exline

I was involved in a start up a while back where video encoding was a tiny part of what we were doing and while it was painful to get working, I don't know if we would have committed to a monthly service.

Take my comments with a grain of salt since I'm not your target customer.

But that said, if you really feel like it is close for the business to break out, I'd give it a bit more time. Talk with your partner, pick a date in the future, say 6 months out and commit yourself to that deadline. Either things will be running really well, or you will have released that there will always be another thing holding you back. Either way, at the end of 6 months, take a month or 2 months off and do some traveling and see the world. But commit to taking the time off and work it out with your partner ahead of time.

Perhaps you should looking at a consumer market where you would do the work and then host it yourself for them giving them a link, or publish it to a subset of popular sites (facebook, flickr, youtube, wordpress, etc.) Your typical users on these sites will not/cannot leverage libraries to do what your service does. Make it easy for them to just upload & publish so they don't have to think about it.

Just my thoughts.

I recommend reading up on Bassamiq (http://www.balsamiq.com/blog). There is a log of good information about how he grew his business.

Personally, I'm using Adwords and standard SEO techniques. I'm going after the small businesses. I don't see much chance for a viral techniques in my market. I going to experiment with some cold calling to see what the conversion rate is to see if it is a good use of time. I've started talking with a marketing guy and he has several ideas that I will try. No idea if they will work or not.

http://blog.chrometa.com/you-launched-your-app-now-what

Related and a good read.

Even for Patrick, he did't get there over night and he is very good at his marketing. But the good news is that you can get there. I'd focus on the first customer. Getting that first customer is one of the best feelings ever. And the good news about SaaS, is that they stay with you. I still have my first customer paying me every month.

My thoughts were similar to yours going into it. I only need 500 customers and I'm set. I'm a long, long way off. The problem is not that there are not enough customers, the issue is reaching them. I have a ton of competition in my market, some good, some bad. I'm somewhere in the middle product wise and somewhere near the bottom half marketing wise. At my current rate of customer acquisition, it will still be a few years until I get there. But I keep plugging away.

Good luck!

The site looks nice. I didn't have time to create an account to see the inner workings yet. My initial thoughts are: 1) Screen shots of the internals. I.e. if I submit my app, what do I get. I don't want to have to submit it to see if the BetaBoom will be useful to me. 2) I'm not sure that you have a strong enough reason for testers to want to join. I regularly test apps posted here because I know how valuable the feedback is. I don't do it because I want free access to the site/app. It is about being part of the community and helping each other out. 3) Because of #2, I don't know if you will be able to get critical mass to have a usable service 4) Are you planning on making this a business? If so how will you make money?

I believe the difficult part will be making your presence known to companies looking to hire you. I prefer to hire developers through recommendations because you are less likely to end up hiring the wrong person.

All told say 12 months from building it to the first $100. Say another 4-6 months to hit $1000. Obviously its a side effort and I'm not getting rich off of it. But I don't put a lot of effort into it either. If you ignore the development time costs, its pretty profitable right now.

I'm going to start doing some real marketing and hopefully it will start gaining more traction. One thing I still find strange is how customers come in bunches. Nothing for a while then a bunch all at once.

The monthly cost will be a big difference in when you hit your revenue goals. I have an idea I'm toying with right now, that if I implement it and it works, would be $300-500 a month per customer, so I would be able to hit those numbers a lot quicker. But then again it would be a longer sales cycle.

What is your app?

Good luck and enjoy. That first customer is a very rewarding experience.

I'm getting ready to bite the bullet and go with a designer if I can get the price to an acceptable level.

My dad/brother built it. One practical piece of advice, keep any walls that you are going to hang cabinets on standard framing walls. This will save you an huge amount of time and effort to get them to hang properly and look good. Also be careful how /where you run your water pipes. Straw (and probably other materials) really don't like water if you get a leak.

You might have better luck at sites like Elance instead of Craiglist. I think you would deal with less flakes.

Personally every contract and job I have had was found through my network. Find your local tech groups and start getting to know people and let them know you are looking for some short term work.

Even though you think the other website will not gain much traction, you will be driving traffic to them. If someone hears about you and goes to domain.com and sees a product in the same market, they may very well assume that it is you. Nothing good can come from this. Either they don't like what the see and leave or they buy from the competition. Why take that risk.

I've been tempted to do some cold calling, but not interested in the work involved. I'm letting google slowing grow the number of customers. It is a side effort, so I'm happy with the passive income.

I suspect most of the people who do buy from Groupon are impulse buys. I know that is my case. In fact I did it yesterday for a something that is not urgent, certainly not something I was waiting for. But now I will be giving business to a company I had never heard of before and probably would not have heard from without groupon.

You should look at it as a marketing effort that pays for itself. If you can do the deal so that you break even or better, then essentially, its free marketing to get your name out there.

For me it depends on what is the lifetime value for a customer. Very easy to determine if its a one time fee. And what is the lifetime expense of a customer. If the expenses (server cost, support, etc.) grow over time, then you are bound to lose money. If your application is one would only be used a few times, say wedding planning, or related to being pregnant, then I can see it.

The big downside I see, is how do you handle upgrades. With a SaaS subscription model, they are continuously paying for the upgrades. With a web app with a one time fee, you would either have to give them the upgrade for free, force them to pay for the upgrade or maintain multiple versions. With desktop apps, it seems that you get a big boost in sales with an upgrade and I feel like you miss that with a one time fee for a web app.

You have to have one or the other. If you don't have either, then I'm going to choose someone else.

For anything over entry level, I'm looking for work experience.

To answer your question (which is why do companies ask for the a degree) is that it is used as a filter for them. If you have ever done any hiring, you will know that you can be flooded by unqualified candidates and its a major time sink.

What is/was your plan to monetize your company? I don't have much advice I could offer this late in the game. My advice for others is to make a product/service and start charging from day 1. If you can get customers to give you money, then you know you have a product that people want.

The major problem is defining the full requirements. Your estimate could be perfect, but it could be an estimate for what the client said, but not what he wants.

Be careful with the "we only need 1% of the market to make millions." You can fool yourself into thinking getting that 1% will be easy. Depending on the product, the sales channel is different. Focus on how many customers you can get to the top of your sales funnel. You loose a certain % of customers along the funnel and you end up with a certain number of paying customers. Even if the market is 5 million people, if you only get 100 in your sales funnel, then that is an issue.

If you are going with Adwords, there are pretty standard conversion rates you can follow to figure out how many customers you need to look at your product in order to earn X dollars a month.

If you have expensive product that requires a salesperson, then find out how many deals can get done in a day/month/year. Even if the market is big, but sales are slow, it doesn't matter in the end.

Also a huge plus with most API's is a test/development environment. This depends on what the product/service is, but in some cases this is a huge issue.

I do like the look and feel of the site, but that alone is not enough to switch.

Probably not. You can look into seeing if there is something similar in MD.

The only thing that worries me in your post is "But I am concerned about trying to convince investors of this." I've chased funding before and its not a fun position to be in. Better to boot strap and have total control. In most cases you are going to need a product, active customers and some revenue to get a foot in the door for investors and even then, the odds are not in your favor.

Teach. I've taught a college course for a semester and was the main trainer/teacher on a product/api we developed. Teaching others something you know will make you aware of how much you do know and how well you know it. And it is enjoyable if you don't mind the public speaking part.

I think there is a network effect as well. When I was fresh out of college, everyone in my close network was all the same age. I always prefer to hire someone I've already worked with or someone that was recommended by a friend. So if the start up is founded by fresh college graduates, their network is going to mostly consist of other young developers.