An Open Discussion Of My Personal Business Strategy | Hacker News Reader

An Open Discussion Of My Personal Business Strategy

zacharyburt.com

42 pointszackattack15 comments

I appreciate your candor. I struggle with some of the same issues, especially when it comes to finding new customers. I imagine a lot of other devs have the same issues.

I recently decided to take a similar approach, which I'm calling "quickie startups". The max timeframe to build a quickie for me is 2 months. It's not so much a desperate shotgun approach as it is just getting ideas out of my head, into reality and seeing which ones have merit. In my head, they're all winners but we all know it doesn't work out that way in reality, as evidenced by a few of your projects (and mine).

I definitely sympathize with your disinterest in a project once it's launched. Building is a fun, creative process. The let down comes when the world is apathetic to your startup and you feel more excitement about the next one, rather than trying to shove something people don't want down their throats.

I agree that you have to give it some time with each one and really try to find your market, but when you are bootstrapping, it's more cost effective to focus on the ones that users gravitate toward.

I had the same thought recently too -- get a stable and self-contained product live in six weeks, try to drum up users the next two weeks, then move on to something different. Ideally, each two month product is an orthogonal component of a larger product. When enough components are complete and live, just snap everything together to generate something nobody saw coming.

I'm branding it as "6 startups per year." My first three speaking engagements are already booked.

I don't mean to be overly critical or dismissive, but I think this is a guaranteed recipe for disaster. It takes more than a couple of months to build steady traffic and gain traction.

For me finding customers is the easy part- they're out there, and there are a few proven ways to generate lots of traffic quickly that WILL get you customers. The hard part is getting cash flow positive and monetizing properly. That means minimizing CPA and traffic costs, maximizing customer CLV and all of the other things that come with running a profitable business. Getting more money out of a customer that what it costs to acquire him is the hard part.

It's trivial to generate $1 million in revenue for any mass market product in a few months. I've seen others do it time and time again with direct response campaigns. That million from paying customers might cost you $10 million to acquire however.

Assuming you're targeting a large market and solving a real problem, any one of your projects has the potential to be wildly successful. The ones that aren't just haven't found their audience yet. Fortunately, there are economies of scale and snowball effects as a product grows, so once you've gotten a small customer base and some initial traction, everything becomes much, much easier. Commit to a single, well thought out idea, and see it through rather than starting from zero every 2 months. Test different traffic sources, pricing models, etc. It's a fool's errand to test different startups.

Re: web confessional

I don't know what you mean by "RFQ" in this context, and I don't know whether you meant this seriously, but in the Catholic faith, confession is not (principally) counseling: it's a sacrament. Neither confession nor any other sacrament may be administered remotely. You may think that's silly (but unless you believe in the efficacy of the sacraments, it seems even sillier to argue about how they should be effective), but of course the question has come up at least since phones became commonplace, and the somewhat related practice of proxy baptisms on behalf of the dead has come up since the first century. In short, I wouldn't bet a business model on the Church changing her mind on this one.

I'm not saying you couldn't get traction calling something a web confessional--in the reality tv age I think the name implies exhibitionism more than confidentiality--but it would be disingenuous to pitch it to Catholics as at all related to the sacrament.

As with any other group of people, lots of people who are Catholic don't even know half of the tenets of Catholicism. At least where I live. I basically slept through CCD, and even in my adult life, I've heard a 'huh?' response when I bring up something as big as Vatican II.

I still think that you're right, but you'd need to do a little more market research to prove it out. Even people who know it wouldn't be 'real' might still think it amusing enough to do it anyway.

I wonder why that is – is it because I’m more eager to hack on early prototypes of fun ideas than continue them? Or is it because the code base is so development-unfriendly that working on it is just no fun? (For example, there’s no automated testing.) Soliciting feedback.

It seems to me that you might do well to try to find a co-founder to work with. You're clearly full of ideas, and have the skill and discipline to get an MVP out there. Nicely done.

However, I think that having somebody to share the ideas with, prod and poke you, and share some of the burden, might help you achieve more.

I'd disagree with that. Getting a cofounder before finding an idea that sticks will:

1) slow you down - you can't iterate as quickly when you need to convince someone else too

2) dilute your shares a lot more than if you de-risk the idea before getting others involved

Given his choice of a "quick iteration" approach, I don't think getting a cofounder makes sense.

He seems to be doing okay with building initial products and then selling them off if they have potential but don't interest him anymore. I would guess that adding a co-founder would put more pressure on him to stay with a project that he wasn't committed to. At least he's honest and aware of his dedication to each project.

Zach, you might want to buy that domain (Webconf...) you are talking about, like right now.

Nice article.

Thanks - got it. :)

The typical organization goes through 100 "investigations" or idea concepts to get to one success*. They have a larger pool of resources to execute those 100 investigations, but I think the larger point is that you need to get through a lot of muck to get to the one success.

As long as you're learning lessons along each project I say more power to you. You'll known when you hit upon a project that you're passionate about.

To that point, have you read “The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit”? The summary is (taken from Amazon):

- Winners quit (regroup. cut their losses, switch gears) whenever necessary on the path to winning.

- Be the best, and the world comes knocking at your door.

- Work through the pain, because the reward is waiting for you further down the road.

Sounds like keep doing what you’re doing.

Source:The Human Side of Managing Technological Innovation: A Collection of Readings

As the person responsible for sparking that thoughtful, and reflective piece: I have nothing to say but kudos, and march on.

If there is a method to the madness, and you're systematically building, launching and tossing projects, then there is nothing wrong with that. I just had to address what I thought was impatience, and decided to make it public because I have noticed it as a trend lately.

I think you are absolutely right in trying different things till one works. When the idea is right, when the business works, you will know, nobody will need to tell you.

Have you ever sat down and figured out what your end goals are?

Because without that, you're just stabbing around in the dark for a couple hundred here and a couple hundred there.

Which is perfectly fine, if all you wanna do is experiment.

A couple hundred in a couple hundred places would not be such a bad outcome

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