Ask HN: Distribution Channels and "Traction"
I'm fairly new here and have recently become addicted to HN (lol), but I thought I'd try to reach out and see if I can gain any insight. My friend and I have been working on our startup for the last 7 months. Our product is serving the non-profit space which has a culture of being slow to adopt, technologically backward, hands on, etc.
We had launched a pilot with a handful of organizations and gotten good feedback, but a lot of it was hands on work (services) that we did to validate some core concepts. Moving forward, we wanted to automate a lot of those tasks so that we can scale more easily and have now launched our "beta".
That was two weeks ago. I guess that's not really a lot of time at all, and knowing our market... there would be a much slower adoption cycle, but does anybody else get really discouraged at this time? Our issue is that it's hard to validate or test anything when you don't have a stream of feedback. We have been trying to hit up any channel we can (cold calling, tapping our networks, referrals, etc.) and so far it's be lukewarm.
Jumping from a "semi-services" role to more product focused feels like a step backward (as in, maybe the value WAS in those services offered..ugh), but we didn't want to go down the consulting road. Maybe we need an adjustment of our expectations and to continue plugging away at different channels.
Anyway, this probably sounds like a lot of babbling. Any input appreciated. Thanks all.