One Year, Six Products: What I’ve Built and Learned | Hacker News Reader

One Year, Six Products: What I’ve Built and Learned

alexlod.com

78 pointstlipcon34 comments

Here's my suggestion.

Pick a niche market. A market that you don't have to create and a market that is already lucrative. At this point you are not building a product to test a market/theory because it already exist, and proven. Then build something that's better than what's out there and compete on features/pricing because you can obviously build products fast and this can give you an edge.

Personally, as much as I like building products for consumers I learnt (the hard way) to avoid them (for now) because they will most likely fail for reasons like: audience is hard to reach, requires viral-lity most of the time for people to hear about it and use it, and requires a very well polished UI. Not to mention that they whine and expect things to be free. :)

Before you create a product, answer these two questions accurately: 1. How will I reach my audience? 2. Am I solving a real problem? (don't kid yourself)

Agree with this, except maybe the bit about competing on pricing. I think it risks becoming a race to the bottom which benefits none of the competitors. Better to compete on features (as you suggest), quality, service, even messaging/style which may appeal to a particularly under-served segment of the niche.

Agreed. I didn't imply to burn the price but if you can operate at a lower cost then reflecting that in the prices can bring along more customers.

But how would one compete with already established competitors when it comes to domain knowledge? I mean... picking up a niche market may be easy, but then you must know it better than those who are already there.

One learns a niche by immersing oneself in it.

So it is not really a practical option, considering that you need to make money and the process of entering a new market just to learn may take several years, until you learn enough to build anything close to already established competitors.

edit: unless the competitors suck really bad, of course.

Disagree. I studied civil engineering and have been in it for five years and am presently building software that accomplishes the OP's goals (so far in theory).

The same advice holds for a writer of nonfiction. Don't study writing, study another field so you actually have something to write about.

Nope.

I have a lawn sprayer. Like most of them, it's manually controlled. Big agricultural sprayers have a huge range of automation. I want automatic control of my sprayer, so in the process of building one for myself, I'm becoming knowledgeable in the field: it just takes a few weeks. Eventually, I'll have something that scratched my itch and I can look around and see how many people have the same itch and sell it to them if it's worthwhile.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're either in school or haven't been out very long. It's truly amazing how little research goes into most products put on the market.

I've spent some time working on jobs as a programmer, but the companies weren't all that great... to be honest, I had the chance to take a somewhat close look at the infrastructure of one of the largest retailers from Brazil, who happened to be one of our clients, and it was scary how it was so poorly designed and implemented - it was something like a tower of babel, there was lots of third-party workers and no one was really responsible for anything.

Now I'm trying to do a PhD on security for distributed systems, though I'm having trouble to find it inspiring. I have a recurring feeling that this is not for me, but when I think about quiting it to start something for myself I have trouble thinking what could be usefull for other people, for those who use it as a tool and not as a research object. It's a bit frustrating :)

Not to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you're doing your PhD because you can't think of anything better to do. That doesn't exactly seem like a recipe for happiness.

Indeed, I'm almost convinced of this. My advisor invited me to work with him then I got excited by the idea of doing something more complex than what I was doing. I wasn't really thrilled by getting into school again, but I guess it was good to my ego :P

A year passed and the freshness faded away. Now I'm struggling to get things done because I really don't see a point in what I am doing. I don't know if I'm going to drop out yet, but if I do it won't take long to happen.

Well, at worst I guess I'm learning what not to do :)

You have to pick a niche that you think your knowledge in this domain is an advantage over the current competitors or allows you to compete at the same level. Don't think you'll ever enter a market where you'll be on your own with no competitors and everyone is paying you. That won't happen. If this happened then you are creating a market and soon after you'll have competitors.

Don't be afraid of competition. Competition is at the core of running a business.

That is the kind of thing I would like to see in case studies. I always see articles about starting the next facebook or something, the 'sexy' startups. But when it comes to building stuff to niche markets like, say, agriculture or logistics, theres not much said.

I'm actually trying to find something for myself, though acquiring the domain knowledge is something the puzzles me. How do one gets, as was suggested, immersed on a given field, knowing that no one will pay you just to learn.

I studied computer science, but this just teaches one how to use technology to build stuff. Now I'm on the weird position of not knowing what to build :D

People often pay you to learn, but that's not the point. To answer the question you posed in the earlier post about domain knowledge: you focus smaller and smaller until you find something where you can become an expert in a reasonable time.

e.g., "agriculture" is not a niche. Breeding management software for Silver-laced Wyandottes is a niche. You reduce the huge term "agriculture" by going agriculture->poultry->poultry husbandry->poultry breeding->breeding-chickens->breeding-Silvery-laced-Wyandottes.

Now, is there a market for that product I picked out of the air? I don't know, but I suspect, based on my knowledge of the field, that there could very well be. And you could own it if you wanted to.

thanks for the explanation, I liked your example :)

I'm kinda baffled by memcachier. Who is your target market? I would think everyone who uses memcache would be frightened by WAN latency to your service.

I'm going to have to second this as well. Memcached is one of the simplest services in the world to set up as well.

Maybe if you solve the problem of cache invalidation...

Had the same reaction, but you can't judge so quickly. Memcachier's home page explains that they set up servers in the same datacenter as your app (currently supporting Heroku, appHarbor and cloudControl), so you get LAN latencies.

Very interesting to read about each product and the lessons learned. Looking forward to the follow-up article.

I'm a bit concerned about how long the writer can continue, though. There isn't a single mention of sales or income, both in terms of actual results (which is fair enough) and hoped-for goals (more worrying). Is the aim to get by with funding and deal with revenue later? Sounds high risk to me.

He seems to be consulting his way out. It's great to read that he can afford to keep it up with consulting and his own projects!

Here's the follow-up:

http://alexlod.com/2012/07/11/one-year-six-products-16-tips-...

Good post but surprised by his understanding of cash-flow positive: Being cash-flow positive is...when your costs not including salaries are lower than your revenues

It's almost correct! Just replace "costs" with "outgoing cash", cross out "not including your salaries" (if you pay yourself a salary in cash, it is by definition included in "outgoing cash"), and replace "revenues" with "incoming cash". ;-)

Well spotted. Many businesses fall over by misunderstanding cash flow, especially in the early days when they don't have much incoming cash.

Terms like 'costs' and 'revenue' have no place in cash flow forecasts - it's all about cash in and cash out (including salaries, assuming they're paid). If your product costs are less than revenue, you have margin (sometimes called profit, but that's not quite right either); but if you have to pay lots of costs before you receive revenue, you can hit a cash flow wall no matter how large your margin is.

I had one client who re-sold physical products. They were paid by the buyer on 14 day terms, and had to pay their provider on 30 day terms - so they actually got paid two weeks before they had to pay for the product. Margin was low - but cash flow was ridiculously positive.

Pivoting is great, but sometimes you have to give it some time. You need to pivot strategically. Almost every startup experiences a curve, first you launch. Maybe you make some news sites, growth goes up. Then people promptly forget about you. Usage plumits, and you fall in to a depression. You don't come out of the depression until you 'make it'. Starting a new projects puts you right back at beginning.

Here's the promised follow-up article, One Year, Six Products: 16 Tips for New Entrepreneurs:

http://alexlod.com/2012/07/11/one-year-six-products-16-tips-...

It's amazing how many products you've built this year. I love these retrospectives on your year (with lessons learned). I think I'll do one soon too.

> Unfortunately I can’t talk about it because it’s still in a closed beta

This makes me a sad panda every time I hear it.

A good way to spot a first time founder is to see if they're concerned about competition before they even launch the product.

It looks to me like he built the product for someone else as a consultant. So maybe he's under some NDA with the person that hired him.

Yep, to clarify I was referring to the client not to the OP.

So if I build a website for a non-existent product to test the waters that counts as 1?

It counts for more than doing nothing.

I'd strongly advise looking at other areas than the memcache cloud service. The whole point of memcache is to be incredibly fast to prevent having to do a much heavier weight process, like making requests to databases.

While you offer locating the memcachier product within some datacenters this is such a narrow offering, and for something that's already mind numbingly simple to automate anyway.

While 'cloud' anything is hot right now, this just doesn't solve a real problem.

I think you're rushing into building something, without looking at the market and what problem you're trying to solve for customers.

If you'd had a good mentor they would have saved you a lot of hours wasting time in ideas that are obviously doomed, they neither solved a problem, nor provided entertainment.

Except one you discarded, the celebrity photos from twitter. With a great front end, and preferably an iPhone app that served up celebrity photos in a magazine style format might very well have legs. People seem to love celebrities, and they seem to love looking at what they are getting up to. This app would have the advantage of twitter's speed at disseminating information, and people like knowing first so they can send the photo to their friends and show how cool they are.

Forget the tech for a moment, think about psychology - what human need are you targeting, then think about the business, the market, how you'll reach them and finally the tech. I hope this helps.

*edited for spelling and typos.

my 9 year old makes a lot of little stuff like this too; lego constructions, sticks woven together, playing card pyramids. Pretty cool stuff...

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