- https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-starting-an-internet-busine...
- https://maxrozen.com/2019-further-reflections-trying-to-star...
Golden advice for many people launching things on HN who get this wrong.
So, for example, you build a free platform that helps remote contractors manage their hours, billing, invoices, leads etc.
Then, once you’ve built up an audience of contractors you say to the companies “hey, I have a million people working on here, I think they’d be interested in job opportunities, so I’ve made an opt in jobs board / newsletter” and go from there.
Of course, it might not succeed, but AFAICT this is the general strategy for solving this problem.
Using your example, the market for time tracking, invoicing, etc. is very mature and highly competitive, so if you launched a solution in this space, you'd have a steep uphill battle to gain traction.
In the example market, there are already established players with free tiers.
Did you see value in the 30x500 course? Would you say it’s worth the price tag (I think it was 4K last I checked)?
I’m in a similar spot where I’m mostly disillusioned from salaried work. I enjoy writing quality and long term code and companies tell me it’s what they want when they hire me, but when the rubber meets the road, what they want is quick and dirty quality be damned.
But I can’t think of anything that I could sell for myself (either a course or a SaaS). I’ve had ideas before but always ran out of steam before they were useable. I usually spend a lot of energy on the project setup (deploy from git push, tooling config, etc)
And honestly, it doesn’t feel like I have the stamina to work so hard for year for maybe a payoff in the future.
Any thoughts on the above? How would you tackle it?
In terms of raw money earned per hour, it hasn't been particularly impressive, but 30x500 taught me to see customer pain in a completely different way, and to stop continuously reaching for SaaS as a solution to every problem.
It's online course that teaches (or at least tries to teach) how to come up with ideas for products by getting better at spotting problems.
As a fellow bootstrapped entrepreneur (& programmer), I sympathize with what you're going through. Maybe it's the survivorship bias but I think you could try some things differently. I'm not sure you're open to receiving advice but I hope you find it at least well intentioned.
My biggest piece of advice is that only the sales channel really matters. People talk about product-market fit but that's kind of ambiguous. What you need to do is really understand some sales channel. Your real goal isn't to create the best product in the world, it's to own some sales channel for a particular category. Take movie theater food for example. It's shitty & expensive but keeps selling because it's the only thing available. It may even be helpful to ignore the actual product part and learn about understanding and identifying opportunities in sales channels first. Then you build the product to dominate that category.
Sales channels can be content marketing, google, facebook, amazon, trade shows, in person meetings, and more. For example, if you wanted to do content marketing. Instead of building a product and hoping that content marketing would work, you should learn about how content marketing actually works. Things like link building, content optimization, technical SEO, and keyword research. Then you could find categories you're interested and start seeing where the competitiveness is relatively low compared to the volume. You may also learn that content marketing usually takes 5-figure investments + months to work even in niche categories.
If you really understand a sales channel, the opportunities become obvious. Most people don't really understand why Gitlab succeeded or how it's different from Github. If you're running a dev ops team with a requirement for an on-prem OSS solution, then it starts to make a lot more sense. Another example is the dozens of companies working to port Wordpress apps to Shopify. They're not making the apps any better, they're just making them work on shopify by owning their category in the Shopify App Marketplace. Here's one idea I posted on Shopify hoping someone would build it: https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-apps/how-to-add-a-ta...
All in all, I wish you the best. It seems like your heart is in the right place but you need improvement on strategy. You want to build something that people use but thought experiments aren't the way to figure it out. Coming up with more ideas probably isn't going to work out if you don't understand why the other ones didn't work out. An idea without understanding the context of how it will be sold is only a prayer. Talking to customers is great & reaching out manually is a sales strategy as old as time, but it's hard to build a company out of this without 4+ figure deals.
For me, it was figuring SEO and micro influencers. My first business was CBD products got to ~$500K/month in 2.5 years before selling it. I'm now investing in (and helping build for a few months) a cardboard cat homes business. It's completely unrelated except for the sales channels. It sells exactly the same ways and it hit $10K in its 2nd month of sales. After this 3rd month, it should be profitable and I can step away to help other founders start more ecommerce businesses.
- Pick an uncomfortably narrow niche and stick with it until you reach $10k-$100k MRR
- There are 4 main growth channels:
1. Inbound
2. Outbound
3. Partners
4. Ads
Pick only 1 for the first 12 months and master it.
If you're pre-revenue, I'd suggest to stay away from inbound & ads. You didn't prove yet there's demand for the problem you solve and that you provide value. And SEO takes too much time to get ROI back.
I personally suggest to start with outbound. Identify your niche, start reaching out (LinkedIn/emails/groups/forums/etc) and speaking with them. Get their advice on how big the problem you think is and how you're solving it. After giving their advice, if it is a valid problem, they'll be interested to learn more about your product and give it a go.
(Ideally do demos/onboarding for every customer <$10k MRR. You'll get invaluable amount of feedback by doing this)
Partners is another great channel for early stages B2B SaaS because of very low CAC. Find companies that share same customer profile and where each of you can provide value to each other.
P.S. - Going back to Inbound. SEO is not only inbound channel. One that is being very big right now and I recommend is LinkedIn. E.g. lemlist added 1m ARR via LinkedIn, just by building their personal brands there, posting and sharing a lot of valueable content. While doing outbound, you can also start posting on LinkedIn and building a network of your ideal customers and position yourself as an expert in the niche/problem you solve.
Inbound - blogs, vlogs, podcasts, guides, templates, checklists, webinars, content, answering quora, guest blogging, case studies, organic LinkedIn/social media. It's all about people stumbling on your content/online presence whether directly or indirectly, and then coming to you.
Ads - is a completely different beast. You're actively spending money to advertise your product.
> surely ads is a (dominating!) subset of the latter?
Dominating in what sense?
You mentioned companies working to port Wordpress apps to Shopify. Do you know of any resources for learning more about that niche? Seems like it could be a fairly lucrative and low-friction pipeline for a solo dev trying to bootstrap.
Step 2. Look at the Shopify app store. Can find one with the features you need? Or one sucks? Build a better one.
I've already given an example of a table of contents generator for Shopify and how it should be specifically built.
And what do you mean by microinfluencers?
I think https://backlinko.com/ is a pretty good resource.
Microinfluencer is the fancy internet word for free samples online to specifically chosen people. Either for direct conversions or some small level of word of mouth.
His Twitter account was powerful and perfect for reaching wannabe nomads and remote workers.