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Comment by puniaviision | Hacker News Reader

This whole comment was beautiful.

Especially this part:

"But to recap, my high level point is that the technical expertise is not really the money printer. The money printer is mapping market demand to technical products, which is a business skill. And that business skill is worth a lot more than technical skills. Its just a type of business skill that you find more often in developers than you do in MBA, and so we don't associate it with "business guys". But it's the most fundamental of all skills to make money from software, other than a handful of "exceptions that prove the rule"."

As an ex-shitty business guy, I taught myself how to code thinking that would solve my problems. Nope. Now I'm just a shitty business person and a shitty dev. Forcing myself to do the actual work of talking to customers now.

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Thanks!

I'm in a similar boat. I'm not lecturing anyone having learned from success but having learned from failure.

I just spent an entire year spent building software products and they almost all failed. I wrote a long retro (too long, not edited, more for myself than for others, but if curious: https://www.billprin.com/notes/one-year-retro ) and the #1 cause of failure I wrote down was not doing enough talking to customers and customer development.

The one project I have that has a tiny bit of recurring revenue was not originally a project I had set out to build. I cold-DMed some people in a Facebook group and pitched a different project, and one guy told me he didn't like what I built but might pay if I built something different in the same space. And that was the only product I have thats worked. Goes to show the obvious - talk to users!

I see a lot of indie hackers talk about "audience building", and my initial read of that the purpose was that if you get a ton of followers on Twitter, then when you launch a product, you have a bunch of people ready to sign up. Increasingly, I'm thinking the much bigger value of audience building is that it's easier to get people to tell you what to build in the first place.

So yeah, customer development is not some magical thing that requires you to be a "business guy" or anything else, but it's hard, it's important, and sounds like we both need to do more of it :)

> I'm thinking the much bigger value of audience building is that it's easier to get people to tell you what to build in the first place.

Yes!

It’s basically inbound sales for business ideas.

> Nope. Now I'm just a shitty business person and a shitty dev. Forcing myself to do the actual work of talking to customers now.

This level of humility will take you far. You will get better at talking to customers over time, keep grinding, keep practicing, it gets easier. And one day the switch will happen, they will look up to you as the knowledgeable consultant instead of looking down on you as the 'shitty business guy' with nothing of value to offer.

> This level of humility will take you far. You will get better at talking to customers over time, keep grinding, keep practicing, it gets easier.

Thanks! I launched my first large-scale cold outreach campaign this morning after learning about it this week and building up leads. Tomorrow, I will try out cold calling.

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