Comment by avenger123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avenger123 | Hacker News Reader

The reason you are not getting too many responses is that there is no right answer.

A lot of this is dependent on the industry, the type of business, your location and a bunch of other things that don't lend themselves to in depth answers.

I think you would be well served by looking at Steve Blank's materials (steveblank.com) and even maybe buying his book.

Aside from that, the simplest answer is:

1) Based on your own experiences what are the potential problems that businesses may be facing that you were exposed to. 2) Make a list of all the relevant companies in your area that potentially may be targets for investigation. 3) Find ways of connecting to these companies. Try hard to make sure its to the right people. 4) Contact these people and setup lunches/coffee meets etc. Your introduction should be about how you think you can solve their problems and the ideas you have of how you can do that. Please don't just email them and ask them what problems they have.

I understand that this is a very broad question but I wanted it to be more of a way to share your own experiences that we can perhaps learn from.

I think the steps you listed are extremely helpful. For example, what if I want to sell them a SaaS that helps employees manage their vacation times, and other paperwork, I envision these steps based on your suggestion:

1) Provide an easy way for employees to book off their time at work. Think of pain points. Think of solutions to those pain points. Translate into software features. Don't write any code yet, wait for validation.

2) Google or linkedin the companies. Any other ways?

3) Get contact information. Who makes purchasing decisions like this? HR? CEO? CTO?

4) Contact people over email or phone. Which is better for first contact? What should you write or say?

    Hi Mr. CEO

    I'm a local software engineer developing a tool that I 
    think can help employees book off their times easily. 
    Would you be interested in scheduling a call to hear 
    more about how your company can save a lot of paperwork?

    Thanks,

    Signed.

5) Sit down for lunch or coffee and make the pitch

    "So my SaaS solution costs $1000 a month, it would do 
    features A, B, C, D, E and X that I think would help 
    your employees book off their time easily and save you 
    time and paperwork. If you'd like to see any other    
    features I'd be happy to add them. Now if you are happy 
    with this proposition, I will be starting development 
    and communicate with you along the way until the product 
    is ready to deliver. For now, I can send you a contract 
    for you to sign and an invoice for one month ($1000) to 
    get things started and a commitment to subscribe monthly on the 
    day of launch."

6) Profit???

How did I do? What do you think about this approach? Is it rude to ask for money for something you haven't built yet? How do you assure them you are not a flip flop and that you will actually follow through with the development and deliver it? Isn't market validation asking for the sales first for the idea you have and getting money paid to build the thing your customer needs?

I really would suggest you look at Steve Blank's work.

You can take his online course (for free I believe) at:

https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245

If you sent me the email you drafted in #4, I'd ignore it. If you sent it again, I'd mark it as spam. Don't do this, it's a bad approach.

If you managed to get me to meet for lunch, didn't have anything built, but asked me for $1000, I'd ask you to pay for lunch and get back to me when you've built something that I could use for free for a month. Caveat - if you're the former founder/co-founder of Dropbox, Square, Twitter, etc... this rule doesn't apply. You want to be in the position where someone offers you money (without you asking) because the product is so great.

what would you like to see in #4 that would spark your interest?

Hey Steve, I was referred to you by our mutual friend John. He mentioned that you were using X for booking off time. My startup has a similar, but better product that just went live. We spent four weeks in beta, and saw a 25-35% decrease in operating costs per month. We plan to launch this as a paid monthly service, but I'd like to offer it to you for free. It takes less than 10 minutes to migrate. Can you hop on a call this week and we'll get you started?

Thanks!

Me

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