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Selling to unicorns from my parents basement

themvpsprint.com

40 pointstimjones20 comments

Hi Tim,

Inspiring page about your journey. HelloHailey looks great. But I am still left wondering-- in one sentence, what is the product? It's great that you list the benefits of the product. What is the product itself though? I am left wondering, "Is this product a map of colleagues where it shows their headshot/avatar along with a message?" -- i.e. is the product/service actually the map at the bottom of the HelloHailey website?

Thanks!

Definitely a good question! Short answer - I have a strong idea, but nothing concrete yet.

I've started this whole journey with a problem-first mindset.

In the first 2 articles, I chose a problem and a niche:

As a remote product or engineering leader in tech, it's hard for my team to develop personal connections with teammates distributed across time zones.

Over the next 2 weeks I'll set my product vision and share specific requirements for an MVP. I'll scope an MVP that I can build in a month or less.

The landing page today is vague - I was hoping the problem and potential outcomes would resonate with potential users, with the goal of collecting and qualifying early waitlist sign-ups.

So far I've had 50-60+ signups, but hard to say how serious they are.

As an aside, I've found interesting ideas which then inspire me with tangential ideas on sites such as:

https://reddit.com/r/entrepreneur

https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance (people who retire early and share their product/service idea)

https://www.indiehackers.com

https://www.starterstory.com

I also found that very unclear. It kind of sounds like another...Slack? Maybe?

Likely to be built within Slack, but certainly not a competitor.

I had the same exact question. What does this product do? The landing page does a poor job of explaining, imo.

Hey HN! Author here.

I know there are tons of readers out there with more SaaS sales experience than me (which is none...).

See any major flaws with my strategy? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

If you have such a low price with a land and expand strategy, sell your subscription only on a yearly basis and provide a long trial of 60-90 days or more so there is enough time for asymptomatic incubation and infection to coworkers.

The fewer options you provide for subscription, the better. You want your B2B customers to have a simple yes/no decision process.

Thanks for the thoughts! I agree, and was thinking something along these lines as well.

I'm leaning towards having a permanent free tier with a low seat limit.

On billing, I'll definitely have an annual subscription option. From interviews I found that, in some cases, team leads will have to file expense reports and doing it monthly would be too tedious.

I'll have to think through offering quarterly and semi-annual plans. My gut feel is that it'd be too much complexity to have 3-4 options.

Consider also a "true-up" model where buyers can exceed their user quota on your platform until their subscription is set to renew. Then perhaps you can catch the big multi-team renewals due to inertia, as well as catching back-pay for the months they were over subscribed?

Interesting. So if their 12-month plan allows for 100 seats, and they grow to 150 seats during those 12 months, then for month 13 they would:

1. Pay a pro-rated amount for exceeding the seat limit during the first 12 months.

2. Pay the 12-month contract rate for 150 seats (or maybe more if they expect to continue to grow)

Is this a common practice?

I have no relevant experience, but I felt I should note that I would be extremely offended by being billed retroactively.

Hopefully you would provide some notification at the time they exceed their limit.

I second this. Instead of billing retroactively, consider just not billing for the extra seats during that period. Maybe notify the user that they've entered a grace period for this billing cycle, but starting next cycle they can expect to get charged for the extra seats.

The usual flaw with trying to make a bundle selling better mouse traps is that there is less demand than expected for said mouse traps. And the creator's idea of what is desired seldom matches the consumer's.

This is why the important thing is getting an MVP into the hands of users, then iterating.

Agreed. Everything sounds like a great idea when the only thing challenging it is your own thoughts.

Explain your customer support funnel.

1. Customers email me.

2. I fix their issues and answer their questions as quickly as possible.

3. I email them back.

I'll develop processes when this starts to break down or take too much of my time.

I actually think it's pretty cool that you are sharing your process. Some of what you have outlined about the process of getting to an MVP looks like solid info to my eyes (granted, that may just be announcing my own naivete).

I will note that there is a danger that sharing the process could interfere with success of the product for various reasons. The big two are "conflict of interest" -- people may be hesitant to sign up knowing in advance you are likely to talk about them -- and that blogging about it may be more rewarding (in terms of positive attention and feel good experiences) than actually making the product, which could end up being counterproductive (if you let it).

I've looked your landing page over and I will suggest that good guidelines for how to socialize well with co-workers will be a critical part of making this work.

I was a homemaker for a lot of years and not understanding social norms for the corporate world was an uncomfortable experience for me when I had a corporate job. I have about six years of college and yadda, but I just have different life experience from the norm so it's been personally challenging for me to parse certain things.

So I think you will need to help people with that piece of it because a space of this sort can potentially go sideways. If this were my product, I would be gathering together good articles about how to do business socializing well, what are the pitfalls you most need to avoid, what are some best practices, etc.

I would also put together whatever articles I could find about the importance of making social connections and building trust to business success. That will be the value position: That your work force will be more effective if they can connect socially and sort out things people need to sort out that can impede effective communication, etc, at times at work.

Just remember to bring your same chart game from the linked page to sales meetings and you should be good.

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