Having 170 competitors in not an obstacle
pingr.io
pingr.io
The reason is that getting a few hundred or a few thousand customers in a proven market with millions of customers is a very achievable goal over a few years.
No need to compete on price, just compete on great customer service and support. Be someone that your customers know and like and love dealing with.
And of course you do need to make a great product and find a marketing channel(s) to reach that small segment of customers.
But still I got some ideas which I'm going to implement, and hopefully increase my value.
For me, $20k/month is surreal. But for someone it's nothing.
If your main marketing efforts have been to scrappy student startups etc then price will be a big deal for them, but if you can shift to marketing to small business that do have an income and present Yourself as very easy to deal with and talk to then you might be able to shift the dynamic.
Again, in the bootcamp, but there are many different types of buyers and you just have to work out how to reach the ones that align with your goals.
If your expenses are like $5k a month and your getting maybe $180k a year in profit before taxes this is really more like a job than a business.
A business making revenue of $20k a month must be a very small idea, for example a service that pings some servers and alerts customers of downtime or maybe some kind of file storage. Conceivably that means you can quickly pump out a lot of similar sized ideas and perhaps get multiple revenue streams going, each averaging $20k a month or so. Now you can afford to hire talent.
That quibble aside, I agree that if you can multiply that kind of success 3 or 5x and automate the living hell out of everything, you could be doing pretty well.
I don't think this paints a correct picture. For example, there are many developers out there who'd love to work on FOSS 24/7 while having some income from a simple side-project like you mention. But many of these developers still struggle, which says that it just isn't that simple.
FOSS is what you can do when you're no longer tied up in the mundane day to day tasks of running a business; when you have employees who keep the business processes you put in place running while you simply make high level decisions and provide capital.
And of course these small kind of businesses rarely last forever. Instead of thinking long term, think of this small business as a temporary opportunity to extra value from a market while it is still there. Eventually the opportunity is exhausted the way a mineral field gets harvested and you must find a new opportunity to mine. There's not much time to do both things well.
My advice to developers who want to build FOSS for a living is to make money from the software itself by providing implementation and consulting services around it. This way your interests align well with the things that pay your bills, and you can excel at both simultaneously.
For many people, the ideal situation is one where they are self-employed, not responsible for payroll, and making $20k/month (or whatever). They are not going to become part of the 1% doing that, but they will be able to lead a very comfortable, self-directed life.
As a resident of New Mexico, I put aside 23% of my gross income for federal and state tax, and that is normally within a few hundred dollars of the correct amount.
Not sure why you'd look down upon that amount. It's a good lifestyle business if you can do that consistently.
The end goal of business is making money, not hiring talent.
Managing people is like herding cats. There are many business owners that do not want to herd cats.
Nothing wrong with that being your personal aspiration, but it is a dangerous mindset.
Seeing hiring as the end goal, can result in you raising overhead because you want to build a fiefdom well before you really need employees.
Bonus: Growing the market by 0.01% gets you more customers than taking 0.01% of the existing market.
I see what you were getting at, but you erred in this case: the two are identical.
If the market is a million people, growing the market by 0.01% causes you to have 100 of the 1,000,100 people in the market, while claiming 0.01% of the existing market causes you to have 100 of the 1,000,000 people in the market. So the absolute figure is the same, and the fraction you have is smaller.
Additionally, as an indie founder you essentially have an invisibility cloak because you won't even be on the radar of the market leaders.
These two reasons are why someone like Less Annoying CRM can build a $1m/year business and Intuit couldn't even give a tiny care about it.
You can even study the market leaders and tackle things they are not interested in fixing - but that some customers have asked for on forums and such.
Of course, the indie founder invisibility cloak effect diminishes the smaller the market is, or the larger market share you take.
It's pretty hard to go un-noticed when you enter a market that just has 1,000 customers.
Likewise, it's pretty hard to go un-noticed when you start getting 1%+ of a larger market. But that's ok, because if you do get that big, you most likely know what you're doing.
-you didn't look hard enough
-you are a genius who spotted an untapped demand (very unlikely)
-no-one wants it (very likely)
Also, remember that the main competitor to a lot of software is Excel and post-it notes.
That said, the more competitors the harder it is to get noticed. Ideally pick something where you have got a reasonable chance of getting on page 1 or 2 of Google.
I used vk.com a lot in the past and in terms of UI it was much more convenient for me than Facebook.
Same ideas, different implementations.
I'm talking about people who just rip-off someone else's design with adding anything original.
I am using a service called Invoicely for recurring invoices in my small business. One day I randomly googled for some of its features and found a post of a guy who claimed (and I believe him) that Invoicely is a blatant screen-by-screen clone of their own SaaS.
I felt really bad for that guy, and after some time I thought that it's a good idea to switch to them. The problem: their website name is so difficult to remember, I never got around to actually opening an account there.
Some shifty guys literally copied an existing service up to their Javascript and CSS, and improved it dramatically just by giving it a name I can remember.
You mean, like gas stations?
1. It's always been technically and administratively possible, you're just the first genius to overcome those hurdles. All the combined efforts of thousand developers at a FAANG found it impossible, but against all odds, you succeeded where they failed. Congratulations if that's you, but don't bet the farm on that being the result before you start.
2. Technological developments have only just now made it possible. Maybe your idea requires resource-heavy neural networks on the users' mobile phone, and current high-end models have just become capable of that. If tech has only now made it possible, you also have to be the first of millions of developers to realize that and get to market. Good luck, this is how most of the startup ecosystem has worked for a long time.
3. It's currently illegal, and you're just going to hope no one stops you. This is a big administrative problem, and maybe all the efforts of a big company couldn't change the law and make their idea work when fighting eg. the hotel or taxi lobbies, but if you side-step all that and just do it anyway, well, you might see all your hard work disappear in a courtroom, or you might succeed.
I'm working on a product where google is my competitor and the thousands of super genius engineers utterly failed to achieve what we did.
Just because the big company of the day didn't do it, doesn't mean it can't be done.
Finally decided to go anyway.
What can you do? Make them better, or at least try =)
When you try to make a better product, you are automatically comparing yourself to other products. Instead, when you try to be different you are creating your own niche and your own rules. Yor product will not be compared against others. At least if you fail, you will be original and not another copy-cat.
I now sell about 100 copies per month for about $500 income per month. I give $350 to charity for every 100 copies, but that's a personal decision.
Building it has been a great learning experience. Interacting with customers has been a very rewarding experience (so many people love it).
Video Hub App - https://videohubapp.com/en/
and Open Source on GitHub - https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
The first time I shared it on HN it went to the front page :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587992
ps - it's not essential, but I think many people use it for porn ;)
I have a very large collection of assorted YouTube rips I've gathered over the years and would love software to help me arrange it.
Building your own copy is also hassle-free, just npm install, npm run build. Version 3 (releasing this month) already on main branch, has more features than public version.
Reasons:
- more likely I’ll find the product that fits my budget and needs
- ability to switch out of an unfavourable technology stack that no longer works for me
- competition helps encourage the vendors to improve their products and fix bugs
Having a few competitors shows that there is market for what you are doing and you do not have to be same as others you just have to be better like better feature, UI, support maybe.
So there is at least some demand
You may fail if you try, but you will fail if you don't. Someone is going to replace one of the existing players, why not you?
You are right that not all successful business started with an original idea. You are right that not all of them required significant upfront investment, and you are right that there are great newcomers who find a niche in an established market.
There is only one thing you are missing. How many businesses like that have failed. Is it 1%, 10%, 50%, 90% or 99%? I would guess that it's somewhere upward of 90%. BTW. And you won't even hear about failed companies because these 170 competitors are survivors.
Having capital increases your chances of being able to experiment and find market fit.
Having limited competition increases your chances of being noticed.
Having a fresh (doesn't have original) idea helps you laser-focused on what you are trying to solve.
BTW. I am not trying to discourage you from trying. However, if you want to try, I recommend doing this with your eyes open.
Good luck with Pingr :)
My family literally has one, mom-and-pop store of radio receivers :)
Thank you!
People often choose products based on what their friends are using and what they see people online mentioning.
How can you get in front of people first without spending tons of cash on marketing and paid ads?
While the second part is true, I agree.
It's really hard to overcome existing players, on the other hand there are some advantages: existing players are kind of slow in terms of changing (adding new features) and in terms of support.
Among these 170 alternatives, more than half of them were built in 2010 I guess, and they do not evolve.
Regarding paid ads. This year I was watching how other guys do with their side projects and I literally haven't seen anyone who tried paid ads. They did SEO though, but not google ads or something like that. Because they are good at reaching the right audience in the right place, I guess.
If I create 20 monitors at a rate of 10 minutes I only pay $1.00 + $1.04 / mo
How do you create a sustainable product that you can realistic maintain when you've to pay taxes, hosting, etc. at this price?
You can lease servers very cheaply nowadays, uptime monitoring is not resource-intensive and is an easily distributed workload. The most expensive part of the operation is likely to store the monitor results in a database.
It's always worth a try.
That's Borat-level pep talk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k
It's a clickbaity title but it's a serious talk.