Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

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Fascinating writeup. A couple of quick thoughts:

- It sounds like one of the problems you ran into was massive undercapitalization. While some businesses can grow without spending anything on staff, promotions, marketing, etc., that's not the norm. Figure out how you can inject more resources into your business. Cash/barter/debt are all viable strategies (although debt is a potential time-bomb.)

- <4 months part-time is't really enough time to spend on a business before evaluating it as a failure. While pivoting may make sense, I'm pretty sure that $300 + 120 days doesn't generate enough data to say anything conclusive.

- SaaS products like Rakasheets are deceptively expensive for customers. This is good for the SaaS provider. Your middle-priced plan is ~$700 annually; factor in low turnover if you do a good job, and you're basically selling software in the $1500+ range. Keep this in mind when figuring out how to promote your product. The cheapest promotion channels may not be best for a relatively high-priced (vs consumer-targeted) product.

- If you're low on cash, try direct sales to start. That's you on the phone, or sending email. Or getting in your car and driving, if your area warrants it. If you're really offering something that will benefit your prospects' business, they want to hear from you.

Good luck!

> <4 months part-time is't really enough time to spend on a business before evaluating it as a failure. Wile pivoting may make sense, I'm pretty sure that $300 + 120 days doesn't generate enough data to say anything conclusive.

There was a lot of hubbub before about calling the whole thing a "failure". I should have made it more clear that I wasn't calling it a failure because I spent 4 months and only got one customer. Instead I was calling it a failure because I was no longer interested in what it did, and I had no intention of working on it any longer.

> SaaS products like Rakasheets are deceptively expensive for customers. This is good for the SaaS provider. Your middle-priced plan is ~$700 annually

This is something that I hadn't even considered until an actual small business owner sent me feedback saying the exactly that. Previously I thought people were like me, and only considered monthly costs of products unless they were buying an annual plan. It may be that I'm alone in that.

There's also the issue of how many inventory items I would let each plan track. The smallest plan, which was $29/month, only let a user track 25 inventory items at a time. That's a laughably small amount of inventory. I attribute this to not targeting a specific type of customer, but it could also easily be attributed to not thinking it through.

> If you're low on cash, try direct sales to start. That's you on the phone, or sending email. Or getting in your car and driving, if your area warrants it. If you're really offering something that will benefit your prospects' business, they want to hear from you.

I live in a small town of less than 4000 people, and the nearest printing company other than the one I work at is an hour's drive away. That makes it hard to talk to them in person while still holding a 9-5 M-F job.

With that in mind, there's really no excuse for me to avoid cold calling potential customers. If my own printing company is an indicator, sales won't be made until numerous phone calls have been made.

This. I was really surprised how short the timeline was from creation to declaring failure.

If you're able to build something that fast, give yourself some time to figure out how to turn it into a business!

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