Finding My Next Bootstrapped Business Idea

Some markets just don't exist, period. Think nail polish for pet turtles. It's easy to figure this out, because every pet turtle owner tells you "I wouldn't buy this". There's no two ways about it. You know exactly where you stand.

This is infinitely better than the alternative, which is selling a product that kind-of fits, to a market that kind-of exists. You've identified a problem, everyone is saying "great idea, love the design, etc" - but hardly anyone's buying. They all stall, or come up with excuses as to why they can't buy, even though they say the product is great.

Both are cases of "no market demand", but the former is an infinitely better place to be. You know exactly where you stand and what needs to be done - scrap everything and start over.

The latter is a very dangerous place to be. It's easy to give yourself any number of options - "maybe we just need a (UI redesign|new website|better marketing materials)". But fundamentally, the product is flawed. You haven't really found a market need. Odds are you've identified a market want. This is something that's nice for people to have (and that they might be happy to use). But it's not compelling enough to reach into your pocket and pay for.

This is an acute problem in software because

(a) we tend to be builders at heart, so we favour making things over identifying customer needs.

(b) it's relatively cheap to build something. Other industries have significantly higher barriers to entry, meaning you (usually) need to secure customers and funding before the production/manufacturing phase.

In reality, demand is much more malleable, and what people want and how those wants coalesce in different product categories is what defines the structure of those "markets."

People would do far better to start from first principles and understand what desires, wants and needs they want to serve, understand what products/"markets" serve those needs, and build products to satisfy them.

Unless of course you just enjoy the distribution advantage given by building something in an entrenched category. But then don't talk about your "tech" "startup" or about "innovation". You're just doing a cookie cutter product like everyone else.

My friend Justin Jackson also published a good article about this too: https://justinjackson.ca/giveup

I'd advise anyone working in the software side of real estate to target anyone other than real estate agents (brokers, title, inspectors, etc) as customers. The churn is punishing, there's a lot of competition and many agents do a small number of deals/year.

- TinySeed (https://tinyseed.com/)

- Earnest Capital (https://earnestcapital.com/)

- Indie.vc (https://www.indie.vc/)

Each works a little differently. My friend Matt Wensing did a comparison of them: https://medium.com/swlh/alternative-funding-calculus-a-quant...

Hope this helps!

I've been working blogreader.com.au, which has a very similar concept to articulu for the last few months, but I have recently given up trying to turn it into a business. I ended up stopping because of a pretty underwhelming response from potential users. Most people I've talked to in-person don't really care about it - they might say "oh that's cool", but they're not beating the door down to use it. My site has a _horrible_ bounce rate as well - but this could just be a problem with my landing page, rather than an intrinsic issue with the product. I've found the marketing really hard, which has been a positive experience. My primary concern is that our services solve a small problem for a large group of people. Don't get me wrong, I listen to an article every day using my own service, but my friends and family don't care enough to create an account, submit an article, etc. Meanwhile, people on Google don't appear to be searching for "listen to web articles", so finding motivated users online seems quite hard. I can't comment on your marketing because I found your service in my reddit thread or /r/podcasts. I will note that Audm and Curio are also both trying to get into the "listen to articles" space. I now look back at my napkin math of "if I can get 1000 users to pay $1/month..." and realise how naieve I was to assume that getting so many users was easy.

Another issue is that when a service only solves a "small problem", then people will only put up with so much bullshit - ie. the UX has to be pretty good. I struggled with this, although I found your app prety nice. In particular I like that you hijacked the "share link" functionality in chrome to allow a user to convert an article.

Finally, I've found that people hate paying for content - who knew right? Perhaps your freemium model will get around this, whereas mine was a little more aggressive about getting people to pay. I'm interested in the economics of your app though. If you're paying for the text to speech service (I assume you are - if not let's talk about that!), then you're operating at a loss. What's your end game? How many subscribers do you need in proportion to your free users to make this profitable? What's your model? I think it's a really interesting problem because you're providing a nice UX wrapper around a paid commodity service, and so if you charge too much you'll be undercut or lose users to free content, but if you charge too little you're losing money.

In summary I found the following problems with this kind of service:

- many potential users + small problem = lots of marketing effot required

- small problems = relatively high standard of UX, low friction required

- people hate paying for content, but the content costs money to produce

I'm really interested to hear your input on what I've said. Did you have the same issues? Do you agree with the problems I identified, or do you have a different perspective?

My hope is that my post will help others think about choosing an idea that fits with their goals, so that it will work out for the long haul.