Comment by kristiandupont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristiandupont | Hacker News Reader

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Before I started Submotion, I did a fairly thorough analysis of what kind of startup I wanted to create.

I decided that I wanted to create something that

- was B2B. Consumers are fickle, things can explode but they can also go out of style just as fast. It's more sexy and makes for better smalltalk but my assessment is that they are much more difficult to grow predictably.

- targets SME's. I am somewhat extroverted for a developer, but I will never be the type who goes golfing with CEO's to close deals. Million-dollar deals is not my game, I will go for higher numbers of small ones.

- targets tech-savy businesses. Because I speak their language, I understand their needs and I stay in the loop of their world out of curiosity, not because I need to keep up with my industry.

The problem is neither hard nor easy, by the definitions of this article. It's deterministic; there's just a bunch of work to be done. I'm doing it. It's slowly evolving. This is definitely a reflection of me being 40 when I started it, it's somewhat boring but that suits me perfectly :-)

I went through a similar thought process a couple of years ago before starting Feature Upvote.

Until then I had spent too many years on a technically difficult consumer product. It had drained away my life force and my passion for coding.

In my case I decided my next product should be:

- B2B

- target SME's

- a simple CRUD app: a nice UI on top of a simple database schema.

It is a nice business to run. Pleasant customers, simple to maintain and support, and quite lucrative.

Care to elaborate on the business and how you scaled it? I'm really curious. Did you build it as a side thing?

HNCS (Hacker News Comment Section) is turning into AWZ (A WarZone) with these acronyms.

Here are some definitions of acronyms:

B2B: Business to business.

SME: Small and Medium Enterprise? Subject Matter Expert?

CRUD: Create Read Update Delete.

B2SMB: Business to Small Business?

CEO: Chief exec officer, SEO: search engine optimization, they have nothing to do with one another.

VC: venture capital

I'm not sure what SME means, that's why I posted this.

These are all basic acronyms in the software/business world

My apologies, I dislike it myself when people do that. SME's are indeed Small and Medium Enterprises. For my particular case, I am targeting companies with around 50-250 people.

Yes, SME is subject matter expert.

In this context I assume it's Small or Medium Enterprise.

I love B2SMB, which is why my company specializes in it. Lots of growth potential.

I agree with this, except we decided on closing CEO deals, we sucked at SEO by comparison.

Oh I am not doing any SEO either. I am still writing emails and making calls, just not the kind that start a 6-month long sales process ending with cigars :-)

Would you mind if we have a short chat about your sales approach? This is something I am still struggling with a little bit!

Same. :) Wish there was a venue/forum/platform to share tips and advice on this type of stuff!

This is the typical stuff we discuss at https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/

I have a question: at a previous startup we emailed and called small and micro businesses in NY-SF-LA to sell an SMS marketing service. Kinda like messagebird but not for developers. Basically a web app to be able to send a list of numbers an sms with one tap, in an automated fashion.

Out of 4000emails/calls, which were not pushy at all and focused on understanding their needs, no one ended up paying ($3.6k/y).

What do you do differently?

You too are welcome to send me an email. [redacted]

Not at all. You can send me an email: [redacted]

That sounds like blog post material ;)

I guess it does! :-) I'm not blogging very consistently at the moment but I do seem to have a lot of ideas lately so maybe I should try and get back into the groove.

If you are comfortable with this approach you should have a great future ahead. Most engineers would hate that approach although that’s where the money is.

Once you decided what kind of startup you want to make, how did you actually find a problem that fits that criteria? That's the part where I'm stuck now.

I've heard (or read) someone say that every Excel sheet is a startup waiting to be made. Submotion very literally replaces Excel or Google Sheets for people to the point where I am considering making the UI more spreadsheet-like.

It was hard for me too. I happened to consult for a company where someone got fired and was disgruntled about it. They hadn't had all of their accounts closed and went and did damage. It occurred to me that this must be something a lot of companies struggle with and so I decided to try it out. I spent two months just writing and calling people before I felt confident enough that this was a real problem.

So try and think of places you have worked or the place where you work if such a place exists. What kind of time consuming and tedious processes do they have that could be optimized? Could you talk to someone there about that?

Hell, that sounds like my reasoning. Can you mind read?

But seriously, I agree that this is the way to go. Add low fixed costs and you can have a very healthy, very profitable company. And if the business model scales reasonably well even a potential VC ready startup with the need for VCs. Can't think of a better strategy to become, and stay, my own boss.

I like your thought process. Thanks for sharing, and good luck!

How is Submotion doing btw?

Growing slowly but steadily :-) We don't have product/market fit yet and we are just one of at least 5 companies trying to figure out what this new category of "SaaS Management" actually means, so we'll see where we all end up.

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