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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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
I think it just comes down to fear of rejection in the end. Making a product, adding features, working on things and even showing your "cool" demo to friends isn't same as asking strangers for money.. because people can say a million nice things about what you have to offer until you ask them to put in their credit card number. Then the you get to know what they really think.
Some of it may be "morality" component, for lack of a better word. Some people want the world to be one where people and ideas advance on merit rather than via popularity or "knowing the right people", and act upon that hope subconsciously or as a justification for avoiding unfamiliar risk.
I'd wager it's also a bit more common among software developers.
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.
[1] https://enchant.com
Maybe the first 10 will leave while you figure out where to go. That sucks, but it’s fine.
Crystal Pepsi was another example. Budgets couldn’t overcome the fact it tasted like nutmeg.
Modern era, I worked for a startup that got national media coverage before it was ready. I’m not convinced it was the right product and I know the founder could have spent way more time talking to customers in the ideation stage. But national media coverage created some bad months. I remember a several week stretch with more than 100 support requests in queue.
Fun times, in the Dwarf Fortress sense of the term.
In gaming industry you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one. Anthem, Marvel Avengers, Fallout 76, that game with 2042 at the end, Amiga CD32, Ouya. A lot of games as a service(and for most of them you pay upfront and afterwards). Everything is so much hyped to be the best thing since sliced bread.
How can you push too hard too soon, if people were turned off by the product?
Unless you're burning budget in an unsustainable manner... but that's not what OP said.
There is always a risk that the market won't like it. If you want a steady paycheque then entrepreneurship isn't for you (or isn't for you right now).
> Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
My biggest struggle so far is: How do I find those people to "sit and talk" to? Any advice on that?
Who do you expect to use this product day in and day out? And then make it even smaller and go look for those people on LinkedIn, Reddit, HackerNews, Twitter, etc.
Then just hit them up. You don't have to be selling necessarily, you can simply be asking about the problems they might have or looking for feedback on something.
Obviously this depends a lot on B2C or B2B, but there exists a community of people somewhere with the problem you're trying to solve or a company which is kind of a community :D.
If you can't find an audience, then I think that also answers your question.
So, you should go ahead and subscribe to my newsletter. It's pretty good:
https://www.shoto.io
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I was actually overwhelmed last year (my first as a freelancer on the side) and will scale back a bit to strengthen the foundations a bit better this year - but actually talking to people and when doing so always trying to create a little bit of value for them (and be it by 'oh now you mention that you need x, Paul over there is great and is actually looking for a way to sell x).
I am part of a business network and currently am working on providing a free short workshop for the people with online shops in basics about usability and conversion optimization. It will already provide them with the tools to make their shops better and also act as a marketing tool for deeper work on that topic with them (or a few of them).
And in parallel, as I am compiling the materials nonetheless I also will create additional ways to use the content in blog posts, Instagram and by creating checklists for others as a way to build an email list.
So this next to a day job and client work will probably be enough for me this year in marketing and business development work.
Let's see what comes of it.
[Edit typo]
It strikes me as imprudent to split it between Google, FB, and Twitter ads when I don't know what I'm doing.
Google Ads is complicated. Avoid it unless you are prepared to put in serious time learning how it works.
I tried Twitter ads a few years ago. Their demographics (knowledge of their customers are) was total garbage. Waste of money.
In general, do lots of small experiments and measure the results (clickthroughs, time on page, sign ups etc). If you can't measure anything meaningful, think carefully before handing over any cash.
If you’d have mentioned marketing a couple of years ago, someone would have shared the Bill Hicks post by now.
Marketing (not just advertising) really is an essential part of building product as it forces you to confront who might actually want the product and how you best go about talking to them and finding them.
He did a routine with a joke that worried Letterman, so Letterman made sure the segment didn’t air. In response, Bill Hicks went on public access television - there’s a really good show from Austin on YouTube - and used that as part of his own pitch.
A number of years later, after Bill Hicks died, David Letterman had Bill Hicks’ mom on his show. They talked about Bill Hicks and aired the routine. Bill Hicks’ impression of his parents was remarkably good.
I’ll share links then make my overwhelming point:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbHYqfYnhg
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B1NTmnG0hmA
When I watch Bill Hicks on marketing, I take it as being about ethics. We don’t have to monetize every little thing. And we don’t have to do awful things for pay.
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One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed and improving SEO. A couple of years later, the site is now earning $10k+ a month .
Fast forward to now, my wife has a new job. I still hate ads, but I have become accustomed to that extra $300 each month and have had trouble talking myself into taking it down.
The moral here? I am working on that myself.
My joke since moving has been "I like my morals and will stick to them as long as it's convenient."
I've kind of thought about the moral of it myself. I ended up integrating Stripe to let people remove the ads. For a blog that might not make sense, but for a solitaire website where some people play an hour or two a day, it makes sense. I think the lowest pricing I had was a one-time fee of $5 and basically no-one uses it. I'm super surpriced how few people use it. But if you won't pay for playing, you're gonna get ads . And from what I can see, people are fine with this arrangement.
2: replace the ad with an ad for your thing
You don't even have to offer any perks. In my experience and in those I've heard, most people don't care about "rewards." They come to support. Just make a few tiers since people tend to pledge along them.
Edit: I see the ad sidebar now. FYI on my first visit I played for several minutes and this never opened
http://www.sudokuisland.com/
Tell me, have you set the difficulty on the first played game to some level that might artificially encourage further play? I only ask as I've not played solitaire in literally 20 years or so and everything on the game I just played on your site seemed to fall in to place remarkably easily... .
ed - spelling, grammar
Yes I have. Most solitaire games these days have an option of playing a fully random game or a winnable deal. The automatic deal when a user comes to the site is a winnable deal.
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I'm trying to monetize a site I have but after a few impressions Adsense has left all my slots unfilled since. Of course, you can't contact anybody ... quite frustrating.
I had hosting issues in many of my companies and consulting projects, running from "WTF is this AWS bill $10k???" to "WTF did our 10gbit/s download just kick Heroku offline?"
But people can only appreciate the things I build for them if they are hosted well. So I took the obvious next step and purchased a small struggling hosting company. We then introduced nicer tooling that imitates the AWS and Heroku APIs if possible, to make using their servers as easy as possible for me. And now I can offer managed hosting to all of my consulting clients. For them, it's slightly cheaper prices and (in contrast with AWS and Heroku) they can just call me when things don't work. And for me, it's reliable high-margin revenue.
Great tip - thanks for reminding me about this.
For those of you that are interested, here's Joel Spolsky's really good analysis of this:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Going the other way of buying a failing hosting company would inherit its problems, mainly the lack of customers to break even.
One big trade-off is that I only have one datacenter so in cloud lingo, I only offer one availability zone with offsite backups. But then again, when AWS us-east went offline, so went most companies, because the proudly advertised multi-AZ failover didn't work that well in practice.
As for the APIs, I just limit the subset of APIs that I offer. Since this is used only for my consulting clients, my cloud only needs to support those APIs that they require. In effect, that means CEPH+PostgreSQL do most of the heavy lifting.
I've seen Cloud APIs explode in funny ways when customers actually arrive with Petabyte-scale datasets. In that sense, my customers are pre-qualified because all of them have had horrible experiences with Cloud providers over-promising and under-delivering. So once they are on my platform, dissuading them from wanting more APIs is very easy. "Would you like to continue to use my cloud at the current price? Or would you like to pay 3x the monthly spend just to use the Amazon cloud and gain API call XY? And please remember the last time they crashed badly and you could not reach any Amazon support by phone. Didn't they even bill you for EC2 while it was unreachable?"
And if they insist, I can always point them towards the Open Source project that Amazon/Heroku use under the hood. But in my opinion, most Cloud APIs don't add business value anyway. "Keep it simple" always wins out in the long run.
My customers want API compatibility with AWS and convenient deployments like on Heroku. So I needed a software layer to convert bare metal boxes into Cloud VMs and to imitate necessary APIs. And of course base images, buildpacks, etc. to convert a git link into a runnable docker image, like what Heroku does.
So basically I purchased them for all the scripts, tools, and stuff that happens between "Customer does a git push" and "Docker images are running on the correct bare-metal servers with the correct configuration"
Before, we had many situations where they asked me to take a look because something could have been a software issue but then turned out to be an AWS issue instead. That's always nasty if I need to tell my client "sorry you're offline, try calling Amazon". Even if they understand that there's nothing I can do, emotionally they still feel disappointed in me. When I use my own infrastructure, I can avoid these situations because it's in my power to make the necessary hosting repairs, too.
Turns out there is still a lot of money in selling technology to large enterprises that they can host and run themselves on an annual licensing model.
We were initially afraid of the long and high-touch enterprise sales cycles, complex procurement processes and enterprise integration requirements (complex permissions, LDAP auth, audit trails etc.) and thus wanted to do a simpler SaaS version with a monthly plan.
But I learned that if you start on the enterprise angle early, you can get some incredibly sticky customers with five, six or even seven figure annual license payments and very predictable cashflows you can raise or borrow against.
I worked on a similar product. It's just like shipping desktop software, but the people installing the on-premise server are much more savvy than someone who needs their hand held pushing a few buttons.
One thing I feel is really important is to have an actual person with an email address receive these and reply to them - rather than a ticketing system. This personal connection does wonders in maintaining a good relationship with the customer, especially if things go wrong.
[1] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
Also, make sure that your page loads fast - especially the content that you are trying to index. Low hanging fruit like optimising image size or cleaning up your imports can have a big effect. When just starting out with little backlinks, good page speed loads can be the differentiator that will put you ahead. Use https://pagespeed.web.dev to check how fast your website loads.
To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?
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.
https://learningseo.io
Additionally https://www.sitelint.com/sitelint-vs-lighthouse-comparison/
I'm the founder of Scrimba.com, an interactive code-learning platform. We went almost two years from when we launched our very first free course until we launched our very first paid course. In the meanwhile, we planned the "perfect" business model and also pivoted to a Teams-based product for a while.
Had I just dared to put up a pricing wall in front of our second course instead, we'd have gotten the signal we needed from the market much earlier. Once we started getting revenue, everything else became a lot easier (what to invest more in, which courses to prioritise, what to do in general).
A lot of businesses do this as a growing strategy so don't fully discount the backlinks, leads, social media it gave you.
For bootstrappers and small ventures, I'd rather spend the free subsidy in ads. If you do it right, it just works.
I hate ads, but they work.
https://imba.io
A few accelerants:
1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the US.
2) Started replacing myself by hiring multiple managers, which helped when I sold the business as it was no longer just about me.
3) Converted long-term clients to pre-paid retainer billing with helped create predictable workloads and revenue streams.
I had meetings with potential buyers and received a LOI (letter of intent) at a price I was comfortable with.
After that came 6 or 7 months of due diligence! I wasn’t expecting the process to last that long, but the buyer took time to interview my employees and secure a loan. At the end of each month I’d have to update my complete financial statements and the buyer would have to review them and they’d get submitted to the loan application.
Finally, the sale closed and I received a wire transfer.
I stayed on working for free (or maybe minimum wage?) FT for about a month, then part time for another month or two, and then finally on call for 1hr/week but no official office hours for another few months, just to make sure all the operations and handoff went smoothly. 6mo after the close I was officially done.
My main takeaway: first ensure the company is optimised for sellability.
And your question is answered too: agents. There are people and companies specialized in selling companies. Just like there are people specialized in buying companies.
edit: https://microacquire.com/
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.
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There's a few of these sites. Just search for them.
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And there is also https://microacquire.com/
These days the secret is you have to hire the good South Americans.
Exploit the fact corporate America hasn't caught on to routing contracts through Upwork et al. Then don't get greedy, keep the TCE delta below 20%, so they stay more than 9 months.
You can take your pick of the finest FOSS contributors Guinea and Paraguay have to offer.
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Startup engineering management is so simple.
Buy a copy of Mythical Man Month.
Read it, read it again. Then re-read chapter 3.
Get two of the best, your Captain and your Copilot.
Encourage them to hire a pimply faced minion to edit the config files so they feel important, and so you avoid single point of dependency.
These days, get someone else who lives in Estonia/Ukraine/Sri Lanka for follow the sun support.
If you need more than two engineers + 2 assistants, you should have hired smarter engineers.
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Your secret path to success with international hiring is to avoid any country you know the name of.
Don't think you're thinking out of the box hiring from Brazil/Israel. Hunt down a decent dev from Ghana or Georgia.
If my Slack/Discord buddies are anything to go by, there's an extraordinary amount of gems out there who've made the choice to raise their kids in their home countries.
There's good talent in Thailand as well. RIP my friend the Thai data/cloud principal eng banking 14k USD.
4) Optimized for SEO. About 50% of my business came from referrals, the other 50% SEO.
Dead Comment
1. Often times the product is a leaky bucket, and you experience a massive spike in traffic and very quickly see your growth asymptotically approach zero.
2. These platforms often times also are filled with people waiting to abuse your platform. For flurly, all of my original fraud problems originated from my product hunt launch.
Thus for GraphJSON, I went with a different approach. I shared my progress on my twitter account and mostly had my builder friends use the product. Over the past 6 months, the product has continually improved due to the constant feedback of this community. Word naturally spreads and so does the growth.
I think it might be time to stop using Product Hunt for me. I find that I reliably get email spam after posting projects there. Along with the spam, there's usually little to no useful feedback.
Looks quite interesting - nice to see someone else thinking (and realizing) that you could go a long way with clickhouse + search/filter/visualization.