From idea to paying customer
linen.dev
linen.dev
This is actually the right approach. This is a good story of how to test out a product idea. Just a terrible headline to describe it.
idea -> 6 months sending emails -> 1st sale -> 2 weeks building what I just sold
This was after doing build -> sell for far too long.
I have various 'projects' between shower-thought to prototype/usable-for-me that it wouldn't make sense to sell first, because I'm thinking about or building them to scratch an itch and use myself; popularity with others and people paying for it would be great, but it's only the right place to start if the point is 'right, I want a successful business'.
Selling isn't only about money, you get feedback also.
I usually switch my brain off after hours, but for example, recently at a baby-party event, someone was asking what I do for work. Ended up asking if my company would like to bid on their project, gave me a bunch of insider info.
I don't want to be that person who only talks about work, but small comments here and there, like planting seeds, and then you get emails of "can I introduce you to X, who is looking for Y?"
Goto meetup.com or any event/meetup website. I found this Python ML meetup group (could be any technical group), joined, and went to their weekly weekly conference (more than a hundred in attendance). I'd sign up to go up the stage and talk for a couple minutes just introducing myself and what I did. After I got off stage, interested people would come up to me and chat with me. There definitely had been a few collaboration propositions.
This sounds like a great approach to any startup / for-profit project that easily goes overlooked. However, I guess most people will still get stuck at this point:
> I had built a relationship with other open source projects so I knew where my early customers was going to be.
Background: I have an idea that I think might be interesting for large corporations with lots of retail customers, specifically mobile service providers, ISPs,... However, I don't know anyone at T-Mobile or similar, so I've been carrying the idea around for a long time. It'd probably be more of a consulting-style gig than a startup initially, since it'd need to be heavily tailored for each of those giant idiosyncratic businesses. Any thoughts or suggestions much appreciated.
Anyway, thanks for sharing, OP!
You could always try and get a job at one of these business for a year, with the primary goal of building connections.
Of course, this relies on being able to afford tickets to, and likely travel/accommodation around, whatever event(s) will attract the sort of people you're interested in. And putting yourself out there, time after time, hour after hour, each time projecting the confidence that "hey even though we've just met and I don't know what your working hours consist of I'm confident enough in what I want to discuss that it's not a waste of either of our time", is easier suggested than done for many people.
[0] The upside to iglio's suggestion of working at a company to network is that you can build relationships slowly and organically rather than having to impress very quickly to get even an hour meeting, then kick ass in that hour to get a next one, etc. Plus, you gain a reputation for actually contributing to the industry rather than potentially appearing as an outsider going "With no experience I still know better than you" (shouldn't be too hard to avoid giving off that vibe though).
Often people sink a lot of money into attendance and then get there with improvised messaging - today is super easy to delegate everything and boost one chances
People might be familiar with Google analytics and ab testing and whatnot and then forget everything about it in different verticals just because they don't do the connection.
I have done that in a recent search for a rental apartment, I went from the initial one answer/week into two scheduled appointments/day just by tuning first contact messaging and was top of the pick in the unit I eventually rented thanks to reaching out with a professional. Total cost was 350€ which I'll get back into a few month as I could land a highly sought aftar apartment which was under budget for the zone/quality.
It's the same basic stuff we do on the job - branch out, measure outcome, refine, repeat. No need to be good at selling oneself, it just need time and delegation.
There is a book called “The Mom Test” that covers this part of market discovery very well. Aligns almost exactly w/ how OP approached it.
In case you want to run your own: https://github.com/zacstewart/tech404logs
> Finally if they were ready to pay I would send them a Stripe checkout page for payment and I would then update a field in the database manually of whether the user was a paid user.
> I could have spent 4-5 weeks coding and polishing up the onboarding process and getting payments ready
Just use Rails...
> - I would frantically run a script in the background that actually trigger the sync locally ( I had to do a manual sync locally because I was using nextjs and hosting on vercel which didn’t support background jobs)
> - I would then make small talk to distract them on how long it would take
> - Once it was finished I sent them the link of the page that was finished along with DNS instructions to set up subdomain forwarding
Love this so much.
The irony is that SO much enterprise software is basically this, and there having the person on the line is sold as a benefit!
Airbnb started by spamming Craigslist with fake ads. Stripe started by accepting payments to a single bank account. Doing something shoddy/somewhat shady and not being afraid of the repercussions gets you ahead in startups.
So what if OP breaks someone's "TOS", by the time they notice or OP's product gets big enough too care, he will likely have sufficient enough capital to fight them off. If he never gets that big, more power to him for something that makes him some beer money.
Where can I read more about that? It sounds fascinating..
This might be of some interest
It does feel like someone trying to advertise to me on Twitter though.
"Be bold" and "fake it till you make it" are good slogans, but there is always a gradient between boldness and reckless negligence. "Take calculated risks" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
If OP gets banned by Discord and Slack, their product is dead in the water and they'll have to deal with angry customers who paid for a service OP can no longer provide. This means if this really is a TOS violation, they'll either have to fly under the radar (which arguably failed when they hit HN front page) or they need to grow influential enough to enter negotiation with Slack and Discord to get a special deal.
while Airbnb and Stripe are independent. There won't be enough money to fight them (Slack/Discord) if it stated in their TOS that they can turn off their services.
Linen's situation is more like developing add-ons for Microsoft's Office until Microsoft decided to add features that does what your add-ons do for free.
In their App Developer Policy <https://api.slack.com/developer-policy>:
> As part of good business practices, Applications and developers are prohibited from: Circumventing Slack’s intended limitations (including pricing, features and access structures). You may not use the Slack API to replicate or compete with core products or services offered by Slack
And in their API Terms of Service <https://slack.com/intl/en-au/terms-of-service/api>, which cites the app developer policy and then adds:
> Further, you will not: … (C) access our APIs or documentation in order to replicate or compete with the Services
If Slack spell out that there being no public mirror is an intended limitation, or if they offer a direct equivalent, then they could complain. And they could do for free accounts, which have a history limit that this would incidentally circumvent. But for paid accounts I don’t believe either of these are true, so if it were limited to working with paid accounts I’d say you’d be in the clear with Slack for now. Of course, you’re still subject to their caprice in changing their rules, implementing new features, or just booting you off their platform even without cause at their whim, and that’s a significant existential risk for building such a business.
But I don’t think Slack would be particularly likely to boot them off, given that any hostile action on their part would be akin to claiming some degree of ownership of the data. The data belongs to the customer, and they should be able to do whatever they want with it without hindrance. Of course, such reasoning as this is only reasoning. If they did cut off such API access, they’d hardly be the first large company to shut the portcullis to support their own interests against their customers’; Twitter, for example.
TL;DR I strongly believe Slack became popular through their users bending/breaking some rules.
I also believe that the users have the rights to archive and republish their chat messages as they please. I don't believe a service that archives messages will cause too much overhead to Slack either. They may start charging for API access though, which is fair.
If anything, Slack benefitted from community slacks until they outlived their usefulness and then Discord benefitted from the influx of new users. They definitely took notice at the time and added features new users had been used to from Slack.
I'm in a big Go Slack community and it's not indexed, which is a shame because there's a lot of really good info there.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/28/13098164/slack-is-an-acro...
I like the idea of Linen, I think it could be pretty good in recording those unique technical threads for future knowledge base management.
And post online. And submit links to aggregator services. And message people on social media. And go to face-to-face events and sell to people. And post in places even if they say you shouldn't promote things.
Really, you need to be willing to do all the things you hate other people doing...
This is why I am a firm believer that marketeers are a different breed of people altogether. Marketeers, recruiters, managers, sales, etc.
I mean software developers are weird, but THESE people, yikes. (this message is tongue in cheek)
This is worth remembering. Always hated receiving cold emails.
edit: grammar
But: One paying customer leaves and you're back at ZERO/month
I'd celebrate cautiously.
The whole initiative is one cease and desist letter away from collapse.
We're here for a good time not a long time. Have fun and good luck!
How is something backed by YC if it took a month to build?
Is that intentional?
Edit: reproducible and happens when I scroll the content. Maybe related to the sticky header. Killing Safari and reopening got my browser controls back.
I have a big list of ideas too but I’m not entirely sure they all solve a valid problem. I’m nervous about spending a lot of time on something that’s cool but not sellable
I don't know when Linen was first created, but these days you can get most of this done much more rapidly.
Check out Laravel Spark[1], for example, where all of that billing stuff is neatly abstracted away so you can focus on your product
(I know, users don't care about tech stacks, but if I'm going to be developing the product over time, I definitely do care what I'm coding in)
Because they outline a great approach that actually works and is solid.
Yet, we always have HN comments why the idea would never work :)
Such a great decision. even OAuth/SSO solutions can complicate things, and why spend time on automation before you have the load to justify it?
Well done.