Ask HN: {Startup} Do you feel that you are doing exactly whats not recommended?
While building a product:
Developing all the features without customer feedback, not launching quickly enough etc.<p>What else?
Then there's the market research aspect of what I'm doing. I know there's a market for VPS Instances, which is what I rent. But I haven't done any specific research for the specific niche I'm targeting, which is the financial sector who needs low latency access to New York City's financial district. I just know there are people who will find value in that my servers are colocated in a data center close-by to Wall Street, so I make that a selling point.
I know I want to eventually target big data customers when I ever get the opportunity to reinvest revenue & buy additional servers that I can build a cluster large enough to handle big data workloads, but I don't know if there are big data customers in the financial sector, I guess there ought to be, and it's a specialized enough market that if there is I could be a monopoly in the field. Maybe, I haven't done the research to find out. I don't know where to begin to do so.
It's not like I don't want to know, I just don't have the budget or the contacts to find out. For christ's sake my daily Google AdWords budget is less than $2. I don't even know if that's going to work at all.
I'm totally self- funded, so there's been no real need to show anyone a business plan, and as such I haven't bothered to write one. I'm not too good at writing projects, I stick to building servers which I can do.
I might need to seek outside funding, even as small as I am- I only have 1 server- albeit a real fast one, just to be able to manage a marketing plan to find customers that will fund expansion beyond server #1, and to finance operations expenses like colo fees. I read on the net that atypical Google AdWords campaign is $1,500/month, which is far beyond affordable to me.
- Release early with feedback from customers.
- Charge money.