Why didn't you launch in 2013?
justinjackson.ca
justinjackson.ca
Distractions from contracts (inevitable if I want to pay rent)
I'm working with technology that's new to me.
Also, it was a lot harder than I thought. My prototype was banged out in about 72 hours; I assumed the product would be a few months at most.
Good luck with whatever it really is and roll on 2014! :)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/product-people/id5853909...
Maybe you could dig deeper and go beyond the "motivational" stuff? Of course, I do like a weekly dose of motivation.
But it is at best a minor help, at worst a distraction. It doesn't come close to replacing a cofounder who will force you to talk through important issues, who will dive deep with you into the product.
I answered the question because it was worth crafting an answer, for me.
The problem is that most of these services don't really add much value. You get a few connections, lots of advice, and you're still on your own.
I wanted to recreate that feeling I get when I'm hanging out at a conference (in the hallway, after sessions) with other attendees. Being able to talk to smart people, exchange ideas and tips, on a regular basis is super helpful.
These sorts of things need some nucleus to form around, some other reason for being there that attracts smart and creative do-ers, and that will repel wannabes and service providers (lawyers, accountants, etc). Often I find the best "networking" happens at events which are completely unrelated to anything businessy.
The "nucleus" of our group were smart people I'd met through my podcast (Product People). We only let 5-10 people in at a time, and the monthly cost itself keeps most trolls away. ;)
The group has a great diversity: everyone from people building their first thing, to folks that have already built big (million+ in sales) businesses.
Clearly, choosing a group to belong to is a pretty personal choice. Our group isn't going to appeal to everyone. ;)
(And correction: it's actually $20/month! There are other active + healthy communities that are $34-$100/month out there as well)
I think there's a difference between "shovels" (which are tools) and motivation.
> your advice caters to, doesn't really go far enough with people who sell other types of products
What type of products are you selling?
There are two potential markets, one b2c on mobile, one b2b. I have some interest from b2b already, but selling to them is going to take longer.
My theory for now is to get a little more interest from b2b with my non-interactive prototypes. That will at least give me more confidence to go forward, in case b2c doesn't work out.
What was the hardest part for you?
So I kinda-sorta launched in 2013. Not the big project I hoped to launch, but an unrelated side project that distracted me from the big project. Should still have serious profit potential, but I made certain assumptions about the support infrastructure that panned out to be incorrect despite early evidence contrariwise. I'm now working to recover from that, and developing more robust stratagems that technically I probably should've handled earlier. It's a bummer because it's going to make things take longer to get off the ground than I would've liked, but we are launched and accepting payments. It's just that no one has chosen to disburse that payment yet. ;)
It is not much at all just a description of what wrinq is going to be. But I am making progress every day.
Quick recommendation: I'd recommend an email signup form. I (personally) would be interested in knowing when you launch.
I am also planning to build chrome and Firefox apps to support native like experience on desktop and hopefully (when it works) on mobile.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will put up an email collection form today.
1) Carving out time and sticking with it - not rescheduling it for someone else, totally agree you need to lock your self down for making it a priority and finishing an idea
2) Which you mentioned is underestimating the time - 3 weeks was really 3 months for you. For me, I totally do this and work hard semi-launch something, test it and before I know 2 months have passed. Need to iterate faster and go hard.
Great stuff - super excited for 2014 and JFDI :)
It's not all lollipops and blowjobs out there--sometimes you just get dealt a bad hand.
EDIT: Which isn't to say I hadn't tried before and wouldn't try again. It's just very easy in this bubble for people to ignore the visceral truth that starting a company is hard and that success is far from guaranteed.
Way, way more complicated than I anticipated. Also serially getting disgusted and starting everything over every few months hasn't helped. And getting distracted for weeks on end by ancillary projects. And deciding I needed to write my own framework.
So, given that, I'd say that the following points from TFA resonated with me:
Your idea was too big
What we're working on is big, and as a result, it's taken what feels like forever just to get to this point. In hindsight, we might could have decomposed things a bit more, and done more to look for a way to get traction with a subset of the overall vision. And that's an adjustment that we are actually still looking into making. In 2014, we'll probably launch a SaaS version of our Information Discovery Platform, tailed for use as a "sales intelligence" tool, and targeted at sales teams. We've gotten some very positive feedback on this idea from a number of sales teams, so we're pretty excited about that. Had we decided to go this route sooner, we might be a lot better off now. But, hindsight is 20/20.
You didn’t build an audience
We only started really "working" social-media with an eye towards specifically trying to grow our audience, in 2013. I mean, we had a blog and a Twitter account and a Facebook page and the gamut all along... but last year we started taking it seriously. What I have come to realize is that growing an audience is a lot of work, but it is somewhat predictable. There are things, that if you do those things, will result in more Twitter followers, more mailing list signups, etc. We haven't dived full-bore into "growth hacking" but are definitely seeing the importance of these ideas.
The other thing we hope to do in 2014 is more marketing efforts, including: presenting at user-groups and Meetups that relate to what we do, hosting Google Hangout sessions, and/or Twitter "live chats" on topics related to our domain, still more "content marketing" via our blog, and maybe even writing and publishing a book (or two).
You tried doing it alone
Did that for the first year I was working on Fogbeam, but we've grown in fits and starts. IMO, you should invite people to join you when the time is right, and not just to say you "aren't a solo founder". We have three members on the founding team now, and a fourth person we're talking to about joining up to do sales. It's taken time, but we've been patient and looked for good fits.
I had some difficulty understanding what you are selling - a groupware suite with API integration? If all your sub-products make sense used as part of a suite, why not talk about the suite and it's capabilities, rather than a collection of products with strange names?
(hope this is useful feedback, good luck!)
Sure, it's all based on our overall branding theory. The company name is "Fogbeam Labs" and the logo is a lighthouse, and our (current) slogan is "Cut through the information fog". So everything is based on ideas around light, illumination, and helping people see what is currently unseen. Given that, Quoddy, Heceta, Neddick and Hatteras are all named after famous lighthouses.
At one time we debated using a model where those names would be more like "internal names" and would be the name of the Open Source project, and then using a different name for the "branded" commercial release. Something like the way Red Hat use "Fedora" for their upstream distro and "RHEL" for their branded release, or "Wildfly" for the upstream JBoss and "JBOSS EAP" for the branded release of that.
But when we sat down to think about doing that, we kept coming back up with scenarios like
"Quoddy" -> "Fogbeam Enterprise Social Whatever"
or
"Hatteras" -> "Fogbeam Business Event Engine"
and nobody on our team liked "Fogbeam Enterprise Social Whatever" and the ilk.
So we decided just to use the "base" names, and tag "Enterprise" onto the end to discriminate between the underlying OSS project and the commercially supported releases.
"Quoddy" -> "Quoddy Enterprise"
etc.
Is it perfect? Probably not, but we're running with it for now. If it doesn't seem to be working, we may revisit it.
As an aside, I did learn one important lesson during all this... at one time, I was trying to be too cute with using lighthouse related terms, and we had a project named "Screwpile". A little later, one of our advisors pointed out that "it makes sense if you know what screwpile means[1], but nobody does, and if you don't, it just sounds ugly, almost vulgar even". And then I realized just how bad that was. We yanked that and renamed it "Fogcutter" instead. :-)
I had some difficulty understanding what you are selling - a groupware suite with API integration?
I try to shy away from using the term "groupware" because it has existing connotations that don't necessarily apply to what we're doing. I'd probably say a "suite of knowledge management tools" over saying "groupware", but we are kind on the boundaries of the existing terminology to some extent, so we're still iterating on the terminology to use in our messaging.
But basically, we have - in Quoddy - an "enterprise social network" (kinda like Jive or Yammer), but with much better support for integrating with other enterprise applications and knowledge sources, and using semantic integration to fully unite knowledge and information across disparate sources, so we can provide relevant context at the user's fingertips when they are examining any given event, task, or piece of content.
Neddick, on the other hand, is like "Reddit for the Enterprise". It's link sharing, social news, and that sort of thing, but - again - tailored more to be useful as a tool within an organization.
If all your sub-products make sense used as part of a suite, why not talk about the suite and it's capabilities, rather than a collection of products with strange names?
That's another place where we're still exploring what's going to make the most sense. Are people going to want to hear about (and buy) the entire suite, or are significant numbers of people going to want one piece, or the other, but not both? We don't know the answer to that yet, so it's all still in a state of flux. Ideally, as we learn more about how people react to this, the messaging and branding will become more clear.
(hope this is useful feedback, good luck!)
It is, and thanks!