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@anakic

That was an enjoyable read! I have also tried qutting my job as a developer, tried making money by working for myself (and focusing on developing features instead of actually making money, same as you), then returning to a "proper job" as an engineer. There were many recognizable moments in the blog post.

I once took a course in entrepreneurship, as a distraction from computer science, and the bottom line is that to make money you should first try to find someone willing to hand you their money, and then put the effort into making the product or service. But, as a developer, it's soul-wrenching and just feels wrong to try to sell something before something proper has even been made. But I've seen it work many times, you just need sales people that are not afraid of making up products while they go, with both the profit and stress that follows.

I'm glad you found a good opportunity with an accelerator, good luck with the next adventure!

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Thanks for the thoughtful comment! This is my first try at entrepreneurship. I'd be lying if I said that I'm always sure it was worth it. Most of the time, though, I really think it is, regardless of if it's commercially a success or not. Probably sounds corny, but for a product to work commercially, it needs to have both passion from your end and usefulness on the other. I think if there's no passion, it's probably not going anywhere and even if it does it's not worth it.

Really cool stuff!

But, as a developer, it's soul-wrenching and just feels wrong to try to sell something before something proper has even been made.

This has been my biggest struggle.

Yeah, I think most developers struggle with this one.

I have a friend that is like he's born for being in sales. He loves money and have almost no moral qualms when it comes to selling (but paradoxically have a heart of gold when it comes to charity and being nice to people).

Some people actually enjoy making lofty promises for money. I guess that's part of why being in a team is a good idea.

This. Absolutely agree with both points. Going it alone is hard, and developers have issues with self promotion. Sales seems like dirty word to us. The thing is, when I'm the customer, I don't mind being sold to. As long as it's not a flat out lie, I actually find I appreciate the stuff I buy more if the sales person made me feel good about it.

In my experience, technical people latently believe the thing that people buy from you is a product. So if the product isn't done / ready / etc, then you are being misleading trying to "sell" them or engage with them. It feels wrong, like you're forced to misrepresent yourself.

You imagine the potential buyer as a hyper-critical power-user that will expect everything to be perfect.

But what if the above isn't true at all? What if the potential buyer is buying something more abstract? Like a solution to a problem; or even the chance at future resolution of a painful problem?

And what if they aren't power users? But just need basic help today that could grow into something better tomorrow?

Like, what if they just need a partner to help them solve a painful part of their work, and would be willing to put up with a lot of incomplete stuff to get that?

In that case, reaching out to them to "sell" them in the early days is basically saying "Hey, I'm starting to build XYZ that solves problem ABC. My goal is that it would help by doing DEF. Do you have that problem? I'm early on in the process, and looking for lots of feedback from potential users. Would you be interested in checking out my prototype / designs / thinking on this?"

That doesn't seem "soul-wrenching" or disingenuous or anything like that. It feels very authentic. You're making yourself somewhat vulnerable and portraying yourself as eager to learn and help.

IMO early stage entrepreneurship consists of finding a problem bad enough that non-trivial amount of people say "sure, let's talk" to that pitch and then working with those early users to build something useful.

This shift in perspective has been critical for me. Similarly, it is critical to ask “Whose problem am I solving?”

I am an engineer and tinkering with tech brings me pleasure from creating, I crave mental stimulation, and I get immense satisfaction from havingright things in right places”. Polishing the code is like polishing the car engine for a petrolhead.

But those are my problems and triggers. I am feeding _my_ needs, then implicitly expect other people to give me _their_ money for doing this. Because look how hard I toiled! Yet many people do not care how polished their car engine is. And I have never seen clean code that was generating revenue.

The critical shift was to accept that people and have needs I don’t have, and they are desperate to solve them. And their professional lives are often painful - I get frustrated when I spend a day with almost any professional outside of tech. “This is the shit you have to put up with to get anything done??!” I haven’t had that problem since teens, if ever, and I can fix it. Automatically, empathy takes over, and I want to rescue them from the daily dread. So I wire together a minimal app that will make them glow with delight for 6 months, and they’ll give me dollars in return. Today was a good day, because two strangers supported each other and did not focus entirely on themselves.

If it were up to me, everyone would get a juicy steak. But when going fishing it’s more effective to bring worms.

That really is some great insight into entrepreneurship. I have that same problem of wanting everything to be perfect before showing it to anyone.

This is a very clear articulation of my professional experience as well. I feel like I have to drop out of "aesthetic perfection" mode in order to just do what I can to help someone else; and and that is what they will actually pay for, since they don't care about the perfection of fine details.

This is hard for a certain class of problems, though- ones where people have to be convinced that the (1) there is a problem and (2) they should care about doing something about it. The first (modern) electric cars and the first home computers come to mind.

But that's really just a nitpick. I believe your point overall is correct- you're selling a solution or a dream.

This has been my perspective. It surprises me how many people (including non-technical people) have a problem with simply going “hey I’m working on solving this problem. Would you be interested in giving me some feedback?”. Or even the less forthcoming and more morally ambiguous pretend that the product exists/is being built. don’t build anything yet. seek idea feedback from potential users. maybe even grow the community first. only actually build the product once you have enough data to show that people actually want it. invite the most vocal people to use it first. when ready to launch, launch with actual users on day one

I’ve worked with “seasoned” business experts, MBA’s who run multimillion dollar companies themselves, etc, who had a problem with this just out of principal. I once put up a website for a personal startup project with a “give us your email and we’ll send you the white paper” form — and the white paper didn’t exist (although the raw data that would be used to produce the paper did). When one of my mentors who was examining the website wanted to see the white paper, and I said “it doesn’t exist (yet), I just want people to show me that they are interested in it, otherwise this project is not really solving a big enough problem. So far nobody has requested to see it.”... they were LIVID. They could never trust me again after that, even after I tried to explain the reasoning.

So what if the first person asks for it and it takes a day or two to arrive? If only one person ever asks for it, it’s not a big enough problem anyway. But the mentor was seeing it from the perspective of how it would look if they did that in their multi-million-dollar company with their fortune 100 clients. But their rules did not apply for my situation. My situation was that I don’t even have a profitable company with customers. That I want to build things that people want, and the sooner I can figure out it’s not worth pursuing, the sooner I can move on to other ventures. So if during this journey I create a white-paper request button, and nobody ever clicks it, did it even exist?

Builder's sell houses before they build them. I think developers often are intimidated because they might not be certain they can deliver. Nobody with a minimum of experience would hesitate to take 1000 for a quick gig, because it's obviously going to work out. So we need to prove ourselves to ourselves first, and then we will have the confidence to take on larger, more lucrative contracts.

Sometimes. Most builders work both ways: They one's I've worked with closely seem to be about 3/4ths build to order, 1/4th build for sale after. The spec houses are carefully designed to be cheap to build (without sacrificing quality) and look great on the market so they will sell/close fast. Builders want a good looking spec house to show potential custom buyers.

Even when they build spec houses (sometimes crap), they are paid first / at milestones by a bank or investor group. They don't hesitate to take on the job because they are confident in their capacities, which is my main point.

Building a house is very different from building a product. For example, timeline estimates for building a house can be reasonably ascertained; not so for software.

It's the distinction between building something you've built before and architecting a new bridge or building. The latter is a creative effort with lots of variables that are extraordinarily hard to pin down into estimates that would be acceptable in spec house construction.

So, your spec house is the yet-another-crud-webapp, where the spec is clear and the tech mature... Engineers do those too, but they aren't so much entrepreneurs as jobbing contractors or agencies

It's fine to move the analogy, but the point remains the same: The more confident you are in your own capacities, the easier it is to bid on a project. And to be confident in your capacities without it being simple hubris, you need to do difficult things that demonstrate to yourself what you are capable of accomplishing.

I think it's worth pointing out that in order to "sell" to investors (as opposed to customers), having the product (and the customers!) ready actually is very important.

So the proper sequence is:

    1. Sell.
    2. Build.
    3. Pitch to investors.
    4. Repeat with more resources.

Inexperienced non-technical founders sometimes get the steps 1-3 backwards.

reconciling creativity with the market is a really longstanding problem in lots of areas. so I'm really interested in discussion that leads to any insight.

I'm curious about 1 before 2. Any attempt I've made in the past to understand market interest without having something that people can actually touch has always been really squishy. People aren't that interested to talk, when you do they always say something like 'well, sure, I guess that sounds interesting'. People that seem really interested usually don't have enough bandwidth for a beta product evaluation, even though they will say they are really excited and want to help. Often, product uptake comes from an unexpected direction/vertical, just by accident.

So while in principle getting customer-based design information up front is ideal, in practice it seems like you don't get that much no matter how much you try.

Maybe you're suggesting iterating on 1 and 2 until you feel like you have a solid case for 3?

Yeah I tried this too and you're right: people will say they will buy stuff, but when it's time to pull out their wallet it's often a different story.

I think that is why point 1 is "Sell," not "Interview" or "Imaginary sell." For example, some people put up a web page, run some ads, and have a complete signup process that once the CC is entered they get a "thanks for your interest- we'll be in touch when we get it built and by the way we didn't really charge your CC."

We've had discussions before on this board about whether or not that's ethical, IIRC.

> 'well, sure, I guess that sounds interesting'

I think the question boils down to: would you be willing to spend the next few years of your life on a 'well, sure, I guess that sounds interesting'?

There are all kinds of people. Early adopters are usually who a startup would want to start off with. If you can’t find even a few people who are excited about the value that your nonexistent product would add to their life (not even yourself as a user?), should you be excited about building it?

Money talks. You want people who are excited enough about what you’re building to give you money for a nonexistent product/service. Via Preorders, kickstarters, etc. Words can be cheap, but once they’ve bought in you can value their feedback.

Here is how I have rectified this for myself (though I am not the hardcore developed of some on HN, I've hacked a lot of stuff together for fun and profit).

Developers rarely know what users really want in advance. Hell, even users don't know what users really want. Re-writes are time consuming (and, to me, boring), it is easier to do the minimal amount of work first, demo that, take feedback, and then build it out.

However, going into this you need to have faith in yourself that you can deliver something good, and on time. If you have that confidence in yourself that you can deliver the functionality expected in a reasonable time frame, you can possibly be more comfortable selling ahead of your delivery schedule.

IMO, once you reach a certain level of comfortability as a developer it doesn't feel wrong at all to try to sell something before it's made.

I know I could solve whatever problem it is by leveraging a lot of my existing patterns and code. Once you know enough about a domain the coding and configuration becomes an afterthought.

I think that there's a rising "Maker" culture that focuses on building first and launching fast.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0

That is very interesting, thank you!

@levelsio also published a book on the subject recently.

Do you happen to know the title of the book?

https://makebook.io/

It's pretty good so far

I would argue the you go the lesson slightly wrong. As a technical person you start with your great idea and get it working (not working is not the same as polished!). Then you HIRE someone who is great at marketing to help you figure out where it needs to be polished to sell it. The great marketing person will then do the work go get sales.

Note, if you were a marketing person your lesson would be correct: you find the idea that someone will pay for and build it, then you HIRE the technical people who can build it. Marketing people are great at figuring this out.

The above are two very different, but successful approaches to creating a business, with different results. The technical first approach asks "what can technology do" and creates the next revolution. The marketing first approach ask what will people pay for, and creates the next evolution. Both are very valid approaches that can lead to riches. It is very common - even in business schools that should know better - it not recognize that a technical approach can work.

> As a technical person you start with your great idea and get it working

This starts from the (potentially flawed) assumption that your great idea is actually saleable. If you build something and prove that there is at least some market then great. But you might build something and find that there is no market.

If instead you start with the market, then you are unlikely to be pointlessly building something.

Absolutely.

The opposite approach has equal risks: you start with a saleable idea that just isn't possible (or is possible but the costs are more than the sales will ever cover).

Either way it is critical have points where you decide if further effort is worth the investment. You have to make some investment in time/effort/money to find that out, if the answer is the product isn't worth the investment all your efforts to this point are wasted.

Having built some very cool things that in the end nobody bought, I strongly disagree that one should just build the thing and then try to sell it. I also disagree that these two approaches lead to evolution vs revolution.

Even if you have a revolutionary idea, and even if you can build it, it's still a waste of time if nobody will buy it. No matter how revolutionary your idea, you can try marketing it. If you are eventually going to sell it via a website, just build that website. If you're eventually going to sell it in person, just sell it in person. If you need a video demo, just make the demo. Then see what people do.

There are two reasons for this. The obvious reason is that you can save years of your life building something that nobody will pay for. But the subtle reason is that finding out what people actually want will usefully inform what you build. You can spend those years building the revolutionary product that people will buy, rather than the not-on-target product that they won't.

The techniques for this are not hard, and the Lean Startup literature has plenty to get people started. E.g., the Alvarez book on Lean Customer Development: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Customer-Development-Building-Cu...

(And this is not to say that people shouldn't obsessively build things that interest them. I like doing that. It's a great way to learn and explore. But they shouldn't pretend that's a good way to start a business, any more than amateur musical noodling in one's basement is likely to produce the next #1 pop hit.)

So I entirely believed this advice, completely and absolutely. And then I started my current project.

I'm working on a thing now which no one believes is possible in the AI space (and to be honest I didn't either).

So I built a tech demo which proved to myself that it really does work.

Now I do the "I'm doing XXXX", get the cynical "yeah right" look, but the idea is interesting enough that people are prepared to see the 30 second demo.

The demo is pretty cool.

After the demo I've had people ask if they can invest, without me asking, and I think every person I've demoed to thinks they would either buy it or know someone who would.

So I'd caution that not all advice is correct in every situation.

I think a tech demo is in line with this thinking - selling it first doesn't mean there can't be anything of substance. It means you didn't invest a year of your life taking the tech demo and making a full-blown product out of it before showing it to people. I think many products have substance that people would buy but the execution is way off and it makes it unappealing.

I'm not sure what you say is contradictory. You didn't go build a product. You especially didn't spend 4 years (and 1 relationship) building a product.

From what you say, you did some technical exploration (which again, I'm all for). Then you didn't make a full product, ujust a 30-second demo. Next you went and tested the "people want this" hypothesis. That sounds very much in line with Lean Startup advice.

Sounds like you need to re-read what was written because your approach falls in the same line of thinking. Creating a demo is part of sales, even if you had to develop something in order to create that demo. You’re not asking people to integrate your finished product into their life, you’re asking them to view a 30 second demo. And then they’re reaching out to you and asking if you would take some of their money off their hands. Great!

What I wrote is in no way contradictory to your experience.

Great tech MUST be sold, once you have the proof of concept you must get someone great at marketing on board to help you sell it. There are plenty of great marketers who can help you with this (for a price...).

My only point is as a great technical person you start with getting it working before trying to sell it. Once it is working great marketing people will come on board and help you sell it - that is partially a matter of finding customers and partially a matter of making you admit those hard rough edges need to be fixed.

I believe what you say is directly contradictory. I'm suggesting you definitely not get it working before you try to sell it.

For most product ideas, the key question isn't, "Is this possible to build?" It's, "Will enough people buy it to make a sustainable business?"

That is to say, the greater risk of failure comes from lack of demand, not lack of technical competence. The greater risk should generally be addressed first.

This is compounded by the fact that it's usually much easier to test the "people will buy X" hypothesis than the "I can build X" hypothesis. Or, put differently, the cost of reducing market risk is usually lower than reducing technical risk.

Furthermore, even if we're in the rare case of working on something where technical risk is significant, we generally don't need to get a real, working product to reduce that risk sufficiently. Some technical experiments are generally sufficient to put us back in the realm of, "Yes, we can make that product."

Slow down. We are both right and both wrong. Figuring out how the reasons apply to you is half the battle.

As a technical person you are better at getting it working so spending a couple weeks getting a working prototype is worth the effort, it might be ugly but it builds trust that it can work. If the idea is radical your potential investors/customers won't believe it is possible.

The real problem is until you have enough paying customers to pay everybody you are living on borrowed money. How you best borrow the money is the only question, and the answer if different for every situation. Some ideas are so obvious when seen that you can get millions from investors. Some ideas will get the "that ain't possible" reaction until you show them the finished product when they will beg you to take their money. Some ideas look cool but nobody is willing to actually pay for them. Some ideas are cool and will generate sales - but never enough to pay for all the people required to make the product. You have to figure out where you are.

There's been a few startups that forked off from my employer, but none of them started off as "here's a bag of money, go and make something" - they always started from one of our customers having a need, and being willing to invest and be a pilot / first user.

Ten years later, that first startup scored a 100M funding round.

Yeah, it's quite difficult to sell and quite easy to start wondering if what you're doing is valuable to anyone. If the need and the willingness to pay are already there, that's a perfect opportunity. Good on them!

Accurate. In understatementship it’s called “over-promise”. But inventing non existing products or features is the current industry standard in startups. Call it fraud, call it marketing, get used to it.

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