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 kinda expected this as the top comment. It's just so simple stupid yet it's a wonder that a lot of people discover it the hard way and most still haven't.
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.
> a lot of people discover it the hard way and most still haven't
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.
It's common everywhere, I think. There's just a general, pervasive myth around "discovery". Famous artists, great products, even people with enviable romantic situations—most folks think these things were just "discovered". They don't see the hours of practice, the thousands of phone calls, or the hundreds of failed pick-ups in the process.
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.
Every job sooner or later is a sales job. If we're not teaching this in the education system, I'd argue we're doing a poor job of teaching morals in the education system - although the American system - at least in the better schools - does a much better job of this than systems in Asia.
Agreed. Life in general is sales. Job interview? Sales. First date? Sales. Sales is more than "Here's my product/service. Give me money". It's the art of getting someone to do what you want. I can only speak to American culture, but I feel like most people feel icky about that because the first thought that comes to their mind is the car dealership guy that's trying to sell you garbage like gap insurance that you don't need. Kind of like networking, it feels by definition manipulative when it doesn't have to be.
I agree with everything except the 'first date'. I'm trying to find a person I'm compatible with, and who I can trust completely with who I am. Rough edges and all. I would much rather torpedo date 1 or 2 with a person I'm not compatible with than string things along for a couple of months and break up when she suddenly discovers those rough edges. This has not been a recipe for quantity, I'm hoping it's one for quality.
That's still sales. People focus on "bad" sales, but "good" sales is about being honest about the capabilities of your offering and finding people who honestly need it. It's a bad practice long-term (both in business sales and dating sales) to be over-focused on short-term closing and not focused enough on long-term satisfaction.
As in, what is "sales"? It's the presentation of that offer. That might be an offer for a product, for companionship, for an intimate coupling. All of those are a form of sales.
Life in a society... where people are divorced from all material realities and only interface with the social... but that's not life in general. There are, for example, wars.
War probably wasn't the best example because, although I wasn't thinking of it, there's still that social element.
My point is that war involves people directly interacting with physical reality in ways that aren't mediated socially. Modern high tech people live in a world where popular illusions and perception are much more important than gravity and inertia, but reality still exists somewhere, and sometimes it matters.
I agree that "life is sales". But I disagree with the "it's the art of getting someone to do what you want". I'd argue seeing it that way is THE problem and the reason why people find it icky.
Sales is about helping people. About finding people's pain and fixing it. Even if you cannot fix it you still might have helped them - maybe now they understand their pain better. Maybe they didn't even know it existed.
My CEO spends half of his time acting as a sales rep, writing blogs, hosting workshops, et cetera. Honestly this would overwhelm me after a while and I'm glad he's there to do the job.
In the space we[1] operate, there's no shortage of competitors. Over the years, I've seen that those who can unlock marketing see a lot more success, even with a shittier product.
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.
For every one of these stories though, is there a 'we pushed too hard too soon, the product wasn't ready, people were already turned off it by the time it was'?
This is the whole point. You go out there and get lambasted by customers so you know what to improve upon. If you sit in the shadows tinkering until its 'perfect,' it will only be perfect to you. Whereas if you are iterating against customer and stakeholder feedback, you will end up with a refined product fit for market that may even not look like what you initially expected the perfect product to look like.
Coca-Cola’s New Coke may be an example of this, though New Coke may have actually been the best marketing campaign possible for Coke Classic.
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.
> For every one of these stories though, is there a 'we pushed too hard too soon, the product wasn't ready, people were already turned off it by the time it was'?
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.
What I mean is if it's not ready enough, not a good MVP essentially, and then people who see it in that stage might not be inclined to try it again later when you're still pushing it but it is more developed enough now.
I get your point and provided a couple of examples of failed products. But there’s always another path. Depending on your personality, one approach is to take the people who complain and level with them. Yeah, this product sucks. It’s brand new. But does the problem exist? Is it important enough to you to want to solve?
If so, how can the founding team save the relationship? If someone is motivated enough to tell you your product sucks, they’re potentially great beta users!!
Yeah that's the lean startup model. You intentionally find people who are early adopters and offer to bring them into the beta to improve the software. Its a win win situation because the feedback gives them what they want, and gives you a marketable product.
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).
That may be true for massive companies like Google with huge exposure. But if you are some startup no-one has heard of then you are going to be doing really well if 0.1% of your potential market has even heard of you in the first year, let alone tried your product.
You don't need to start with a $1M+ Super Bowl Ad. Find 10 people, call them, learn what they need, educate them about your offer, take their feedback back to your product. The earlier you can start that process the better, without exception.
I'm not sure 'call 10 people' is the up-thread intended marketing push though? Maybe it is, but certainly not the way I read it (and hence framed my response).
It's a start. You start with 10 calls. You learn from them and build an email to send to 100 people. You book more calls and then take the feedback and put it into a social media post and get 1000 more. Then you take what you learn there and turn it into an ad to show to 10K sets of eyeballs. The up-thread focus is on starting this process early.
> 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.
I'll be honest, I don't have a ton of experience when it comes to finding investors, and other early stage enablers. However, when it comes to your market, I think the question is better asked, who is your audience?
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.
My approach has been to put out something as early as possible and then be very responsive when people ask questions, make suggestions or report bugs. And this has resulted in lots of useful feedback for all 3 products I have developed. It takes time though and you have to go the extra file with support.
I could not agree more. I still find it difficult to talk about me providing services to others. I find it difficult, but once I do the pipeline opens up.
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.
As with everything to do with marketing, the answer is 'it depends'. Not much point in putting ads for an enterprise ERP system on FB.
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.
I am not an expert, but any advertising >>> no advertising. I would go with your first instincts, slap some cash down in a few different places, and start refining later.
he's not talking about ADVERTISING. You need to reach out to people yourself, cold email, tell them you have a product that does XYZ and think it might solve their problems.
I’m glad to see how thinking has evolved on this on HN over the last couple of years.
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.
Neat story about Bill Hicks and marketing. When he was sick but still working, he appeared on the David Letterman show. At that point, he was something of a regular on David Letterman.
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.
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.
There's no doubt that Letterman has had a large ego at times and acted poorly towards people. But he does contrition and humbleness so well, it's a major reason I've watched more than a few My Next Guest...
Marketing is way more than advertising. It can be blogs (technical or general), SEO (getting your content to the top of relevant search pages), conference attendance, social media work (e.g. posting here :P ), running webinars and more...
Tried to register on rysolv with my github account, but it failed, I see animation indicating working progress, but it never finishes. It has authorised on github successfully.
It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them.
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 .
I run a blog that gets about 200k unique users a month. My wife lost her job at the beginning of Covid-19, and I slapped a single ad on my most popular post to supplement our income. I hate ads, but income is income. It’s bringing in over $300 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.
I moved to an area where the only engineering work is defense contracts. I have been and am morally opposed to the MIC both for its primary product being death and for its massive societal waste. We have high rent and bills to pay and I am working for a defense contractor.
My joke since moving has been "I like my morals and will stick to them as long as it's convenient."
For similar reasons as the parent: my SO's research group moved. Their PI then got diagnosed with a terminal illness and the department leaders are taking the lab space and grant money. To quote a friend of mine, we got "hyperfucked".
It's a tough crossroads. I am applying for work I really care about far away while my SO may still have a path to finish. No good answers, but we'll stick together through thick and thin.
It has, but it's pretty hard to find. I sent out about 100 applications every time I try to find a job, hear back from maybe 20 and get offers from less than 5. I've never heard back from an application for remote work. I have thrived in my short stints of remote work in the past (mid 2019).
I'm not really a tech insider here, more of an engineer in search of discourse more stimulating than reddit. Also, I think discourse with wealthy and influential people is one of the few ways I have to attempt to better the world.
You might consider a move to the blockchain industry if it interests you at all. More than half the jobs are remote and there are plenty of wealthy people to talk with. Let me know if you want any advice there, my email is my username at Gmail.
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.
1: set up a Patreon or Ko-fi with monthly memberships enabled
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.
I've got no experience in shopping around for ads, was hoping you did :) My blog gets decent traffic these days, seems like I should stick an ad or two someplace so it pays for itsself.
I initially started with Google Adsense, but has later moved to Freestar. They basically connect you with 10+ ad networks (including Google Adsense) and then all the networks will compete for your ad space each time an ad is shown. In my experience the revenue is a lot better.
Glad you're earning some money, but I turned ad-blocker off to see how you incorporated ads on your site - honestly taking up a quarter of the screen with autoplay videos and blinking ads is some toxic 90s geocities stuff... ad-blocker going right back on.
I started with a lot less ads, but have since then put more on. I don't like it either, but people really don't mind it that much it seems. I also have an option where people can pay to remove the ads. Basically no one uses it.
I use uBlock Origin, but as developer the easier way to earn money is to feed ads to that 90-ish % of users that don't have an adblocker. I used to force interstitials and videos when starting my apps, but removed them to avoid bad ratings. People seem happy with double banners top/down and affiliate links.
Damn, that's an excellent earner! Well done lol. I've never played Solitaire to completion and I just checked it out and spent 8 minutes of my life playing Solitaire and completing for the first time, lol. Really smooth experience :)
I wonder if the delay is intentional so users start paying and want to finish. If they saw ads, they may immediately leave. Also ads can slow down a website load times so the delay may be for SEO.
It's intentional. The first 5 games are ad-free. Most of the ad-revenue are from people who stick, so I kind of try to give people the best experience the first 5 games.
Any chance you can give me pointers on how to improve SEO for my sudoku site? It's been up for 8 years now and I've left it for dead since user growth wasn't happening. Thanks!
Congrats with the site. I've only just had a glance at it, but I think there's a lot you can do. Make it HTTPS first of all, research all keywords that relate to sudoku, write a long article about it and have it on the main page. Make sure you on-page SEO is good and keep doing off-page SEO (getting backlinks). If you want to take SEO a bit more seriously, read through a guide like this to start with: https://backlinko.com/seo-this-year. That's what I did to de-mystify SEO in the beginning.
I opened your site in multiple separate browsers and the starting card arrangement was the same in all of them. Do you start new users off with the same setup of cards to ensure a good playing experience and hook them?
On the bottom in the "New Game" menu is has "Random Shuffle" and "Daily Challenge (current)", so I assume it defaults to the daily challenge, which I assume is the same for everyone.
The competitor solitaired.com is doing over 6 millions views a month and has similar ads. My guess is they could be making over 150,000 a month from ads.
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... .
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.
Not sure if you remember, back then you could add “like buttons” from facebook on your webpages, and if someone would like it it would display “X liked ‘music saved my life’” (if that was the title of the page) on their timeline. Which would make a lot of people “like” the page by clicking on the like button located on the timeline this time. I had seen these english websites doing this with a lot of funny or inspirational sentences like that, so I created the first French website like that. I was in the top alexa 500 for some time, then facebook decided that this feature was dumb because it was, and all these websites died. It was nice money while I was still a student though :)
during my first year of uni I had to do a presentation about what I wanted to do in life and how I was planning to find a job and make money after graduating. In front of two professionals that were here to help guide students (and probably making less than me). It was graded. I told them that it didn’t matter because I was already making bank lol, they didn’t believe me and gave me a shit grade. Good times.
Hi, thanks for sharing. Is the widget thing working for your website? I also run a game website and I'm thinking of letting people use some of my games in widgets, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Thanks!
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 switched from Adsense to Freestar and have been very happy with them. I think you'll have to have a certain amount of volume to get signed with them, but it's difinitely another ballgame than Google Adsense.
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.
I'm going to save this so I can just link to it whenever the "but running your own servers is irresponsible!" thing comes up (as it seems to do weekly here on HN).
Cool idea!
I'm a pro SRE guy, with 20+ years of experience and working with US top500 companies. If anyone wants to partner up and replicate this, let me know! You can also reach me on matrix: @kim0:halogen.city
Great. If you don't mind, can you share your trade-offs and pain-points of managing own hosting? and How do you manage to get your service/apis compatible with forever(kinda) changing AWS/Heroku apis.
I never had the "hands off" hosting experience that cloud providers advertise in the first place. Before (with AWS and Heroku) if things went down, I was the person that had to investigate and escalate to the appropriate vendor's support. Now, I'm the person responsible for investigating and fixing things. For many small issues, it's easier to fix them than to get someone at AWS with the necessary clearance on the phone.
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.
> I never had the "hands off" hosting experience that cloud providers advertise in the first place.
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.
Point of clarification: us-east-1 is an entire AWS Region, which contains multiple availability zones. Multi-AZ setups in AWS are generally fairly straightforward, multi-region generally isn't.
...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.
Judging from your username, you're affiliated with rsync.net. If that is correct, then no. That's a very interesting service for offsite backups, though. At the moment, I just rent colocation with lots of HDDs inside and do the RAID management myself.
> How can we work with you ?
That depends on what you need and how long you can wait. I've already committed to launching 2 AI-based products in 2022, so currently it looks like I'll be fully busy until end of the year.
But most of my customers used RDS and are now on MySql, MariaDb, or PostgreSql. Similarly, S3 -> CEPH. Nginx as front-end, Varnish as cache, Ha-Proxy for load balancing. Queues? RabbitMQ. Map-Reduce? Hadoop. Lots of data? ZFS.
There are A LOT of great open source projects to base your infrastructure on.
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"
Yes and no. Quite a lot of my customers have designed their systems around separation of concerns, so they need 100 small services running. By having my own layer in the middle, I can group those 100 service VMs onto 10 beefy physical servers, as opposed to actually needing 100 bare-metal servers to run their 100 services. But in the end, yes, I have roughly the same responsibility and much better margins.
Buy my startup @ https://PretzelBox.cc. Jokes aside, PretzelBox is a hosting company aka backend in a box and your comments are giving me a ton of hope.
And I thought to myself "So it's a well-marketed notion whitelabel reseller." You're probably good at marketing, but I'm not sure what Cloud back-end infrastructure IP you would have for sale...
No nonononono, I don’t have any idea how to make or sell Notion templates. This is an AWS backed storage and hosting solution through and through.
Your emails use SES for send/receive, files are stored in S3, auth is managed using cognito, the blog that users present to their site visitors are a Svelte SPA.
(The blog itself is a WIP so im using Notion to host my own content for now)
Think of it as a single replacement for Wordpress, dropbox/wetransfer, and gmail/gsuite.
The intellectual property is the working to provide a fully functioning business-y email inbox running on your custom domain, the code to host your own content at scale on your own domain, and code to secure access to private content.
So, your customers could use you for email management, use you to send and receive files, write blogs, and manage their team’s authentication and authorization.
I wish there were a simpler word to describe it but since it’s so many things, I went with “backend in a box”.
I’m probably using the term very loosely but PretzelBox can be used to host a website, store and share images and files (like Dropbox or Imgur or wetransfer) and integrates with AWS to give you an entire backend you can extend to run a whole business.
In my mind, I feel this could/should qualify as a hosting service
I'm going to amplify what others here have already mentioned.
I read your landing page, I have no clue what it is you're selling or what it costs. I'm busy, you were lucky few minutes of my time, in the few minutes I couldn't figure out why I should give you more time or money.
I would highly suggest you work on the landing page:
* What am I buying?
* What problem are you solving?
* What does it cost?
* How is your solution better than others?
My impressions on visiting PB:
Ah, a .cc domain, they're too underfunded to pay for a .com. I probably shouldn't use them for anything too important.
I do not want to "join your beta list". I want a service, now or never.
"PretzelBox" is my backend? Backend to what? You tell me not to worry about domains, email, storage... Does that mean PB provides those? Are you better than WordPress? Are you better than gsuite?
Then there are some random (and I'm guessing fake (rude, I'm sure, but why should I believe them?)) testimonials.
Then some arbitrary text: "See what people have twisted their PretzelBoxes into" with no links, description, or examples... So I'm assuming PB has been twisted into nothing?
Finally, after much scrolling and bullshit, a list of features. So I get some email, some storage, you say unlimited, but I doubt. Still no pricing info. I get some blogs, "No need to learn WordPress!" but... I have to learn PB? How hard is PB. WordPress at least has a ton of support and resources.
Usually this would be called a PaaS (Platform as a Service). It's another layer on top of a public cloud, AWS in this case.
Someone looking to save money on server costs by using a hosting company would effectively be going the other way in the stack: taking the cloud out of the equation and operating servers directly. The original poster in this thread acquired a hosting company to be able to provide this kind of service in their vertical.
Just to understand: did you buy any actual hardware?
Or "hosting company" means services on top of another hosting company that actually has hardware somewhere?
Long-term rental for colocation cages in an existing datacenter + long-term leasing contracts for the hardware + long-term support contract with a guy that lives close to the datacenter and keeps a stack of HDDs in his basement
So in effect I provide cloud services and cloud APIs on top of physical bare-metal servers that are maintained and housed by someone else.
I presume you mean site reliability engineer. Then yes, my clients purchase the whole package. Development, deployment, hosting, production maintenance. So if something goes wrong, really anything, I'm their first point of contact.
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.
I've always found it interesting how simply "Not Megacorporation X" can be a competitive advantage. It doesn't make a lot of economic sense, but people will go through a lot of work - and it can be lucrative to you on the business-side facilitating this - to avoid having to interface with a faceless conglomerate like Amazon.
For my customers, it does make A LOT of economic sense. The financial damage from being offline for a few hours and unable to reach any support person at your hosting company is very much real.
At their spending level, "Megacorporation X" would not pick up the phone for them. But I do. So in effect, my competitive advantage is not that I'm not a megacorp, but my competitive advantage is that I pick up the phone when they call.
Creating an on-premise version of our product for enterprises (as opposed to a pure SaaS version)
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.
This is a great point, and its not necessarily just on prem either. Adding those enterprise features can be a great move to make your product more attractive. We're trying to make the audit trails part a lot easier at Apptrail (https://apptrail.com).
How do you deal with maintenence and stuff? Do you need on-site engineers? With SaaS you can just do it remotely but if it's on site you need to send someone over I guess
> How do you deal with maintenence and stuff? Do you need on-site engineers?
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.
Given that our customers were global and wanted help quickly, screen sharing was usually the way to go. In addition the server logged any error to a local file the customer sent over when reporting an incident.
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.
We did both, customer got an iso image with a single line install command. The installer would automatically download all the docker containers and lock the system down.
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
Invest in SEO early. And I mean invest all the way, including all the different structured metadata into all of your pages to get your website to appear the best on search results [1]. The long tail and residual effects of it get pretty insane.
I second that. SEO is a slow growing channel and it takes some time to get effects. Starting earlier can help out.
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.
There's more to it, but I've focussed on WordPress pages in the past.
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
Normally those things are enough to get a 85+ score on Lighthouse, GTmetrix and alike.
These are overly technical things that technical founders will be drawn too.
But it's not what matters (at least, until you have hundreds of pages ranking).
Google Search is very similar to LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in the sense that the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited, return visitors, etc) the more visibility Google will give you in the SERPs.
For most SaaS, there aren't a few valuable keywords, there are hundreds of valuable pages representing thousands of keywords to drive a qualified audience.
This means after you learn how to create highly valuable content, the next step is to scale your publishing velocity to increase your footprint in the SERPs.
I've brought 4 websites from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month by focusing on creating more reader value than any other page of content Google could show for the keywords I want to rank for, and publishing hundreds of pages of content.
> the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited
IMHO actually good UX metrics mean as low time on-site and pages visited as possible. An ideal user experience (I would, as a user, be glad to pay for) is when you visit the page, immediately find what you want, do you job as quickly as possible and go away.
A good valuable website caring about users rather than ad-spamming them would optimize for this, not for users to waste huge amounts of time wandering through pages until they can achieve their goal.
"Good UX" is dynamic, and depends on the search query, and the UX metrics of the websites you're competing with.
Recipe related searches will have different UX metric gradient than "creating a PTO policy"
I also kindly disagree with your assessment.
All things being equal, if you're Google, and you want to keep users coming back to Google Search, and you could show one of two pages for any search query, I think the only reliably metric to evaluate whether one page adds more value to the user than another page is through UX metrics.
Generally, if you can't find what you're looking for - you'll bounce and look somewhere else.
But if you Google something, then get drawn into the website because the writer knew the 'intent' behind the search, the writer/website should ALSO know what you need to know next, or likely questions to have, and serve you that content after they finish answering whatever is you originally Googl'd for.
For example, if someone searches "content writer job description", I can guess that
1. This is an employer that is actively in the hiring cycle
2. The next things they might need to know are average comp for content writers, the best place to find content writers, the best way to evaluate / test / interview them, etc.
So, if I'm competing with a page of content that is just strictly about "content writer job description", and I go above and beyond to educate you on what you'll need to know next - I should end up with better UX metrics that reflect an increase in value I provided over the page.
Love this. Have you written any more detailed content about this journey taking any one of these such websites from 0 to 100k? I'd love to read the play by play.
This exactly. Focus on value for the person that hits your website and organic search will follow. I've had a slow SPA site for years but the (user generated) content, long on-site time and high rate of return visits all made it one of the top pages in my niche. Not because I was fine tuning image size, speed or meta tags.
> - Reduce third-party dependencies, try making them first-party (fonts, analytics)
I'd add that third-party dependencies are sometimes useful. Especially when they aren't served from the same location which gives and opportunities for the browser to open more HTTP connections: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-does-your-browser-limit-n...
Actually this isn't always the case. Some people just make mistake of using few mbs of some high-quality PNGs on their landing pages which can be much worse than just mere JS framework bundle.
Also both Angular and React are not as heavy as one might expect, but 3rd-party components might bring tons of unnecessary deps.
Not exactly correct or incorrect. Some projects built as a single page app (SPA), using a fancy framework like React or Angular with little configuration, end up loading all DOM content client side via javascript which has a number of drawbacks on performance and SEO.
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.
> To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?
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.
That’s a bit too extreme since you still probably want all the UI libraries readily available to make your life easy. You could use server side rendering instead. And as others have said, package “marketing” landing pages without any heavy plugins/modules. Look into chunking, lazy loading etc.
Question to all, what has been your experience with non-technical SEO. What things are worth pursuing with limited resources, how to measure it and what are good resources to learn?
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.
If you excuse piggybacking on your comment - this and other advice is super context/market dependent. Before you try following it try to talk to people in your market segment first to figure out how much it applies to your specific business.
You may want to try https://www.sitelint.com/ for SEO testing, but not only. We have just launched a platform recently and the main idea behind is that all audits are performed on the client-side, as opposed to crawling. I'm happy to get the feedback and improve anything that can be improved there.
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).
I learned this lesson the hard way - 11 months of freemium, decided to add a trial because "why not?" - now something like 95% of new users choose the trial of the Pro plan, instead of the free tier.
Awesome to hear that you're using Imba! It's my co-founder Sindre who has created it, not me. But please share whatever you're building with us (e.g. via Twitter or Discord), as we love seeing people use it to build stuff :)
I hired a broker. Paid them no upfront fee, just a % of the sale. Maybe it was around 5%?
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.
John Warrillow’s book Built to Sell has some good advise.
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.
> first ensure the company is optimised for sellability
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
the Warrillow book goes into far more breadth and depth than this comment, but I just wanted to highlight that there are strong reasons to act now to shape things in a way that make it easy to sell, even if you don't currently intend to sell. being prepared to sell at any given time increases optionality / makes it so that in case you suddenly _need_ to sell, you don't have to put in 6 months of work before you can even put the thing up for sale.
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.
Also sold a business of similar size to the parent. Basically if you're sub $1M revenue and not growing massively, then the broker websites are good solutions. Anything else, most businesses will be sold via investment bankers, an acquirer will come out an seek you, or you reach directly out to a potential acquirer.
One approach is to find someone (or a few people) who are well connected in the space you're in and offer them a percentage of the sale if you close a deal with a buyer they've introduced you to. AIUI, 5-10% seems fairly typical, at least for a smaller company. Obviously you'd want to have a signed, written agreement in place with any such intermediaries.
I have thought about the same, but over time I've started telling myself that these people (the sellers) just want an exit (e.g. because the market is falling apart), regardless of what reason they give.
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 are lots of reasons to exit and yeah you can't fully trust the seller when it comes to that.
Lots of people simply like to jump from project to project so being able to exit a business is great for them. Other people are retiring or get sick. Sometimes the business plateaus and they have owned it for several years and are tired of planning more articles for that niche. Some built it recently for the purpose of selling and it has terribly quality content and will likely tank in traffic in the next 12 months.
You also can't trust the seller when they say how many hours they work or believe they account for all their expenses (which is sort of a joke for content businesses anyways because almost all the expenses are added back in when accounting for the sale price anyways).
But for the type of businesses on there it doesn't really matter what the seller says, most of it is noise.
You can get all the insight you need into a content business using Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and manually looking at it.
I built a content site from scratch for ~1 year before buying any and was looking at ones for sale during that time so by the time I went to pull the trigger I was "relatively sophisticated". Actually I only bought them in the last few months but so far so good, everything has been as expected. I'm strategically merging them into a single larger site and that is going well (one already successfully merged but waiting for ad network approval for the second)
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.
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.
When you read the book, ole Fred is not a fan of large engineering units. Forget two pizzas (Bezos is from New York, two pizzas for him is ~10 people).
Fred's view is actually:
1x captain/tech lead,
1x co-pilot,
1x ops guy equivalent,
1x business analyst equivalent who can be sent to meetings (he worked for IBM).
(And then two secretaries. And an copy editor for the documentation, because no internet.
No internet! The documentation must be written!
The lead developer needs to follow my favorite advice of all time:
Can't write? Imitate Hemingway.
And a full-time librarian for the punch cards. And a full-time employee just to maintain the minicomputer that was your debugger.
Because hey, the book was written in 1975.
The internet doesn't exist, email doesn't exist, the engineers almost certainly can't touch type. And anyone without an attractive female secretary was nobody.
The pimply faced youth's job as config wunderkid and unofficial court jester fills most of those roles these days)
Your comments are difficult for me to understand, although you do have a fun and whimsical style!
I wasn't taking it as gospel and I agree some engineering outfits are (or at least appear to be) overstaffed or inefficient, and a small number of very driven and talented people can produce some incredible things. But when it comes to making a product it can take a radically larger amount of engineering effort than it would appear.
PS Semi is an example of an ARM-beating company which was founded by a visionary engineer who almost certainly had the big ideas himself or within a small group of technical leadership. It still took a hundred engineers 4 years to bring out their first product.
To be fair with the book, that's what he describes as what he thinks a team should be. Not only there is margin for having more than one team, but the rest of the book completely ignores it and is about real people on real teams.
It was a fabless company so you basically write code and send it off to get built.
There's more details to it, but a single person could write a very small CPU and put it on an FPGA (or ASIC if they have the tools) in a few months.
That's just one example though. There's lots of software examples. Compilers, browsers, OS kernels, database servers, hypervisors. A single person can write any of those, but to make a competitive product it's often a very different story.
One of the most interesting things about hardware vs software is the barrier to entry.
Hardware intellectual property has an insane number of working parts and "factors" (electrical resistance, photo-lithography, metal layers, silicon is amazing) all have to be solved.
Software by contrast, follows the open source model. All those things you mentioned, are being done by people and academics in their space time on the internet. You're essentially assembling pre-configured tools
Hardware is more difficult, because the laws of physics are FAR harder to account for, than tying together APIs. Because APIs are after all, designed for humans to be able to understand and configure.
Software is also complex, but the good people in FOSS have already assembled their shit for free and are giving it to you.
Additionally, basically no hardware IP and blueprints are open sourced. Because of the free flow of goods (and not services), someone in an IP disrespectful country will clone you and sell your goods internationally. You have basically no resource to pursue that individual.
Launching an IP disrespecting internet business at scale however? That is almost impossible. As soon as your IP disrespecting competitor gets going, you can hamstring them.
Hence for hardware, create a develop, release, iterate cycle, and keeping the money flowing, you essentially need to employ a LOT of people to get your startup going.
Hence VS fund about 10 SaaS startups per hardware one.
Mostly I was talking about SaaS with the "make your first two engineering hires like this" guide. Clearly for photo-lithography with silicon on leading edge nodes, you just cannot do that.
> Hardware intellectual property has an insane number of working parts and "factors" (electrical resistance, photo-lithography, metal layers, silicon is amazing) all have to be solved.
Again, fabless companies don't have to do any of this. You get a PDK from the factory which provides all these parameters and even standard cell libraries so you don't even have to do circuit design. You just feed your logic into "compilers". You need "physical" designers to optimize the output of those stages, but these are not people looking at the physics, they just optimize P&R and floor plan according to the PDK specs and tool output basically to close simulated timing.
In practice once you get to a large enough and high performance product, you would need custom circuit designers. And step up even larger again and you'll likely be working directly with the manufacturer on defining and tweaking the process. At Apple scale, you probably even define your own custom process node. Once you get to this scale though it's pretty much like big software houses writing their own libraries or OSes or compilers or asm code because the standard available stuff is not quite enough. That all takes a lot of engineers too.
But that's not _required_ and almost certainly PA Semi would not have had a whole lot of engineers on that work, it would have been logic, analog, PD, V&V, power, primarily. And almost all would just work on the standard package they get from their fab. So mostly writing "software". And you don't need any money for a develop,release,iterate cycle on most of the hardware stack because it can be and is simulated.
That's exactly what happened with Twitter. It was at a company named Odeo.
But yes, I think you can have two high quality employees make good software? I mean they're employees, you're going to give them marching orders to do something presumably.
This is hard to achieve because generally good engineers are either working high pay tech jobs OR they work in a startup as founders / early employees with make-me-rich shares.
Sure, there are exceptions who don't know their worth. In general it's hard to find mediocre technical cofounders and very very hard to find good technical cofounders.
I think the assumption here is that this is a Hackernews thread about someone asking how to make their startup succeed.
Therefore, I wrote the post with some sort of assumption that OP is the technical founder. Hence OP is supplying the stuff like the vision, the outline of the tech stack, OP probably made a lot of stuff themselves.
Hence, it was more a guide on how to find extremely dedicated and good engineers to work for you, the founder. And how to deploy them to take load off you as the technical founder.
As a technical founder you rapidly become far more important as a store of technical knowledge. You're off to customers doing technical sales, networking with people you know for hints at how to solve your technical problems, etc etc.
Hence,what OP needs is top quality execution while they go off and do all that stuff. And ye ole Ghanian FOSS committer is the tree I'd shake.
Depends on the product what you actually need, but I've personally watched more than one successfull software product launched with a more or less this resourcing. Not exactly this recipe but very much in the ballpark.
The assistants aren't assistants - you hire them with minimum pressure, but try still to find the most talented junior you can find.
I'm sure you can be elastic with the mids depending on how much AWS there is to configure or some-such.
2 juniors in a startup is a bit, probably not the right thing. You'll run out of junior work surely?
The "two good ones plus exactly one junior to make them feel important, and to keep the show on the road for 2 weeks in case they both quit simultaneously" formula is pretty solid.
To be specific, my experience was from non-web software.
I would consider "junior" here not as a person in non-critical role who cannot function as an individual contributor, but as a solid candidate that lacks industry experience but can be at the moment hiring be expected to quite fast grow into the role of a solid IC. I.e to use a bit too stereotypical characterization
- not a "stablehand" but a "journeyman apprentice".
At the moment of hiring you don't count on it that they can deliver (but guess and hope), whereas the seniors will have shipped products under their belt.
Mid = journeyman, "worked another job before". Independent, trusted to be delegated to for specific things, but doesn't quite have a personal brand.
Senior = Master. Proven track record, proven reputation of delivering, capable of leadership inside a technical project. Has and maintains a reputation as someone you can trust.
Principal = Mentor to seniors.
Ofc there are shades of grey between junior and mid, because junior-ship takes like 2-3 years to grow out of.
The list of work able to be delegated to someone at the start is not all that large in many cases.
You won't need more than 2 engineers at the beginning for 99% of the startups.
Almost nobody is making anything technologically significant - and if they do they raise millions and act like a disorganised mid company.
In order to do your typical backend + frontend work you won't need much more, unless your developers can't code.
What are you talking about. IBM and other corporates defined the word outsourcing in the late 90s. I remember managing folks with 2 phds that were 1/2 if not less of my salary and I was fresh out of college. I watched as quality of folks went south over time as pay increased for them. My biggest frustration in the end was trying to train new person every 6 months because corporate wanted the same budget. They literally went from a 2 phd guy to barely out of coding shill within 2 year period. Market economies will sort this out.
That perspective makes it seem like US workers are paid too highly, which I do agree with. But the parent comments I'm replying to are speaking from a leadership perspective and seem just overjoyed to be exploiting workers for nearly nothing.
Edit: I reread my comment and I can see how I wasn't clear. I was actually replying to the parent of the comment I actually replied to, my mistake. I am glad the Thai wages increased, but GP was straight up flexing about paying people nearly nothing because they came from a poor country.
Plays some kind of role for sure but there are barely any local developer who work for a company abroad like it's common in Eastern Europe or other places (not counting foreign remote workers).
Oh, I could be wrong on the number. It's extremely low though, certainly in the teens.
As a person they're very opinionated about not working for a "product company." And have worked at the same company their entire tech career after bailing out of some traditional engineering discipline (I think 6 yoe?).
Sweetest person ever. Never really followed up that conversation when I asked them if they were considering remote.
Brazil is the beachhead in many ways. Huge market, easier to sort out all the employment stuff because it's a path that's much more well trodden.
If you still want to get an edge these days, you have to be prepared to go to the global platforms that give you access to devs in the really obscure places.
Nobody is hiring from Trinidad and Tobago because of the legal barrier to entry. But you can if you are clever with Upwork and similar.
If the code of the app is made by remote people in remote countries, how do you sell software to the US government? What do you answer to “What is the nationality of your developers?”?
I used to immediately launch on Hacker News, Reddit, Product Hunt, etc. the moment I finished my side projects. The problem I found with this approach is
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.
> For flurly, all of my original fraud problems originated from my product hunt launch.
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.
I’ll give the exact opposite of what you ask, just because we could easily have chosen not to do it.
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.
Be ruthless about hiring and your team. Think about recruitment early on to work out how you can get the right people to do the jobs. As someone said, "if you think hiring a good person is expensive, try hiring a bad one". Plan for how to get rid of people who are not working out (easier in some countries than others).
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”
It took me a while to learn/accept this point. But there are too many such points that founders need to know, or it kills the business. I'm now working on a web app to help founders build companies. I'm trying to pack it with useful advice such as this. https://cxo.industries
Me and my two co-founders are asking ourselves this all the time, and in retrospect every strategic change could have happened sooner if we had learnt faster and kept “doing things that don’t scale” as PG famously wrote years ago. The funny thing is that we think we are doing great in that regard only to realize again and again that we have to iterate faster and stop the urge to prematurely optimize for scale.
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.
Until your startup is a full on company with multiple hires, consultancy work is revenue and can be a source of other business ideas that you might hire people for and make into another reliable revenue stream.
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.
The main driver of consultancy is revenue. If you can survive without that, don't do it if it isn't core to your business, just like you wouldn't do in an established company anyway.
I've worked at a startup which, bootstrapped, was struggling with income flow. So off-and-on we, the programmers, would be outsourced to gigs that would generate some income. I've always found this the worst of all options and decided to never get into this with my own startup.
It takes away the most valuable resources. It's a negative investment. It advertises the "panic-mode" you are in, to all stakeholders and most to the engineers involved. It lands your engineers (me, in that case) in crappy jobs, which they did not sign up to at all (a few engineers left because of this). It creates misaligned relations in the team.
The last was for me the most frustrating. At one point, I was bringing in ~60% of all revenue, alone, by doing crap work, in stressfull projects, and commuting for hours a day. While at least two of my co-workers, whose wages I was subsidising, turned up at 11:30 to drink coffee and play some FIFA on the company x-box.
What I learned from this, is that hiring too early is a thing too. That, especially when bootstrapping, the income stream must be certain enough to warrant paying another wage for years.
From your example the consultancy work wasn't the problem, it was mismanagement of the of the startup.
The only alternative to consultancy should be to close. If you can let go of 1-2 unproductive employees, that should happen before taking on consultancy work. It should happen in any circumstance anyway, but taking on work to pay for other peoples wage and not getting value for that is a recipe for failure. If on the other hand it was high performance developers that really made progress on the core focus on the business it's probably okay.
Might be a weird question, but what sort of consultancy opportunities do you get? I have worked for a long time in a design and development agency and I (think) I saw very little opportunity or demand for consultancy.
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.
In my experience this stuff is very cliquey - if you’re friends with the guy who is Chief Innovation Officer at some bank, or a heavy hitter at a government department, it’s easy to get yourself lucrative day rate consulting contracts, and much less easy if you don’t. Gotta know the right people and mix in upper middle class circles with people who have power over purse strings.
Charge more! My product[1] was originally free, then $49, then after a year I started to bump up the price more aggressively. It's now $249 and I probably should have started with that. Devs either aren't willing to pay for boilerplate code (happy with open-source options) or $249 is nothing to them if it saves a week of dev time. Last year I hit my goal of $100k in revenue :)
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.
>Establish what "trust" is. The play-by rule-book.
Interesting you mention this, I have used the word integrity in my own ramblings (can be found via a link on my profile), to essentially imply the same aspect, and probably much more. More being things like predictability, personal motivations that go beyond money making etc.
>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..
Not my own business but from my experience at the B2B SaaS company I work for –
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.
How do you make sure you get the good type of sales culture that is customer-centric, rather than the bad type of "trick customers into buying things they don't need"? Are there specific policies/incentives/etc that should be used? Or is it really just 'hire the right people'?
Hiring good people is the main key, and a good VP of sales is crucial.
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.
The founder should always lead the sales at the initial stage, even if they are a techie. The founder creates the culture, so it's important to have that influence on that org. Then you hire the right people to replace yourself, and fire them quickly if they deviate from what you want.
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.
First is the right people - don't hire "Frank" from Paul Kenny's talk.
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.
Funny that you mention this. Because I remember it as the exact opposite of organic growth. So much, that I consider pets.com the first public example of how millions of marketing budget are far more important¹ than engineering.
> A high-profile marketing campaign gave it a widely recognized public presence, including an appearance in the 1999 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and an advertisement in the 2000 Super Bowl. Its popular sock puppet advertising mascot was interviewed by People magazine and appeared on Good Morning America. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com
¹ Edit: for growth. I don't like this and I'm still not convinced marketing is worth more than engineering; I hope to believe the opposite turns true in the end. But alas, I'm afraid I'm wrong, as can be seen in any new tech-field. Crypto being the latest: don't build actual cryptography, just set up a multi-million marketing scheme and run off with the money, if you want to make money there in 2022.
Ok, great advice, but what was the dynamic between customer build outs and sales?
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.
If I have my own digital products as a side-hustle, is it worth hiring salespeople? Or is it really only worth it for big businesses/B2B with big ticket prices?
I've worked in a few sales led organisations and it seemed to me it was just as difficult as hiring programmers. The only difference was it was easy to see who wasn't performing. You could quickly spot the poor performers and deal with them.
Marketing, sales people, and such are all great but if you don't have product-market fit yet, you're beating up a dead horse here by focusing on growth. One of the first things I do when starting a new SaaS is setting up an event tracker (think mixpanel). At this stage, you barely have any users so no need for fancy analytics stuff. I just stare at the event log until I figure stuff out. Why are they not clicking on that button? Why are they skipping this card? Lots and lots of problems can be discovered and tracked by this way.
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.
Back, when I did heavyweight GUI development, I went onsite for the first few customer installs and watched the customers operate the system (usually after fixing some bug LoL). Those always gave me basic UI tweaking ideas, but the real lightbulbs would come on when I asked questions like "why didn't you just do X instead of Y" or "how would you change this to make it easier". Or various other generic questions, the answers were frequently enlightening about how to tweak training materials or the UI, but I usually got one or two killer ideas that were more significant and ended up being the kinds of things later users would rave over.
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.
You’re absolutely right, I do need to spend more time with users and really listen to them. It’s just my ego doesn’t want to be hurt so it feels safer just looking at the event log lol
Agreed. The best example for this is Hallway usability testing: give the app/website to someone random walking the hallway and watch them try to navigate the interface and analyze what they easily do and what they can't understand.
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.
1. When we started to specialize in a vertical and created the narrative and the product for that vertical. This is esp. true in domains with many legacy players.
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've been writing and selling my own software on the web full time since 2005. On the whole it was a 1000 small improvements to the software, website and marketing that improved the sales day by day and year by year. Rather than a blinding flash of inspiration that tripled sales overnight. But probably the single best improvement in sales came when I 'segmented' my event table planning product from a single price to 3 different price points, with the top one 10x the original price. Some details at:
https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/02/28/how-i-increased-sa...
I added a simple self-made affiliate system. It had two implementations. One allowed to purchase 10 or 20 "accounts" in bulk, resell for any price you want. And the other one meant that if two other people signed up for a free account, your account was moved up to the second level (basic, premium, pro). Once one of your referred accounts upgraded, then your account was moved up to the highest tier.
I implemented that over a weekend and it took off dramatically after that.
Depends a bit on the clientele you're serving I guess. At first, the referral part (encourage others to upgrade your account) worked very well, I saw people either onboarding their other accounts, friends' accounts, or just heading straight to Twitter to let everyone know they're recommending the service (so their account would upgrade for free). So that brought users.
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.
Add enterprise-y features without alienating small/middle market customers, and then charging out the ass for it. People are very happy with it, too, as long as we provide good support.
I work for an enterprise-y and this is good advice. Feature-wise a decent audit log and single sign-on are table stakes. If you don't have those we keep looking, but those shouldn't impact your SME customer focus at all and are things that can be upcharged for (particularly the latter). Core value features available via API is also super important because we absolutely aren't going to be logging into your UI. Again something that can trigger differentiated pricing.
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.
Yeah, I've seen this approach work a lot. I've found https://www.enterpriseready.io is a good resource to learn more about the features that enterprises care about.
I'm also working on a solution to make part of this easier, specifically audit logs (https://apptrail.com).
Sort of O/T but why the free tier for your service?
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 offer a free trial to encourage developers to easily try out and integrate the product.
Our free tier can cover low TPS usecases. We offer a free tier because we believe audit logs are too hard to build & consume and would love to see even smaller companies adding audit logs to their products.
I generally agree with the dimmish view of offering free stuff espoused on HN. However one upside is that grunts at largco can tinker on the side without contracts and all that drag. Diehard freeloaders will just keep signing up if you timebox it but it might filter out the casuals.
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.
I would agree, CloudTrail is a pretty good example. The who what where when why is a good starting point. We're building audit logs as a service and our event format looks similar: https://apptrail.com/docs/applications/guide/event-format
Abandoning Macintosh for Windows. Released software for Mac in 1989, but sales stayed flat. Finally released for Windows in 1994, and sales took off. Time and money spent on marketing + engineering had a 10x better ROI under Windows. Gave up on Mac in 1999.
for freelancers / consultants: counter-cyclical marketing
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.
Creating on-boarding training discussing the nuances of different parts of the business. I use teachable now since it's powerful and inexpensive in my opinion at 99 bucks a month. I know this already sounds like a paid promo for them but It's not. I run a blood testing company and we have 150,000 customers who are keen on improving their lifestyle and health. I've been running digital operations since 2004. And I WISH i had been smart enough to document each tiny nuance, tip, how to and share it. Makes learning faster, keeps new team members engaged and happy since they are more comfortable they are in turn less likely to quit, and you don't have to hold everyones hand as much or at all. I could write a book on other things. but 1 other massive improvement was selecting mission critical stats to come inbound to me automatically in slack. i.e. site down, checkout errors, sales revenue comparable to previous period, customer tickets, i never have to go look for it. I connected it all to slack in one way or another and i see it first thing each morning. It helps me spot issues before they become big problems and it feels like i can see around corners because you get the pulse of the business.
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.
The hardest thing is product. If you are starting with a product that is focused on non-enterprise users, you aren't going to have product on day one, and often what enterprises need is quite different from what startups or indies or consumers need. So, step one is doing a lot of discovery and talking with the market to figure out what to build.
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.
Stop obsessing with VC money. Focus on winning customers' hearts and souls. Do things that don't scale (but bring food to the table). Most importantly, keep your optionality, which is the ability to pivot to whatever the market needs, not YOU or YOUR TEAM or YOUR INVESTOR needs.
Marketing is very important. Keep in mind, people need to learn about your app before they install it, not after.
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.
I took a couple of sales training courses. One was an intro course for non-sales staff, and the other was for B2B selling with a longer sales cycle. Both very much helped with the social interaction side of selling, and the second one was very useful for structuring marketing approach and material.
One was a Sandler course - an intro to sales for non-sales professionals. The other was Huthwaite SPIN. I find the SPIN Persuasive Case Analysis method very useful. Sandler was 1 day F2F and Huthwaite was via Zoom. I guess they all offer remote options now but IMHO a live/Zoom trainer is important as there's stuff you don't get first time, and there are often only cryptic error messages at best in real life situations.
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 :)
Hired a business consultant. Built systems for sales, marketing, etc. Had real goals. Everything about growing a business is hard. The easier part was the actual consulting work. Still hard. We sold after building for 9 years with a good exit.
We’re ~17k MRR right now. Being doing it for almost 2 years.
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.
Honestly, the two best things you can hire once you have some minimal traction are the best lawyer you can afford and the best accountant / business manager you can afford. The third bit of advice is just something you should tattoo inside your eyelids: cash is king.
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.
Genuinely, ask everyone you know for good recommendations. Even if they give you their uncle’s best friend in Cincinatti who does public defender work, that guy might know the woman who is the best litigator in the US who has a speciality in what you need. And then if she’s too expensive or won’t help you direct, she will happily refer you to someone who does.
And that kind of hustle is a prerequisite to solid business success anyway. So, get after it!
You probably know people who know people who are good lawyers, but you might not know which. So ask everyone you know.
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.
Like other people mentioned, starting to market is the main one, but I think the bigger one was charging more for the product.
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.
Data segmentation. Segmentation of existing customers to find similar customers. With a reasonable number of paying customers there is always a sub segment who find you valuable. Wish we had invested more time finding more customers similar to that segment early on.
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.
Founder's personal brand
What i mean here is that many a times customers employees and investors believe more on the founder's word and promises than the product or revenue model or anything else, so to make the world believe that even though not everything seems clear now but will be eventually or just getting those early set of loyal evangelisers for your application or your community, the founder's personal brand and his or her's personal brand in the market matters more
For example - Kunal shah of cred or Ranveer Allahbadia of Monk E or Karan from Unacademy or Elon Musk per say, their companies get that initial set of customers or branding or even money per say, just because their founders have a respectable personal brand in the market
As its said " you don't invest 100% in the product always, you invest in the leader building it "
To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner:
"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.
This also works for non-startup stuff. Every new Patreon supporter, every album sale came from talking about it on Twitter or Mastodon. A few have come by way of HN.
"Build it and they come" works, for example Hotmail and Google did not invest into marketing initially. But it works in non saturated market with a few players.
They didn't need to; Hotmail offered free e-mail accounts which was unheard of at the time; Gmail went viral for offering 1GB of storage which was unheard of at the time. The latter also had scarcity with its invite system, I'm not sure if that helped make it more popular or not. Definitely helped prevent it from collapsing under its own success though.
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.
That 1GB storage comes at a cost, which is basically a marketing cost. You give something away for free, in the hope it will generate word-of-mouth marketing. That free thing you're giving away is coming out of your marketing budget.
Gmail had plenty of marketing when it started: Both the '1 GB account' and the "Search don't Sort" snippet where heavily pushed through several marketing channels at the time (paid articles, Google search homepage, among others). Not all marketing is "ad banners". For example, all those Businesswire articles are pure marketing and advertising.
I'm too young to remember Hotmail launch but GMAIL did market. Their marketing investments were
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
> Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition
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.
I was quite young and things seemed shinier when I was young, so take this with a grain of salt. But I remember google differently. Gmail invites were a big deal, even amongst less technical people. Adding that sense of exclusivity to something they would use to advertise to us was remarkably smart.
In marketing there’s owned media, earned media, and paid media.
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.
It actually depends on if you are using ecclesiastical marketing mnemonics (soft c like in contemporary Italian marketing) or reconstructed classical marketing mnemonics (hard c).
Depends on your product. If you're radio shack, sure, always be closing. If you're selling me an essential component of my business, and I expect to have a long term relationship with you... concentrate on the relationship and trust.
I worked for a small startup that won a HUGE contract because the big guy stopped supporting them to their satisfaction. We twisted over backwards to support their needs and they liked that.
Agreed with the sentiment that there are different kinds of clients/opportunities and sales cycles. However the idea specifically in ABC is the 'close'. 'Closing' is the act of securing payment from an entity. I've seen a lot of 'sales guys' who talk about how hard they're selling. But ultimately getting the money into your bank account is the real goal. Everything else is derivative.
Loosely quoting Eli Goldratt, "Until the money is in your bank account and there is no possibility of having to refund it to the customer, you have not made the sale."
Hah, we're living that right now. Big guy got bought, raised prices and removed features. Previously happy customers start looking around, find us (and others, of course).
Over the top support and flexibility are things smallcos can offer to outcompete bigcos with more $$$ and people.
It's not. It's a reminder that all of your sales and marketing efforts are wasted if you're not actually pushing towards a sale. Calls to action, follow ups, using funnels—all of these are things that increase an individual's likelihood to close. That's "ABC".
Yes, a three-letter acronym is incapable of expressing every nuance of a complex interpersonal dance. ABC is about sales and marketing driving towards the close. It doesn't mean you turn a cold call into "Hi, my name is James, buy my product. This is what it does. Buy it. Do you want to know more? Buy it first."
It's "closing" because, from memory, they're selling junk real estate. In the US, the end of a real estate transaction is called closing, beyond which it's (mostly) irrevocable.
Hence Baldwin is effectively saying "get to the end of the transaction."
Building MVP and finding and tuning your market fit early - those Lean Startup ideas were popular here 10 years ago. The money flood of the recent years seems to allow that 'Build it and they will come' as well as just bulldozing your way into market.
Is the idea that the product (once it's caught up) will be as good or better (and/or at least reach more people) than the original? Or is he OK with people being worse off than if your company never existed and the better product got to take the lead?
Better is a 100% subjective term and there's a huge discrepancy between what engineers believe is a better product and what users/customers do. Our product was and still is technically inferior to competition but we still have an NPS of 9 and are extremely sticky, why? Because of our amazing sales, marketing and customer success teams who've built excellent relationship with the customers.
Because the culture so complicitly provides it, while at the same time outlawing it: movies, music and even the LE efforts: drugs busts and drug wars. All of that is a form of advertising.
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.
Sales and marketing are different - there are TONNES of super successful products/businesses that lack salespeople - or who maybe have some, but the vast majority of revenue is “self serve” (ppl buying the product without talking to a salesperson).
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.
If your company is looking for funding for that low cost, high volume SaaS your CEO, CFO, founders…make no mistake…they are damn sure selling your high volume, low price SaaS.
My first customer was a friend. They told other people and it snowballed through word of mouth. I haven't spent any time or energy on marketing and have no salespeople.
Maybe people get it since “good” guys with big legal guns show up for it, and enslave or shoot you if you don’t come up with it, for your own good of course.
Fair point. But I'd think that a seven-passenger family sedan that out-accelerates every street-legal Ferrari ever sold, at the price of an entry-level Ferrari, would sell even with RMS as CEO.
Tailwind? They've built strong brand awareness through the quality of their OSS tailwindcss product who's been successful without any paid advertisements or sales people that I can see.
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
DHH and Jason Fried are masters of marketing. Marketing != paid ads. They are great storytellers and have been doing it consistently for the past 20 years with blogs, books and podcasts. The story they built around their products also serves a culture and philosophy of people using their products, and telling other people about it.
In every big company I've worked for marketing is distinct from sales. Marketing is about lead generation, sales is about lead conversion.
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.
I dunno. I hear that a lot but whenever I'm working on a project with a client who uses Basecamp, it takes a good few seconds for me to remember that the URL I need to trigger autocomplete is "launchpad.37signals.com". Having your product name in the URL seems like Marketing 101 to me.
Reformed salesperson here, you're 1 for 4, and Trello really should only get half a point because they've given up massive swathes of their addressable market to others (Wrike, Asana, Monday).
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.
Personally I don't count "giving it away" as the product selling itself. GSuite - Google Docs, GMail for Business, Google Drive, etc. - has had enterprise sales teams for a long time.
When gmail was included as the email client for their paid office subscription there definitely was salespeople involved, because I heard from them weekly trying to shill it to me. I’d argue that if you take a free product and want folks to pay for it, you obviously need salespeople as Google did.
> Reformed salesperson here, you're 1 for 4, and Trello really should only get half a point because they've given up massive swathes of their addressable market to others (Wrike, Asana, Monday).
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.
Doesn't matter if they have salespeople or not. It matters whether those salespeople can call up and have the other side already sold on the product. Because the product sells itself...
I'll submit Craigslist and Wikipedia as other options. Also Plenty of Fish.
Communities and knowledgebases can be built without salespeople.
And even ignoring the modern sales, it's arguable they were so good at sales in the 90s (when there were far more competitors) that they created the modern Office situation.
Once upon a time when it was Fog Creek, no, no, no…
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.
Product sells itself outside of enterprise though. I'm just saying that it is possible to have a product that sells itself, and reaches great success without having to have salespeople.
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.
I think you have definitely proved me wrong with Trello. Upon reflection I have been on that platform since perhaps day one of its release (I was reading Joel on Software blog posts usually same day back then). I know for sure since the first month (Sept 2011 Trello tells me that) and I am pretty sure I have had a paid plan for nearly a decade, probably dating back to late 2012 when I authorized Zapier to connect to my boards for automation.
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.
"Sells itself" means the product able to stand on its own and raise awareness without paying for advertising to do it.
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.
I think this question should have been formulated in a less punishing tone.
Either (s)he started to hire minorities EVEN more because they had some advantage.
Either if (s)he was discriminating them before but (s)he realized the mistake pointing out what was doing was wrong it's not useful given (s)he tellin it already and it might only make the person assume a defensive position about the previous stance.
It was good you asked. It was threatning you immediately added the legal punishments.
YES if (s)he was discrimating against minorities it would have been indeed racism or some other form of xenophobia.
The point is:
1) YOU DON'T KNOW THAT YET
(s)he was discriminating minorities. And given you already made a sentence the person it's likely to not tell you now.
For example at my current company we almost hire exclusively non-white people. We in fact discriminate positively in hiring non-white because generally they provide more value for money because OTHERS discriminate them and lower their range of offers. We are taking advantage of other people's racism and in doing so we are also fixing the salary gap caused by racism.
We will still hire minorities/non-white when the salary gap will be gone but we'll stop discriminating them positively.
2) PEOPLE WON'T SPEAK OF THEIR MISTAKES ANYMORE IF YOU JUDGE THEM
In the case where the person was indeed racist in the past the person said it was a mistake (s)he wish that (s)he would have not made and (s)he informing others of the mistake so they won't do the same.
You're actively punishing sentencing someone that came clean on it's own.
If you do this less people will come out saying they were wrong.
Example:
When I was a teenager I found out I was mistaken in throwing contact lenses in the WC when they expir because they end up in the ocean and add plastic. TOILET !== GARBAGE
I posted the article that had informed on not doing that on Facebook and said I had done it wrong to inform also others that might not know yet.
One guy came after me with "You are dumb, you should not throw anything in the toilet".
Yes definitely I had made mistakes, I had just told so. The guy had not helped me become better. I had become better already thanks to the article. The guy was just there to insult me for my previous shortcomings. Maybe someone else would have took that negatively and stopped reporting the mistakes (s)he made in fear of being told (s)he was stupid. Luckily I've enough self-worth to not be afraid to show my mistakes if I know it will help others.
> We in fact discriminate positively in hiring non-white because generally they provide more value for money because OTHERS discriminate them and lower their range of offers.
Are you saying that you're paying non white people less because of their race? That should be illegal in a lot of countries.
Not exactly "business" from a company perspective, but:
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)
How do you get opportunities in that scene? Do you get paid in cash or cryptocurrencies? Aren't you afraid of an eventual impending crash of the markets?
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.
Being active in communities/Discord, some networking.
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.
Any resources you'd recommend for someone trying to get back into the scene after a long hiatus? Looking for nuanced/informative discussions without too much hype.
Sure. I'd suggest getting into Discord communities, of course not "shitcoins" and "ponzi-like tokens" but the ones that do actual developments for NFT platforms, DeFis, DAOs and blockchain gaming (which I personally believe has a great future).
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.
(Retroactive comment after seeing downvotes: wow, seems like there are many crypto haters who downvote without even commenting with a solid reason. Super-constructive.)
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.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html