Startups Don't Die, They Commit Suicide
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
That's just it. I had a client a few years back and I thought they were just, well, I mean it sounds harsh but I thought they were a joke.
They were in a highly competitive industry and everything about their product sucked.
I never really took them seriously. But then about 8 months after I'd been doing regular work for them they called me and said "There's a problem with the billing integration on signup". I was like "How did you know?" It was a problem that wasn't immediately apparent and there were no warnings in place on their system to detect this kind of problem. The guy said "well we usually get 5 or 6 signups a day and we didn't get any".
This was astounding to me. I couldn't believe they got 5 - 6 people signing up every day.
Now, 3 years on, they get about 40 signups a day. They have iteratively improved their service, and there's the really killer thing: the markets we're dealing with are HUGE here people. Huge.
I had this little epiphany the other day, about my service 8centsms.com. Here is a service that makes between $500 and $2000 per month - but the bulk of that is from 1 or 2 bulk marketing clients. I want it to be a "personal" messaging solution though.
The problem is, there are only 27 regular users. Pathetic. That's so small it makes me want to cry.
But then I thought about it like this: what if I told you that I had a service that only had 27 regular users (who really love the service). Then I told you that I knew (somehow, theoretically) that those were the only 27 people on the planet who would ever use it or love it, and we'd already signed them up - wouldn't you think that was utterly impossible?
In fact, the presence of 27 users just indicates that there must be more - many many many many more - who would signup and use our service if we marketed it properly. Isn't that amazing?
Don't commit suicide, just exist. Engage with your users and get more signups. If even one person falls in love with your product, that proves that there must be thousands, even millions more out there that will do the same. Because the alternative (that you managed to find the 1 person out of 7 billion that love your product) is so unlikely as to be considered impossible.
Did you get bored of working on Kiko or were you looking for a bigger, crazier idea?
Heresay is, as I understand it, the correct spelling (at least in a legal sense).
(Sorry, my initial Google search automatically replaced "heresay" with "hearsay" in my search. I hate that Google has started doing this, instead of the old "did you mean x?")
Quote from your article:
"These were guys with very little knowledge of the tech industry, two designers who had a programmer working with them part time.
....
Even their lead (and only) engineer had moved back to Boston. As a casual observer from the outside, they appeared isolated and discouraged.
....
But they didn’t give up. They kept at it."
Like you said, persistence isn’t just key — it is everything.
I honestly feel that if you have determination, you can make any idea work and make it big. But it helps if you are having fun while doing it.
The only constant I see is "change the meme every so often".
Justin.tv went through a pivot (reality show -> live platform), as well many attempts to add new product offerings, many of which failed (you probably haven't heard of them) and two of which are on the road to success (TwitchTV and Socialcam).