yes. I love this. until you have 10 customers your business is bull (jason cohen said this, not me and I love it). go get some sales. else you and your partner are wasting your time. best to figure out no one wants what you've built in the next 30 days then 8 months from now when you're sunk costs are even larger.
id suggest proceeding with caution. these pilot agreements.....did cash exchange hands? if no cash exchanged hands I'd treat these are essentially worthless.
I dont mean to burst your bubble but: if you're solving a problem that is serious enough businesses will give you money today. Usually (in my experience) these "once you add these features" are things that wont actually move the needle enough and you'll find yourself in continuous development of things that won't actually produce revenue.
If no money has exchanged hands, I'd suggest telling your sales cofounder to go get a pilot with actual money being handed over.
Ive done this a few times. 1 more successful than others. I would strongly push back on presales not being a possibility in your industry.
every single person says that, but the reality is a lot more likely to be the thing you want to build doesnt have enough value to the customer to part with their cash today.
Also agree with everything below. don't worry about this stuff right now. The sole focus should be what problem do people have that I can solve. Once you figure that out, and build an MVP, then you could worry about fancy business design.
"Getting the flywheel moving" is an incredibly hard part. You most likely will never move past this stage, which means all energy spent not trying to solve that singular issue will result in waste.
As far as paying for features, Id also strongly suggest against this. Initially, and for years to come, if your project is successful there will probably only be 1 major reason a customer hands you money to solve their problem.
This might be bc you save them 10 hours a week of manual labor, or ensure no mistakes are made while processing time sheets or guarantee uptime for production (whatever it is). Even though that might sound like very few people want it, if you can find a few you are on to something.
Anytime spent building a feature because a client paid for it will not be time well spent (all things considered).
I work on an enterprise rapidly scaling b2b SaaS app in finance space. We took lump sums early on from customers and now have 5-6 different "features" in our apps that have to be maintained, supported, all unique to 1 financial institution.
It might not sound like a lot, but when you're trying to get developers up to speed, help them understand the code base, and there are things like that, it really costs, and those costs scale exponentially.
Each feature we have to ensure works with this, doesn't break anything. etc. when we only had 2 developers this was something everyone knew. Now that we have multiple teams, its really, really expensive.
Tread lightly. Solve the first problem in front of you fairst (find a problem people will give you money TODAY to solve). If you succeed at that, you will have $$$ to solve your other problems.
So, to expand a bit on the concept of paid features, my current strategy, I give two options:
1) The paid feature, if it is based on a fixed fee, includes a warranty period, where we will prioritize fixing breaking changes as other parts of the codebase change.
Once the warranty period is expired, it required additional payments to fix the feature.
2) No warranty, but the feature cost increases their monthly or yearly SaaS fees, and requires advanced notice if disabling the feature.
As long as the user is paying for the feature, development resources will be devoted to maintaining it.
This also helps steer customers toward option 2.
Honestly, I use both these strategies more-so to prevent wasted time with feature requests the customer has no interest in paying for.
It forces them to find value in what they are asking for, not just because it is a ‘great idea’.
My #1 bone to pick with Barnes and Noble was they wouldn’t price match their online price in store.
There is a local store near me and probably once a month I want a new book. I want the new book that day so I look online (Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, borders, etc) and determine Barnes and Noble is only a dollar or two more than Amazon. Fine because I want to read now.
Turns out, that was their online only price. If you want the book in their store it costs more.
I’ve avoided buying at least 12 books from them in the last 2-3 months because of it and went with Amazon.
I did school => work => now going back to school. Granted I didn’t study CS undergrad but taught myself a lot.
Since, I’ve learned and worked on some interesting problems. I want to work in big tech or in consulting. To do so, I need to be a lot better and/or have great grades.
So spending 2 years going back to school and improving seems worth it to me.
I have 0 student loans from undergrad and very minimal commitments as is.
went through a lot of the same stuff. Its tough to be isolated and mental health is a large driver of why I didn't want to continue working alone on a (small) SaaS app.
I've only ever worked in an early stage startup I founded. We initially were in same office and transitioned to remote over a 3 year period. (only 5 of us).
Early in your career (I wrote all of our product and am 25) working in an office is probably helpful. I am actively job searching now and the top thing I care about is a mentor/peer group.
I want to have people to interact with during work. I spent 3 years mainly writing code secluded from the real world (yes, I was going to things like dinners but that isn't the same in my experience).
I worked in finance before and use to complain about being at the office. Looking back, I had a quiet cubicle where I was mostly left alone to do my work but would take a break every hour and play some put putt golf around the office with the other interns.
I made friends, had a break and did a lot of really great work that summer.
Remote work once you're older and have kids + family + roots might make more sense, and I look forward to that! Especially if it allows flexible time so I could drive kids to school.
But, while young, I prefer office first w flexibility if needed.
Great work.