From Zero to a Million: There Are Two Usual Paths for Startups; I Took the Third
blog.markgrowth.com
blog.markgrowth.com
* Focus split between two products * No real revenue * A blog to catalogue our path to wild success (I think it lived at diariesofastartup.com)
Long story short, it didn't pan out for me (too many cooks, differing levels of commitment, cluelessness) but I've had some good successes since then.
Best of luck - the path does become clearer as you learn the lessons of growing a business.
"... no conclusions to share with you at this time, as I’m still trying to find my way"
If you are starting a startup and have no money to burn through validating a business model, your only real way forward is to start with sales. You can sell your idea to potential customers (bootstrapping), or you can sell it to investors.
There's no third way to do this, because those are the only two groups of people that can give you money.
This guy is choosing to bootstrap. A fine path, but it requires you to schlep. You have to talk to a lot of people to validate a business idea. People who are so enthusiastic about the idea suddenly develop cold feet when it comes to buying your product and integrating it into their business / life.
If you are a coder, the natural tendency is to avoid talking to people and instead do what you know: build product. But unless you talk to people you aren't going to know what to build. His entire blog post is just exploring these failure modes, except with added self-importance.
I can certainly related to your experience, also solving very hard problems, but I would laugh about 11 weeks as painful as "large amounts of sunk time" is.... We are thinking in terms of years not weeks.
Bootstrapping is almost always the best way to start.
Unless you are lucky, most VC only happens after your success is pretty obvious.
Our solution has been to do dev work for money on the side, one of which resulted in a maintenance retainer. It's a pain in the ass, but has allowed us to work on our startup for almost two years, buying us time to pivot aspects of our bring-to-market strategy or what market to apply our idea to.... In other words, do several BIG pivots.
I would also suggest you decide how to weigh your attention between your products or put them in a sequential strategy that makes sense to you... I don't think you can build three services at the same time at the same level of priority.
If you take the long view, keep pivoting, and keep searching for as much real world customer interaction, your chances of converging on something cool is much improved.
We also got nice growth metrics with very little long term activation/use, which drove us back to do more customer development in the real world (and over skype!)
Keep trying things, keep sharing the journey, we all make many mistakes along the way, hopefully they don't sink a business that "could have" worked.
My view is, you should only fail with flawed ideas, not fail winning ideas due to mistaken models of execution.
Keep learning.
Having migrated ESPs and selected/on boarded new ones, vendor lock in can be a major concern and headache. This is due to all of the automations you add, performance data, audience segmentation data, etc. Often, particularly for business users, this can be in a proprietary format locked inside the platform.
If for example, your entire welcome onboarding flow is locked away like this, you need to be very careful not to disrupt a major touch point in your funnel or you risk losing very real dollars.
Email platform transition/setup and management at scale with any complexity is one form of hell i hope most people never get subjected to.
It's like a major public company mentioning the fact that IT finally got everybody in the company on the same build of Windows 7 in a quarterly report to investors. Yes, it was probably a lot of work, and yet nobody cares, and mentioning it as being a big deal raises doubts about whether you can manage things that are much more difficult, like for example your actual line of business.