc.) and thus wanted to do a simpler SaaS version with a monthly plan.
But I learned that if you start on the enterprise angle early, you can get some incredibly sticky customers with five, six or even seven figure annual license payments and very predictable cashflows you can raise or borrow against.
I worked on a similar product. It's just like shipping desktop software, but the people installing the on-premise server are much more savvy than someone who needs their hand held pushing a few buttons.
One thing I feel is really important is to have an actual person with an email address receive these and reply to them - rather than a ticketing system. This personal connection does wonders in maintaining a good relationship with the customer, especially if things go wrong.
Since this was the customer’s initial impression (and we wanted the IT gatekeepers to be happy), we strove to get installation as close to turn-key as possible
[1] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
Also, make sure that your page loads fast - especially the content that you are trying to index. Low hanging fruit like optimising image size or cleaning up your imports can have a big effect. When just starting out with little backlinks, good page speed loads can be the differentiator that will put you ahead. Use https://pagespeed.web.dev to check how fast your website loads.
To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?
Some things I'd start with:
- Minimize images (tinypng/tinyjpg)
- Deactivate/Remove what you don't need (Plugins (!!!), RPC, Emojis, stuff like that which is ON by default in WP -> will strip down the code)
- Strip down & combine scripts
- Reduce third-party dependencies, try making them first-party (fonts, analytics)
- Minify scripts and CSS
- Use caching on the client-side through htaccess rules
Also both Angular and React are not as heavy as one might expect, but 3rd-party components might bring tons of unnecessary deps.
It doesn't have to be that way though. If you want to use React, there are tools to help you easily make something like a static site generator (SSG) which will transform your React code down into pre-rendered HTML pages. Two popular ones are Gatsby (https://gatsby.dev/) and Next.js (https://nextjs.org/) which also supports Server Side Rendering (SSR).
So out of the box plain HTML / CSS might be more optimized than a fresh create-react-app repo, but if you prefer to use the toolset provided by React to build your site (or Vue or Angular, etc), there are plenty of options to make that equally performant.
That's not what I meant. With optimising page speed, there is a diminishing curve of returns from the perspective of time invested and the improvement that you make.
My idea, adding to the top comment mentioning the SEO, was to make sure that you don't slow down your landing pages / content unnecessarily which might lead to less organic growth and discovery.
While I wouldn't argue that this is the most important thing that will take your business off, a fast website and good content with keywords might provide you nice boost long term.
I'm asking, because every time I read up on these topics, or interact with an "expert", I get the feeling, that it is one of the more snake-oiley fields around.
Additionally https://www.sitelint.com/sitelint-vs-lighthouse-comparison/
I'm the founder of Scrimba.com, an interactive code-learning platform. We went almost two years from when we launched our very first free course until we launched our very first paid course. In the meanwhile, we planned the "perfect" business model and also pivoted to a Teams-based product for a while.
Had I just dared to put up a pricing wall in front of our second course instead, we'd have gotten the signal we needed from the market much earlier. Once we started getting revenue, everything else became a lot easier (what to invest more in, which courses to prioritise, what to do in general).
A lot of businesses do this as a growing strategy so don't fully discount the backlinks, leads, social media it gave you.
For bootstrappers and small ventures, I'd rather spend the free subsidy in ads. If you do it right, it just works.
I hate ads, but they work.
A few accelerants:
1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the US.
2) Started replacing myself by hiring multiple managers, which helped when I sold the business as it was no longer just about me.
3) Converted long-term clients to pre-paid retainer billing with helped create predictable workloads and revenue streams.
I had meetings with potential buyers and received a LOI (letter of intent) at a price I was comfortable with.
After that came 6 or 7 months of due diligence! I wasn’t expecting the process to last that long, but the buyer took time to interview my employees and secure a loan. At the end of each month I’d have to update my complete financial statements and the buyer would have to review them and they’d get submitted to the loan application.
Finally, the sale closed and I received a wire transfer.
I stayed on working for free (or maybe minimum wage?) FT for about a month, then part time for another month or two, and then finally on call for 1hr/week but no official office hours for another few months, just to make sure all the operations and handoff went smoothly. 6mo after the close I was officially done.
My main takeaway: first ensure the company is optimised for sellability.
And your question is answered too: agents. There are people and companies specialized in selling companies. Just like there are people specialized in buying companies.
there are a lot of things you can do easily early on but become very hard later:
- ensure the culture of the company doesn't require you to be there for it to function
- make sure your incorporation structure is amenable to selling easily
- separate out the accounts (both bank account and SaaS/PaaS/Iaas accounts) from day one, separate from any of your other projects
Just want to second this.
I've read several books on this topic. Warrillow's is easily the best.
It sounds planned in hindsight but it was pure luck. None of us had any idea how to do it. The reason luck was in our favor was because it wasn't a 1-man show, our location, aiming our communications not just at customers but always keep in mind our competitors and potential investors will (and should) hear us too.
We started eating our competitors lunch so they did have no choice but to take an interest. First we were an annoyance a few years later we had offers to discuss, then it became once or twice a year. We took every opportunity to engage but only for getting to know them but didn't take it further.
We were very visible because there were 3 of us in 3 different countries "making lot of noise" about our product.
Also timing wasn't good yet (why sell today when you know you'll be worth 5x in 2 years).
We went for ~5 years without considering selling and always positioned ourselves to eventually sell from the day we founded the business. If you think about selling when you're just starting, you end up constantly thinking if the company can be easily understood by an auditor and explained to an interested party.
We (3 partners) were already present in 3 countries/sites from the beginning so there was potential of messy "organic growth". And the only way to fix this do this was with a holding company.
- holding company to keep things simple and easy to explain and audit, e.g.:
- No difference in the contracts with our individual CEO's / sites that have to be negotiated individually when the company is acquired/sold
- an investor that takes over the holding has the keys to the kingdom
- all important negotiations done in the holding
The holding also made sense because it allowed us a presence in a 4th jurisdiction that is known to have a high density of investors and none of us would feel the main site is in one of the 3 jurisdictions that the partners were. So it kept things neutral.
Another thing we did right was never touch things we weren't experts in at least not until we had the first hire to move this forward internally, so we hired one of the big 4 to help with controlling & finance.
We had lots of internal bickering, I hated the idea of all this complexity with the holding, and the whole thing almost went tits-up before we even started. But implementing a holding within the first few months was the single most important decision for us. We might have gotten lucky without but not for the same returns.
I have only looked around in guest mode/logged out and haven't paid or anything to actually speak to the seller and get a fuller picture.
Are you happy with your purchases so far? What advice can you give me as a person that has a similar plan?
There's a few of these sites. Just search for them.
And there is also https://microacquire.com/
These days the secret is you have to hire the good South Americans.
Exploit the fact corporate America hasn't caught on to routing contracts through Upwork et al. Then don't get greedy, keep the TCE delta below 20%, so they stay more than 9 months.
You can take your pick of the finest FOSS contributors Guinea and Paraguay have to offer.
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Startup engineering management is so simple.
Buy a copy of Mythical Man Month.
Read it, read it again. Then re-read chapter 3.
Get two of the best, your Captain and your Copilot.
Encourage them to hire a pimply faced minion to edit the config files so they feel important, and so you avoid single point of dependency.
These days, get someone else who lives in Estonia/Ukraine/Sri Lanka for follow the sun support.
If you need more than two engineers + 2 assistants, you should have hired smarter engineers.
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Your secret path to success with international hiring is to avoid any country you know the name of.
Don't think you're thinking out of the box hiring from Brazil/Israel. Hunt down a decent dev from Ghana or Georgia.
If my Slack/Discord buddies are anything to go by, there's an extraordinary amount of gems out there who've made the choice to raise their kids in their home countries.
There's good talent in Thailand as well. RIP my friend the Thai data/cloud principal eng banking 14k USD.
Oh, I half thought you were serious until this point. I still don't get the joke though.
Don't know from when this is but tech salaries in Thailand are much higher and it's hard to find people.
This would be fresh grad level at most.
Warning, they might need increased PTOs starting tomorrow.
4) Optimized for SEO. About 50% of my business came from referrals, the other 50% SEO.
1. Often times the product is a leaky bucket, and you experience a massive spike in traffic and very quickly see your growth asymptotically approach zero.
2. These platforms often times also are filled with people waiting to abuse your platform. For flurly, all of my original fraud problems originated from my product hunt launch.
Thus for GraphJSON, I went with a different approach. I shared my progress on my twitter account and mostly had my builder friends use the product. Over the past 6 months, the product has continually improved due to the constant feedback of this community. Word naturally spreads and so does the growth.
I think it might be time to stop using Product Hunt for me. I find that I reliably get email spam after posting projects there. Along with the spam, there's usually little to no useful feedback.
Looks quite interesting - nice to see someone else thinking (and realizing) that you could go a long way with clickhouse + search/filter/visualization.
Our business was initially built on analysing data from a commercial provider and selling those insights to customers. The provider required that both we and each of our customers paid a high license fee. It became pretty clear that the provider was moving towards lots of tools and value added features on top of their data that would directly compete with us. At that point we had the choice to either work hard to keep differentiating our stuff, or do the crazy thing and attack their moat by collecting our own data. I will admit I was somewhat doubtful that we could pull it off, it was insanely ambitious for a company that was four people at the time against an incumbent that had been around for more than a decade. Ultimately we worked with another small provider to create a data spec, acquired them and all their human collectors, and now we sell our tools on top of our own data, with its own unique selling points. We went from a fun hobby to a fairly prominent player in our industry. Our competitors have gone on to consolidate and do some exciting stuff too so I hope we were a bit of a kick up the bum there.
I think we could easily have chickened out or waited until we were bigger and the outcome would not have been nearly as positive. So I guess the lesson is sometimes that you have to picture the endgame right from the start, and pursue it as aggressively as possible, instead of with baby steps that might feel safer or more natural.
about: CTO @ StatsBomb. Sports analytics - computer vision, data science, stream processing, data viz. Always hiring: https://statsbomb.com/careers/
Be super focused. It is easy to chase the money in similar but different directions and then you lack a coherent business strategy or brand. We burned time building a hardware-based version of our product, which we didn't want long-term, because a customer had money. Took about 3 months of the entire company's time and we never saw any of that money.
Honestly evaluate your product/service constantly, but especially in the early days. Is it really something that can be sold or is it low-value and low-volume? Do people want it or need it?
You need to believe in your product enough to charge the right amount (usually more than you are charging) otherwise you send the wrong message to customers and possibly cannot afford to support it if it becomes popular. Think in terms of what you are saving your customer rather than how much it seems like it should cost for a e.g. piece of software.
I would disagree with some of the comments below. Marketing is important but not necessarily early on and not necesarily involving hiring someone. Same with SEO. Can be useful but very market segment dependent. Instead, the one skill of the CEO is to see what is working and what isn't and to deal with it. If you can see a funnel with nothing coming in the top, maybe you do need marketing. On the other hand, if you get the leads but can't close anything, you either have a product or a sales problem.
Reach out to customers with the MVP and just incorporate the feedback until the feedback changes from “we can’t use it because…” to “we need this integration” to “we need this pricing”
Our latest learning that we retrospectively should have seen earlier is to get rid of our fear of becoming consultants. We come from a consultancy background and have seen to many startups around us wanting to build products, but taking on consultancy assignments leaving them no time to build their product. We have been so determined not to fall into that trap, realizing now that we have missed out on some great opportunities when selling to enterprises.
Also the contracts and my product don’t have anything related to each other :(
I know a handful of people who started with creating websites, then took some consultancy work and now have an entire different software company. They used those two things as a bootstrap to get going with opportunities that presented.
But we chose to forego the "consultancy" jobs. Reason is that we optimize for learning (we're at that stage). And while consultancy may look like a good opportunity for learning, that it allows you to get paid for investigating the real problem domain of your customers it is not optimised for that.
Far from it. My decades of consultancy and freelancing experience has told me that it always takes longer to implement the solution than to identify the problem. Implementing is a great opportunity for learning the details of the problem, sure. But Implementing also eats vast amounts of time to "Horizontally center that Div on the Dashboard": any non-trivial, time-consuming but utterly uninteresting for our startup.
I really don't want to spend two weeks implementing another authz/authn integration and login flow for a consulting customer. When in those two weeks I can interview at least three other customers. Esp. because authn/authz is but a detail to our startup, and has nothing to do with our domain.
To the point where I legitimately don't know who or in what situation all these businesses are that are spending so much money on 'consultancy'. When do these businesses seek consultants and what for? I know that might be a far reaching question, so any examples would be appreciated.
My approach has mostly been to get out of the way of what I don't know and hold on whilst having blind trust.
Like riding a horse, hold on and give direction of the course with balance of freedom to run. Give more freedom and get more trust and enjoy the exhilaration, however hold the reins too tight and you will be fighting all the way.
Walk the tightrope so to speak. Know if you give too much freedom it will buck you off and run for the hills, however, if you can maintain the balance of direction and trust, good things will come.
One go I had was a communications service provider in the naughties that went from zero to 20 mill revenue in one year and it did alright in the end, but with hindsight, I can see so many better ways that almost everything could have been handled.
In my opinion, the main problem that most businesses experience is TRUST. (On every level)
Without it there is no business. Business by definition is about more that one person so trust is imperative.
Is trust equally mutual within your business? Can you quantify that trust? Can other staff in the business? And the customers? The board? The shareholders?
If it is there with all parties than the world will be you oyster!
If not, well that is just business. (But you should mitigate it to take care of your own future)
Wicked growth makes the green eyes shine... Greed comes through the cracks everywhere. Not sure what can be done about this. Company Constitution? Culture?
These are just ramblings of a semi-serial pseudo-successful entrepreneur. I apologise. I don't know any answers but I do know that 'trust' is one of the crucial key elements of a successful business. Trust between every party.
Find the balance of trust between ALL steak-holders and get it ALL in writing. +2cents.
>These are just ramblings of a semi-serial pseudo-successful entrepreneur. I apologise.
My views come from observations of business. I'm not an entrepreneur either (cannot afford to be one)
>I don't know any answers but I do know that 'trust' is one of the crucial key elements of a successful business. Trust between every party.
True, there are all sort of other elements that people are well aware of ( marketing, development, competition, planning etc.), but this one (trust/integrity) is an underrated one I think.
All that I said hold less true for fly-by-night operators, or enterprises with short term goals.
Set your goals as to what will make you happy. Idle ideas like "I want a house and a happy family" become flexible and then you will chase that flexibility.
Make sure that when you realise, truly, your goals of "business", only then, you will be happy, accept, and at that point, if you desire, set a new goal. ( I <3 , )
Do not shift YOUR goalpost of what you define that "Take Off" moment is. 9.. 8.. 7..
Dunno if this was a joke on purpose but "stake-holders" is what you want there!
When I chose to specialize, not compete with the general consultants, but make all of them clients, that’s when business took off.
Historically speaking, building your practice as a specialist consultant is difficult. It works for certain niches only.
Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will start eating your lunch unless you take that leap.
It doesn't matter how smart your engineers are and how fully featured and bug free your product is. Unless you have a stellar sales team with the right leads who are pushing it on people with all their might, it is going nowhere.
My experience here: https://twitter.com/paulstovell/status/1389881033470869504
This talk by Paul Kenny is a really good talk here about the value of the sales function even if you don't want the revenue:
Paul Kenny: Selling Sales to Techies (2010): https://vimeo.com/96703844
Depending on your product you can control it with comp as well. For example, for an enterprise product, especially one that renews annually and/or has milestone payments, comp the sales person as the cash comes in (and pay out for the renewals same as you would for the initial deal). Unhappy customers don’t pay. I have also paid out commission on time (when customer should have paid, when the delay was due to engineering, and not manageable by salesperson. Sometimes engineering delays are due to sales people though :-(.
Have engineering work out the milestones and deliverables with the customer. Have the CEO sign contracts, nobody else. Count as sales only deals that have both customer P.O. and signed contract (so common to have only one and have the sales person argue that the deal should be booked anyway. Amazing how they could get both in on the last day of the quarter though).
Etc. When I was about 20 my dad told me he’d fired half the sales people he’d ever hired. I shook my head and thought, “what an idiot”. A couple of decades later I looked back and it was about the same for me. I mean table stakes for a sales person is selling themselves. And getting canned isn’t always a bad mark against a sales person. So it’s hard to judge up front, but if they don’t sell “right away”* shove them out the door. It’s not like an engineer for whom you want to invest extra time to help them get into the groove; that’s part of the sales person’s way of life and the good ones are proud of it.
Pay the good sales people well. At your annual sales shindig have the CEO show up for a day, or half a day, to give a pep talk, enthuse about the VP of sales and the top sellers (who made it by following the rules) and then bow out. Maybe have the CFO talk about how many commission checks they had to cut. And have them mention that the top sellers make more than the CEO.
Another tip: have every member of the exec team, yes even CFO, VP of Manufacturing or whomever, go on a customer sales call every quarter. Sometimes a first visit, sometimes a sales person “check in” call or or whatever. It will make the execs understand how the customer views your product, not what marketing and the sales folk think the product is.
* right away depends on your sales cycle. Could be the end of the second month (but you’re already breathing down their next after two weeks), or first quarter, or six months (ugh). And if you sell semiconductor manufacturing gear with a sales cycle of 48 months, good luck.
Welcome to being a founder. If you don't want to do it, you need a co-founder who will, but they must have the same values you do.
It is easier as a tech person to do the sales yourself than to find a good sales co-founder that mimics your customer-centric values. Both are of course very hard, but relatively speaking doing it yourself initially is easier between the two.
And those who don't want to do that should work for a company where those functions are handled by other people, but if you start a company, expect to do sales.
Second is to join sales calls or watch the recordings (Chorus.ai is great for this). Put yourself in the buyer's shoes and coach based on those recordings - I always listen from the point of view of "If I was the customer, do I think they really care about my problem, and is it credible that they will help me solve it?". Right now I watch 1-2 recordings a week and then chat with the team about what they think went well and where we might improve, and we are figuring it out together. That continuous process is what reinforces the culture. When the CEO is focussed on helping customers, and revenue as a secondary concern, it becomes the culture.
Third is probably for the sales team not to be an island. So get the engineering and product leaders to join the calls or watch the recordings too, so that the tiny features or friction points make their way onto the roadmap eventually.
edit: why am I getting downvotes...
Are you selling basically an as-is product? Is there customization required (preloading data, training, etc) to 'make the sale'?
I'm asking because I'm in an interesting position where I have a very nice platform, but it requires solutions specialists paired with salespeople, so outstripping specialists with sales growth isn't as productive.
Example product of mine: https://damonverial.com/the-gap-gameplan/
After all this, if I have a weekly user retention hovering around 30%, I can't be more happy. Then it's time to grow.
So, I can't help but think you missing the most important changes if your not actually talking to the end users about what they are thinking or why they are doing particular actions that aren't always what you expect.
When we develop products we (all the team) tend to get used to knowing where is each functionality and how to use them, but someone unfamiliar might just not find what we "simply" find.
2. For some reason or the other, we have always had delays in announcing our fundraising rounds: both Seed and Series A announcements were delayed by 3-6 months. The moment we announced, we got a step magnitude more inbound customers. Lesson here is to not be a perfectionist and be willing to share the company/product publicly earlier, so you can incorporate customer feedback early.
PS: If it helps provide context for (1) above, our domain is fraud prevention; and we focused on payment fraud for Fintechs/Crypto instead of going after generalized fraud prevention across all categories like ecommerce.
I implemented that over a weekend and it took off dramatically after that.
The "buy in bulk" was silent for a while, until a few freelance social-media managers discovered that they could buy account slots for their clients in bulk here, and then charge their clients for that plus a fee on top (which I didn't regulate). So that surely brought the biggest chunks of purchases albeit irregularly so.
I less than 40% percent of potential customers balk at your rate, it's time to give yourself a raise.
2. launch before its ready
3. getting our value proposition down to one sentence for each user type
4. seo instead of vanity marketing
5. freemium model instead of free or paid
6. listening to customer feedback
7. deliver tangible results to paid customers before fundraising
8. "do things that don't scale" to compete with large competitors who are focused on IRR and monetization
SOC2 is one of those non-functional requirements that can open up markets for you but you're going to pay for in time and energy. If enterprise-y is on your horizon I suggest at least understanding it so you don't make decisions that are counterproductive. But wait until you start to hear the music before you get up to dance with that one...it can be a pain.
I'm also working on a solution to make part of this easier, specifically audit logs (https://apptrail.com).
I would think everyone with a legitimate need for an audit trail is a paying customer, in fact would prefer to pay so there is a contract around the audit trail, and “free tier” would just be a drain on your support resources.
We audit a lot of things but it'd be a good idea to improve that if we can.
Thanks enterprise-y person. :)
AWS CloudTrail is far from perfect but it has been battle tested as much as any SaaS audit log out there.
Who: userIdentity.arn
What: requestParameters.*, responseElements.*
When: eventTime
Where: sourceIPAddress, sourceVpce, userAgent
Why: userIdentity.issuer/rolesession
How: eventName, eventSource
Baller move is to include internal ops actions in your log.
Main thing is to think of it as a product rather than an a feature. People don't want 10 different audit logs...everything should flow through it. With CloudTrail this extensibility comes through the requestParameters/responseElements sections. Most of the schema is fixed but in these sections its service-specific.
In terms of integration, push audit via webhook or various cloud event/message brokers is ideal, but at bare minimum the customer needs to be able to ingest that data wholesale to integrate with their security stack.
For us it was Show HN. But can be anything - Product Hunt, Redit, etc.
Find and interview people who aren’t YET your customers and ask them why they aren’t.
start your marketing sprint when you already have a s##tload of work. otherwise you will always have a cycle of "too much work <> no work" + lots of stress because of that.
you need to start hussling way before the "no work" phase. and that timespan always overlaps with the "too much work" phase.
Hope this helps. if you need some more help just email me jp AT jean-pierre.com
fun fact: This is my first real comment in Hacker News, I figured after seeing so many articles that helped me over the years, I'd give back. Thank you Hacker News and Y Combinator for all the great stuff over the years.
Could you share more insight on the shift from D2C to B2B? What challenges did you face while making this transition and how did you combat them?
Beyond that, scaling up a GTM engine (sales, marketing, customer success, etc) is a multi-year effort but it's a bit more formulaic than product, so there are a lot of resources and people out there you can hire to help you with that. Not a strength of mine so I lean on our COO and the rest of the team for that part so I can focus on product.
Sales is only important if you're doing B2B, and even then I would be cautious, because sales people are sly. If you aren't careful, they sooth your board and suddenly you will be replaced by one of them.
What I mean here is that surley marketing,Creating MVPs and all the other software development lifecycle principles matter but whats most important now is having faith in the leader building it and that surely depends on his or her's personal brand,if he or she has a good personal brand, then getting that loyal set of early paying loyal customers or your company's true evangelisers or your employee's personal idol or your investor's faith - everything gets scaled up when your name is a respectable name in the market Example Kunal shah from Cred - even though his product is still not halfway near to a profitable stage, people trust that this is possible because Kunal is building it or example elon musk, people know about tesla or paypal or spacex more because its elon's companies rather than having a good awesome product or marketing strategy (i agree tesla is awesome though xD)
Be it getting the faith of your stakeholders, customers or team or just getting a respect from the market and at least the fact that your entry in the market becomes 90% more easier if you have a great personal brand and like its said "people trust people more than anything else and you achieve that trust by getting a respectable personal brand first and then shaping it out on the products you make or startups you incubate or invest in"
And as said in india, investors invest in founders till serie a rounds rather than the product xD
So I would go for personal brand of the founder is something which many founders don't think its important but is actually really helpful for a longer run :)
What made us take off is I and my cofounder running through our savings. I did it for ~15 months.
One thing I had to start doing earlier is not trying to get everyone buy our product (we sell news articles published online as a source of data for insight mining) [0]
I’ve lost so much time on people who’d never be able to use what we have unless we completely change our product.
And yeah, marketing is super important. And, it’s going to take some time.
1. Focus: Adopting management by objectives and concentration exclusively on them
2. Hiring: Spending more time finding top talent through referrals and being more prepared for interviews
Now, on with the first two.
"Hiring the best you can afford" doesn't mean hiring the best brand (Skadden. PwC etc). Find the person with the best technical expertise relevant to what you're pursuing. They're often stars from those shops who've gone out on their own -- just like you did.
Why? Don't you want to spend your money on a star engineer or great marketing?
No. Because you're in this game to win. And winning these days (whether going for an exit or, you know, an actual profitable business) needs you to have at least the following:
(1) Not make (or, more likely, not know how to avoid) stupid mistakes or ill-advised moves legally. (2) Not screw up the administration of your business
Even if you do everything else right, errors in either 1 or 2 can prove fatal. Like, literally, you will lose everything.
Good lawyers are like good soldiers these days. You don't go to war without soldiers. And you don't do modern business without the best legal help you can get. Even in the most advantageous, optimistic, friendly scenario, run it by an attorney who knows their stuff. First. During. Last. Or wander onto the battlefield with people who outgun you. You've been warned.
Next: good business administrators are worth their weight in gold. It is a distinct skill and some people really are called to love and be good at book-keeping, accounting, cash flows etc. Do not screw yourself on taxes, audits, book-keeping, invoices slipping through cracks, agreements not being fulfilled or anything in the "admin of business" that keeps you from staying laser focused on you do well -- which is not business admin.
Finally -- remember, business is business. Repeat it to yourself early and often. Business is business. The VC who seemed really friendly and just "gets you"? Business is business. That particular contract term that just doesn't sit right with you -- but the person on the other side keeps telling you not to worry about it? Business is business. Your cofounder is your best friend but now they're not pulling their quota? Business is business. This isn't being machiavellian. It's that everyone will be applying it to you.
Ultimately, good lawyers and good business administrators will ensure that you remember "business is business". Don't leave things to chance. Don't trust. Don't be emotional . Business is business and if you're not controlling your agenda, someone will be controlling it for you.
There's enough sh*t in business you can't control. At least stay in control of what you can.
And that kind of hustle is a prerequisite to solid business success anyway. So, get after it!
As for paying, there are some law offices that offer startup-friendly packages and are probably good enough to get you going, at least they should prevent foot-gun mistakes.
And in the SF area you’d be surprised how many people will do stuff for “low fees but equity” if you show any promise.
I was charging close to nothing for our original product, and I can't tell you how many people would argue with us or try to haggle. As soon as we increased our pricing, we started landing bigger companies who just paid without any question and required little to no support.
The memes are true about this sort of thing.
https://bruzu.com was hobby project for months until I added plans. Now we have few customers nad I am taking it more seriously.
Can't outsource this or even hire for it in the early days
Has to be the founders
With all other metrics in the business staying the same, it had a massive impact on cash flow and (eventually) profitability.
Magazine ads! Postcards! Care packages!
It can be hard to stand out digitally. It's easy to stand out in a world of junk mail and generic scenic-beach-view-with-just-a-small-logo magazine ads though.
"The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people are still waiting for customers."
Let's say I've have been having kicked my ass more than I can count on some beliefs I've had, but I yet have to regret working with him.
(There's nothing wrong with it, the subthread just ended up veering offtopic.)
Anyway, I think any service now that shows up offering something used by many that is now paid for free will become popular on its own.
In 2004 that was pretty amazing
Growth was viral. Only cool people had Gmail.
1. Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition. I'd say they ate the costs of storage as marketing investment.
2. Viral invitation format -> exclusively perception
Gmail's free storage was two orders of magnitude better than the competition. Nearly three orders of magnitude bigger than Hotmail. They launched with a gigabyte against Hotmail's 2 MB and Yahoo's 6 MB.
We're so used to not worrying about email storage anymore that it's easy to forget just how small they used to be.
Google initially focused on the first two. They promoted new products like Gmail or Chrome on their search home page, and in the press. It worked well for them because they were already a newsworthy company with a lot of web traffic.
Today, they work quite hard at all three.
A - Always
B - Be
C - Selling
That is, seize the opportunities of presenting your work and your company.
Obligatory Glenngary Glen Ross scene.
It's still an MVP, but the goalposts have shifted as more folks put up "drop your email here if you're interested in uber for dogs!" type pages.
I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.
(There's nothing wrong with it, it just veered a bit offtopic.)
In a sense it's the perfect advertising (by both being 'free' and 'covert'), supporting the perfect industry, perfect only in the sense of a feedback mechanism ostensibly designed to stamp it out, only ends up perpetuating its profitability, by squeezing the product between its free advertising and its illegality, inflating prices and profits.
I know this is a potential flamewar topic--I'm sorry. I tried to just state what I think about it here. If you downvote/flag I'll delete it...I don't want to start another flamewar.
I do agree that virtually every product needs marketing, and many need salespeople as well. But for plenty of products, salespeople don’t make sense - for example high volume, low price SaaS.
So it was third party selling instead of first party selling.
“Hi I’m thinking of upgrading my Apple Watch 1 but the 7 is quite expensive”
“Can I speak to your daughter for 30 seconds”
(Yes there’s a salesperson in the story but in my case there wasn’t and I know I’ll need another one of these things one day. For her.)
Fiat currency.
Similarly Ruby on Rails was great brand awareness for 37 Signal's Basecamp who AFAIK doesn't believe in advertising, and has made a point to pay for a "non Ad" against companies selling ads against their Basecamp trademark
If you want to sell into enterprise then you are going to need sales people and hence an expensive product that covers that cost. Those big deals need a lot of hand holding to go through.
There are plenty of counter examples though, where marketing is doing most of the work and the offering is mostly self service. Signing up for a $25/month Saas is never going to warrant a visit from a salesperson.
Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world.
Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work. Google has a long term channel based sales model, and a newer but rapidly growing direct enterprise sales team. They're constantly trying to get GApps in against the aforementioned behemoth MS team.
You’re confusing google for work or whatever it’s called now with Gmail.
Trello sold itself. Explosive growth. Great product. Whether they have given up market share is irrelevant.
Gmail had explosive growth. You use it, you're sold on how good it is.
I'm not sure why some of you think having a salesperson means a product doesn't sell itself. Everyone layers on sales to capture more of the market share at some point.
I'll submit Craigslist and Wikipedia as other options. Also Plenty of Fish.
Communities and knowledgebases can be built without salespeople.
Microsoft absolutely has sales people for the B2B side of Microsoft Office constantly shilling Office 365. This absolutely doesn't sell itself.
I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I received every bloody week from Microsoft and Google trying to sell me their enterprise office subscriptions.
Maybe Word and Excel aren't the best examples, but I don't doubt they could have succeeded if they only gave it away to EDUs and had a base plan for consumers and a self-service enterprise plan. Microsoft had a foothold in desktop market so pushing Office and getting users to use it was easy. And once you try it, it does sell itself.
But I think Trello, Craigslist and Wikipedia are great product examples. You need not have a sales team to scale everything.
You can achieve that with a great product, great customer support, digital marketing and word of mouth.
What do you think putting a Tesla on a rocket and launching it towards Mars is?
What do you think PR pieces talking about the latest Tesla tech are?
Elon tweeting about Tesla is advertisement. It's not because it's not a pretty picture in a magazine page that it isn't.
They have an enormous B2B sales team.
Sales reps are for B2B, not B2C.
Generally speaking, business to business customers expect a certain amount of investment from your company into integrating with them when they offer you a contract.
Sales is part of this.
You of course need people to sign contracts & complete the purchase, that's irrelevant to how well the product is able to raise awareness without advertising, i.e. people interested in buying Tesla's didn't hear about it through any of their advertising.
Learning Solidity. I've been in crypto space for a long time, always wanted to learn Solidity to write contracts, but always postponed. Played with some toy code in the past years and that was it.
Recently got back in the scene and saw how many new business opportunities it opens and how financially feasible they are now I hate myself for not going more serious in crypto and Solidity in the past years.
Anyway, later is better than never. (Which applies to pretty much everything in life)
I also thought of learning about so-called smart-contracts but I'm skeptical of investing time in something that looks like it could crash any day, or maybe I'm just missing a big opportunity.
There’s always a reason not to do something. In this case, if you listen to the naysayers, the market has both already crashed (BTC’s only $43k?) and has yet to crash (BTCs inherent value is $0). If you listen to its proponents, btc’s gonna be worth $200k, just hodl until next year, so you'd be stupid not to get in on it.
The real question is what’s the opportunity cost of learning about the smart contract ecosystem? If you’re a back end developer and you're going to learn frontend development or something else that’s going to open up new career paths in the next few months instead, then your next steps are worth a second thought. If you're just going to be drinking beer and playing video games then might as well try and learn about smart contracts.
It can of course crash, but take it as an opportunity to learn things and build up relationships in bear market, and when things go green again you'll have it pay.
About the payments, it's usually in the form of crypto (or getting some tokens from the project).
It did crash and I've lost a lot in the past, but I've always cashed out MUCH more than I've lost so it's a win if you get timings right.
Long term, this thing seems to be growing non-stop.
Learning Solidity for EVM-based chains and Rust (my next personal goal) for Solana is a good start.
A toy NFT project (or whatever interests you) on your local chain might be a nice start to get used to the mechanics.