First-timer entrepreneur symptoms and cures
gabrielweinberg.com
gabrielweinberg.com
if you had 3,000 people come through your site, without a single sale, it's probably a good idea to try something else.
it's very easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are a hockey stick case. "oh yeah, we've had 2 sales @9.99 this month...but remember the hockey stick...a year later, we'll have 5,000 sales a day!"
if you are going to stick with an idea, you need to have consistent sales that are actually increasing. So that there is an indication that someone actually wants the product you have to offer.
personally I take a 3 step approach to this. 1) get actual people to the site and see if it actually converts(2-3000 people is plenty). Once you find out your starting conversion rate(even if it's 1:2000) 2) then your goal is to scale up so you get decent traffic to the site...100-200 people a day at least. 3) then you start optimizing...run a multivariate a/b test every week with 3-4 variations. Discard the crap and keep the better converting ones. Keep doing this every week, and by the end of the year, you'll go through 100+ different variations, and your 1:2000 conversion rate, will most likely be down to 1:50-1:100.
and with a/b tests you have to test EVERYTHING...don't leave anything to chance. You don't know your audience, until you actually test. You have no idea if you'll get more conversions with "buy" "buy now" "get it" "download it" "order" "order today" "give us your money" "stop being an idiot" or "insert coin"...not until you actually test it. For all you know that "stop being an idiot" order button will increase your sales 10 fold.
I know people who give up too quickly on an idea and I know people who stayed too long on an idea. The problem is usually that it's never so binary as to quit or keep going. It's easy to end up in a situation where you've spent 6 months or a year building a product. Over that next year you convince yourself that that NEXT feature is all that's needed for your product to explode. In the meantime you have a handful of users that give you validation that there's value to the idea.
A/B testing would be great but there's also a saying that A/B optimization too early is also a mistake. Time could be better spent understanding product-market fit.
Perhaps, more important than this was mentioned in the blog post:"spend a lot of your time thinking about customer acquisition (for me it's ~50%). Only very rarely will they come on their own early on."
I recall doing every single one of these mistakes, and more. But it only truly registers fully when you actually hit them.
This post was very good for telling people things they might not already know, but which are indispensable. For example, when I'm demoralised, I regularly find myself saying "okay, it might feel bad but in reality people find the service very useful", and then the rational part of my brain kicks in and tells me to keep doing what I'm doing because it's probably worth it...
Many thanks to the author, the post was very encouraging.
Even big, established companies run by visionary or at least very experienced CEOs seem to get some of those wrong at times, especially the 'you build it, they will come' and 'you're about to give up too quickly'.
Wave and N1 for instance with Google.
Would love to hear how fellow bootstrapped HN'ers dealt with such a situation.
I realise this is useless advice for most other startups, but hey, spend as little as you can (but not too little), and you're doing the best you can.
We are running at very bare costs but our biggest expenses are salaries for ourselves (which in an expensive city like Singapore) can drain your finances pretty quickly.
The consulting gigs are so we can afford food. We aren't getting paid anything, but we don't count our time against expenses...
"Most ideas with an NDA attached aren't ones worth hearing."
IP is paper armor for most startups - you're advantages are going to come from things related more to execution than any sort of legal ecosystem.