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Comment by ht85 | Hacker News Reader

Completely agree. Am on my 3rd company, all of them have reached profitability fairly easily.

If you don't want to rely on luck, you have to work from the bottom. The VC, top down approach is very risky indeed, but a different game exists.

Finding people who have problems that could be solved through better software is not hard. Listen to them. Make their life easier. Generalize, improve, start selling to other people who have the same issues. Spot opportunities related to your market, your tech, your customers.

There is a ton of demand, especially at small/local scale. If you are efficient, a moderate amount of upfront work can provide ton of value to countless people. They will gladly pay for it, especially if they feel listened to.

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How do you do that with no connections, no money and no privileged background ? Do you just cold message people asking what they need ?

Cold email is a hit and miss approach. Just go talk to people face to face. Initially it seems like a non-scalable approach but it works wonders. The silicon valley, VC preached mantra of hyper scale is what muddles the minds of most entrepreneurs. Everyone starts thinking of million of users rather than 100s of users. There is a very interesting presentation from YC startup school 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

You will recognise the speaker :)

I consider "just talk to people" to be in the "connections" category

Doesn't have to be. You can form connection with people who you don't know. But first you have to talk to them.

Where are you finding these customers?

May I ask what industries you’ve targeted?

Businesses or Customers?

> Where are you finding these customers?

Look around you. What problems do you see, for yourself or for others?

If you want to solve your own problem then that is easy. Then you have to look for other people in your circle (online and offline) who have this same problem and then charge them for that.

If you see someone else with a problem, then talk to them face to face to understand the real issue and whether they will pay. See if there are at least 5-10 people with this same problem, and you have some opening that will start a business.

After that you have to keep hustling to keep this growing. It is a hard slog, but that is how it actually works.

> May I ask what industries you’ve targeted?

Education and general SMEs.

> Businesses or Customers?

B2B, B2C and also B2B2C.

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