Hello, I failed with a several products that I built (easy part for devs like us) and then I didn't know how to get the product in front of customers, how to commercialize it, how to increase amount of users, etc.
Many of you succeed in this field, so I'm genuinely curious how to learn it? What are decent learning resources out there?
Thanks in advance
Any advice I give may not apply to you and your business. My business is b2b and it's a platform for certain kinds of professionals as well as an API that powers many well known businesses.
I've only had success through two general strategies:
1. Networking (friend of friends, friend of customers, etc). Leverage your network to find more customers.
2. The "Long Game" (SEO, word of mouth, etc). This is where I get most of my customers.
I'd say focus on the long game from day one (blog posts, good marketing pages, etc). Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want to pay for it.
This is a key thing. A lot of developers operate in the belief that “if you build it they will come”.
A small amount of market validation would prevent a lot of wasted time.
- Do people have the problem you are solving?
- Are they willing to pay a sufficient amount to solve it?
- Are there enough of them to make it worthwhile?
The real danger is that we often don’t want to hear the answers to these questions. So we either don’t ask or we dismiss the answers that we get. Wishful thinking is a dangerous thing.
When you start out, you probably only have a vague idea of what the product will be.
The sort of people you want to talk to might not want to talk to you. They are busy people and you don't even have a product!
People saying they will give you money is worthless, in my experience. Only people actually giving you money counts for anything.
Estimating the market size is hard and not all that relevant. See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fall...
I don't waste anytime and never felt like I stumbled on a product idea that warrants me building something.
Therefore, I haven't built anything but the projects at work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30831688
As a rule, I wouldn’t trust building anything depending on a small company - “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM”.
(I also wouldn’t trust building a project on top of a Google product. But that’s a different story)
Not as a solo entrepreneur, but I have been on both sides of a similar situation. I was working for a struggling startup where our largest customer who made up 70% of our revenue insisted on the code being put in escrow that they would get access to under certain conditions.
The condition happened - company was sold for scraps - and then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to them. Yes everything was above board, they worked with the acquiring company to allow me to keep my work laptop and in my severance agreement the acquirer released me from non competes, etc.
Two companies later I was on the opposite side where I was one of the decision makers where we were going to extend the contract with a solo entrepreneur for a SaaS. We were going to be 70% of his revenue. I suggested we also get his code put in escrow and I was responsible for actually watching his build process once per quarter where he pulled his escrowed code out and built and ran from scratch.
Trust no one, and it doesn't matter if it's a Fortune whatever, a small enterprise, a small company or an individual.
A company or business of any size can axe a product they own at any time, unless they contractually promised you support.
> then they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now had access to
Did you live in the same city? Or did you work remote?
Did they want to meet you in person first, before the escrow agreement?
Maybe that can be an addition to your answer: Start with big companies close to where you live?
I think much of the stuff that you need to do is common sense (put word out, write about it, encourage word of mouth). And it's usually obvious what will definitely kill your project (don't talk about it to anyone, don't listen to customer feedback etc.) so do the opposite of those.
My general experience has been that word of mouth is slow but very reliable and the customers you get from there are usually high value.
For those located in India (I would argue anywhere outside US really), in my opinion, trying to find customers in your network is a waste of time, even if you're wealthy. Most societies outside US aren't as abundant in their mind nor value driven the same way people in the US are
Instead focus on the long game, keep filling in the blanks on your ICP and what their pushes and pulls are by trying to figure out who is the right segment to serve so you can save time and energy
Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?
Did you purposely leave out outbound sales? Cold emails, trade shows, working the phones?
And what tech stack did you use?
The initial product was built with Ruby on Rails. It stayed in Rails for three years. At that point I had enough API traffic the memory on the server was getting out of control and Ruby just couldn't handle the concurrent traffic (with a reasonable budget).
I re-wrote the entire product in Go on the third year mark (converted ERB to Go templates, re-wrote all backend logic with Go, etc).
The Go version worked wonderfully and reduced my server costs substantially (from $600/month to $88/month). I had the Go version running for four years and I re-wrote it again in Rust (actixweb, askama, htmx).
For funsies, I re-wrote a portion in Rust and noticed the amount of code used was substantially lower (about 50% less code in Rust). I was surprised by that (I figured it would use more being lower level). At that same time I was growing frustrated with maintaining the Go monolith (it had a lot of legacy cruft from the Rails port and spaghetti code). I decided to re-write the whole thing in Rust and cull the cruft in the process.
The first book I would read is Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. After this, in no particular order you could have a look at:
- This is Marketing by Seth Godin
- Positioning by Al Ries
- The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
- Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
- Traversing The TRaction Gap by Bruce Cleveland
- From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin
I would also have a look at the models created by Winning By Design [1]. But be sceptical! These models do however hold some value in terms of visually presenting the sales funnel and gaining understanding of land and expand.
Best of luck to you!
[1]: https://winningbydesign.com/resources/blueprints/
I suspect success in this area might be only 20% about learning practical methodology. The other 80% would be some kind of self-examination, then analysing and resolving whatever aversions you discover - or deciding on a different strategy such as teaming up with someone who is already comfortable with marketing/selling.
This attitude has served me poorly working inside of larger tech companies because I focused too much on doing excellent work and not enough time advertising my work to others, partially out of a revulsion towards being perceived as the type who self-advertises bad work to non-technical decision makers. It's the "build it and they will come" mindset and it's a hard thing to break.
There's lots of competition, and most customers are already using something to help with their problem.
What worked for me 25 years ago is not going to work as well today. Well it will, but its much harder to stand out from the crowd.
Some things don't change though. You need to find customers before you find (ie build) product. Ideally you get a deposit before you start writing. Getting customers is harder than writing code, so do that first.
Finding customers is hard. You need to get close enough to see their pain. You need to make that pain go away. It's seldom as easy as you expect to make pain go away (the devil is in the details.)
The good news is that it is possible. And it's hard enough that it keeps the competition away. Do it well, carve out a niche, and you can build something good.
And always remember- customer service is what you are really selling, not software.
To add to this, there's always a catch 22 problem - how can I show something to customers to sell to, when I don't even have a product to sell? It's expected in a sales meeting or often any meeting, that you have a demo that would show your product concept for them.
I can't state this enough, but literally build on the shoulders of giants. Build on existing tools, and I don't mean open source, but existing products. Best advice I got from watching one of those AI fad-chasing YouTubers. Is it an online store idea? Build on Shopify first. Is it a chatbot? Use KoreAI or DialogCX. Is it a CRUD app? Use Glide + Google Sheets. Customer Service? Maybe they just need a Hubspot/Zendesk with some custom integrations.
Most customers are looking to buy a functionality, not a "product" . Oftentimes your MVP will be enough to carry them for a long time. You wouldn't even need to write a single line of code yourself for quite a bit of time.
Like you said, the hard part is actually meeting the potential prospect and ensuring that they will pay you for the product. In my (very limited) experience, I've had 60k-employee billion dollar companies outright refuse to buy (instead hiring 2000 underpaid fresh graduates in India to build a worse product), while a 250-employee million dollar company being super-enthusiastic about paying a premium price for it (even though they have their own dev team). If I had gone by the views of the billion dollar company, I wouldn't have found a market niche for my product, but fortunately I stubbed my toe (literally!) and found the actual customer instead.
That said, it basically boils down to 3 things:
Personas
Channels
Messages
You have an archetype of someone in your head that would like your tool, you want to test if that archetype exists. That persona likely consumes content, your job then is to understand the channels that persona typically likes to consume their content, and try to serve them a message they can understand in the time you have to serve it. There are thousands of personas in millions of channels consuming billions of messages, that is why it's hard.
It’s a free hour of consulting with someone that has experience in exactly what you’re struggling with…worst case scenario (no offense neom) you walk away with an hour less to binge Netflix and a hilarious story; best case they point something out that moves you to profitable months or years sooner.
My instinct tells me that you posted this here because you wanted something like this.
smooooth finnish with a free puppy
nuance indeed
call that? the keys to the palace and a free puppy sale!, who could say no?
for the parent: hire this guy!
If you cant, then get a jobby job selling retail to the masses, and just sell sell sell, get a thicker hide, and be able to summon a smile for the worst person you are ever going to meet
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316653
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316653
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37021837
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36922114
Some good recs in the above threads. You'll be able to learn and thrive with those, IMO.
- you can't outsource sales before pmf, and you probably don't have pmf yet
- talk to (at least) a potential customer every day, keep track of what you said and how they responded
- make and give your leads materials they can use to sell internally, figure out who makes decisions (probably not who you talked to first) and make sure it's relevant to them; you may need multiple versions
- aggressively think about pmf, don't worry too much about official definitions here. just ask yourself: "if i took a month long vacation, could sales ostensibly be on autopilot?" if no, you don't have it yet. if yes, take the vacation you're doing great
- look for pmf by making your idea smaller, not bigger, or you will waste money and time
- when you can make a product idea really tiny in scope, and someone will still pay for it, you've identified a strong pain point you can exploit (aka charge for). Build the product/platform around that, not the other way around. Never convince yourself you have to build a huge thing before you can sell it, you're most likely wrong. optimize for finding that tiny scope early on
- when i say look for or find or think about pmf i mean come up with a way to pitch your product, and then pitch it to someone new. then compare that to the last times you did it. you have to talk to a lot of people for this to work, way more than you think. your product will not sell itself, you will have to talk to a lot of people. as many as physically possible to get the feedback you need to create a sales cycle that runs without you i.e. pmf. this is something that took me multiple years to internalize. you're just never talking to enough potential customers
- don't ignore seo, and pick names that are easy to say and read; figure out where your customers consume media and get your content there. every business will be different here, and you gotta get creative
- something i saw on reddit that stuck with me: first time founders think about product, second time founders think about distribution. i operationalize this as: do not begin engineering a product until you're clear on how it will be marketed and sold, bonus points if you can convince someone to sign a contract saying they want it-- and remember in B2B/gov this can (should?) be a sales channel partner not just an end-user
then there's the bigger resellers like cdw or insight and companies like carahsoft and similar
some research firms looking at grants will work with you if you offer something innovative to add to their application
it's just making as many connections as possible, everyone wants to make money so just be honest with people and usually they're open to it
*fixed a typo
This!! And your related explanation is so good!