I will agree with the strategy of separating your product into sub-products, and working on and releasing them one at a time. A single, well-executed feature is often better than many mediocre ones.
Especially as a solo founder (shameless plug: I run https://resend.io), I think this is the best way to both test your assumptions early, and to consistently ship improvements without spreading yourself too thin.
I've taken this approach as I set out to compete with companies with 100s of millions in funding and 100s of employees who had built out very feature rich and elaborate product platforms.
In my specific case, it went something like
1. build a shitty live chat plugin
2. make said shitty live chat plugin good
3. extend previously shitty live chat plugin with shitty
automated messaging capabilities
4. make those shitty automated messaging capabilities good
5. and so on..
In between each step you should try and get people to use it, be shameless. You'll often be surprised that you can find users already at step 1, despite competitors already rocking well-established and mature solutions.
Doing this long enough (I have been going hard for 9 months), all of a sudden you'll find yourself with your own platform, built slowly by stacking one brick on top of another, and sticking to it.
i think the drawback to this approach is that maintenance and just "staying in place" starts to become a nightmare. development is circular in that you have to loop back around and make sure your good live chat plugin even better as time goes on.
it's not just lay a brick and you're done. my experience has been that you either solve a problem that is very single minded (bonus if it's in the consumer space) and tries to solve for one or two problems, or be prepared to face reality in hiring and scaling.
you might be able to compete on some level with the well funded companies, but you aren't going head to head with intercom or hubspot without more resources. not to mention that businesses don't want to deal with companies that don't seem like they have the capacity to support them.
Definitely. You will reach a point where perhaps you will be spending 70% of your time building out novel features, while the remaining time is spent reiterating on your existing features to make sure they stay relevant.
And the beauty of being a solo founder (even more so a digital nomad living sparingly) is that you don't have to go head to head with the giants, even if you were to just tickle them with a stick and steal 0.1% of their customers, you'd be doing very well for yourself.
And since you cannot match their wallet, try to beat them in efficiency. With smart technology decisions, you can maintain incredibly low operational costs, while ensuring massive scalability (shout out to Elixir).
Valid point, to avoid this trap I did a modest amount of initial market research and realized a lot of people were having problems with my competitor's offerings and were actively looking for alternative solutions.
I set out to test this as quickly as I could and just kept going at it when I verified they were willing to backup their frustrations with their creditcard.
The fallacy is when people use the size of a market as support of why they should enter it, sort of like this:
Founder: "We should enter X market! It has $1 Trillion worth of annual business."
VC: "It must be heavily saturated, with mature, efficient companies. Why should we fund you?"
And now is the fallacy - instead of replying with something like "we have better A, we do B differently and we're priced at C," they say "well we don't have to take over the entire market, we ONLY need .001% and we'll be billionaires!"
And the fallacy, more specifically, is similar to an appeal to probability, because using such broad metrics aim to give the VC a false sense of confidence - that even if the founders aren't 100% successful, they only need to be .00001% successful for them to make a killing.
But it still doesn't answer the original question: How does a founder go from 0% to .000001%.
But when you're evaluating the marketplace, it's perfectly reasonable to say "I need x% of the market to break even, y% to earn a profit" and extrapolate from there. The idea itself isn't bad, it's when it's used improperly.
hey your product looks good! any way you could share some info on how long first version took and if you made any money with it (or how long it took to start making money etc)? I find these side project cases very inspirational.
for example my friends brother created http://www.mailaletter.com/ and its always great to talk to him about it. (it was not making him much for the first year or so, but then it kind of exploded when people started using it in a way that he has not predicted. I forgot what it was exactly but something to do with companies needing to mail letters internationally and it being cheaper for them via his site)
If I remember correctly, I pushed the barebones chat plugin out (it was embarrassingly bad at this point) after 1-2 months of development. At that point I was also working part-time and finishing my CS degree, so the amount of time I had to work on it was limited.
Somehow I still managed to convince a few people to use it though
I wish, more like some weird amalgamation of other websites blended together with my caffeine trips and sleep deprivation. I once heard good artists borrow, great artists steal
For all the cries on HN of "ideas are worthless! execution is everything!" people sure do get upset when someone executes a less-than-100%-novel idea...
Especially as a solo founder (shameless plug: I run https://resend.io), I think this is the best way to both test your assumptions early, and to consistently ship improvements without spreading yourself too thin.
I've taken this approach as I set out to compete with companies with 100s of millions in funding and 100s of employees who had built out very feature rich and elaborate product platforms.
In my specific case, it went something like
1. build a shitty live chat plugin
2. make said shitty live chat plugin good
3. extend previously shitty live chat plugin with shitty automated messaging capabilities
4. make those shitty automated messaging capabilities good
5. and so on..
In between each step you should try and get people to use it, be shameless. You'll often be surprised that you can find users already at step 1, despite competitors already rocking well-established and mature solutions.
Doing this long enough (I have been going hard for 9 months), all of a sudden you'll find yourself with your own platform, built slowly by stacking one brick on top of another, and sticking to it.