We Built It, And They Didn't Come
slideshare.net
slideshare.net
The thing that will determine your success is sales and marketing, especially early in the business life.
Need someone to physically pitch your product to investors? I can't do that.
The best salesman are the ones who don't know how to say no. I think the self defeatist mentality of "I'm not a salesman" is the core problem. You're a salesman if you call yourself one. The main reason being: You're the first person who said yes. Your next job is to do what every other sales person has to do: stomach a no answer, learn from your mistakes, and iterate on your idea within reason of making sales. Validation is apart of the sales process as well.
I haven't updated it in months.
I think there's something to be said about building something simple of value and selling the crap out of one idea.(Assuming you know the idea brings in some kind of value for customers)
This kind of thing is easier to do than people give themselves credit for. Half of the problem is just getting yourself to practice it. You'll fail a few times, it comes with the territory. You might be more comfortable doing freelancing and transitioning to product, but both can be done.
That being said: business is of course significantly easier with help. It can be hard to bring someone on board without at least putting in the initial effort if you were going to do it by yourself anyway though. So it's a really good thing to attempt regardless.
http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-...
Her talk alone justified every penny I spent going to BoS last year.
Any other BoS talks you recommend?
http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...
I was asking a few times how things were going and that I could need something that sounds like what they were building -- granted on a very informal level but still I asked and expressed my interested.
Problem was: They never came back to me and told me: Hey here's the stuff! Wanna try?
I can make up reasons why, maybe because I moved to another country to take a job, or after all they don't like me or whatever. To me it boils down to: I (as in "the potential customer") was asking how far the product was and never got a real answer.
My team has about 2000 Boxes to "operate"[1] and I manage only a single team. Totaling to about 100K servers with different DCs spread over the world.
I'd think anybody who gets this kind of offer should try to get a foot in the door. Even if the deal doesn't close people have heard about the stuff.
So the essence is to me: This one little slide where you see that sales/marketing was way under represented in the team. Hell guys I know! you can build stuff, but don't expect me (the customer) to keep asking and asking and asking for wether or not it suits you to send me something I can work with...
[1]: I currently live in an enterprise environment where DevOps or agile is still something new and not to be trusted!
This was a big problem/mistake we made back then (and which isn't obvious from the slides) - we just didn't let people try the product, since we didn't want to be a hosting company ourselves.
We did show demos to people and did pilots in a few cases, but it would have benefited us a lot to have a public installation where people could have tried out the product.
I'm sorry we didn't get to work together then - there was certainly a lot of interest that we managed (and filtered through) poorly.
Luckily I've learned from that (I hope!) :)
Would it be okay to say a startup should have a good estimate of how many users they can handle at each cycle?
My philosophy is to ask "will it scale?" for every part of your business. EVERY step - including sales, support and things like invoicing too. This adds surprisingly little overhead, but if Jon Stewart mentions your product on The Daily Show, you'll be popping champagne corks instead of blood vessels.
On the platform side, services like Appengine make this easy. But you need to have plans in place to scale support, sales and everything else.
It's much easier to over-estimate your potential success (and worry about it) than to under-estimate it and find you've done a bunch of work that was a waste of time. I've worked on features where I've over-thought them and designed them to limit the negative effects of being over-used, only to find that the real challenge is getting anyone to try them at all.
Especially with B2B startups. I could point to a client or two which had "We're having trouble holding on to the rocket ship" at some points along their growth curve. The far more common outcome, though, is to be rate limited on customer acquisition.
If you ever are in the position where you have 120 people champing at the bit to buy your stuff but can only service 100, great, there exist easy solutions to that.
The easiest is a variant on Raise Prices. For example, back in the day when Slicehost was rate-limited on the number of boxes Dell would let them put on their personal credit cards per month, and they had a substantial waiting list, they let people bid their way to the top of the waiting list by using non-refundable pre-pay for service. If you pre-paid for 6 months, you leapt ahead on the queue in front of those only willing to pre-pay for 3. This let them convert pre-paid cash into boxes, allowing them to onboard the entire wait list within 2 months of instituting the policy.
It was genius.
Yeah - I'm not 100% happy with it either. Initially I had Exploration, which is really what I mean (you open up the floodgates and look quickly at a lot of different ideas, before zooming in on one).
But that sounded kind of quirky/confusing when used for comparing it with Execution, as in Execution vs Exploration.
And after all, Ideation is also a valid word to use in this context.