This is a fantastic writeup (and like nearly all worthwhile writing on the subject, I don't necessarily agree with all of it).
Two elaborations:
1) General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on working for you, you may want to have a brief heart-to-heart with yourself on whether you are sufficiently skilled at selling to build a company which will live or die based on your sales ability.
2) His advice about starting with 1 anchor client for a SaaS, expanding to 10 via expenditure of shoe leather, and then starting to worry about scalable approaches to customer acquisition is very, very good. (I don't know if I definitely would endorse the "An Indian company expressed desire to buy something from me other than the thing I was building, so I should have built that instead." That would turn on a lot of things, including how serious that company was about actually buying the thing. There is a world of difference between "I would buy a Widget from you" and "I commit to accepting delivery of a Widget from you, where a Widget broadly does X, my timeframe is Y, and your payment will be $Z." I'd be looking for a letter of intent or a check as a filter for seriousness following that Skype call before making a bet-the-business decision on it, personally, but I obviously don't know the specifics of what was said.)
I'm a non-technical founder (I have an engineering degree on paper, but have never been a practicing developer) who's starting out on his own. I disagree (or maybe, have an alternate viewpoint) with your first observation.
I don't think sales skills are completely fungible across domains. A great business seller may not actually be a great motivational/aspirational seller, and vice versa. So it's wrong, IMHO, to assume that just because you may be incapable of convincing a developer to join you, you will also be incapable of convincing a customer to buy your product.
That said, I'm facing somewhat the same issue myself - so they way I'm solving it is by (a) rolling up my sleeves and trying to build a bare-bones MVP/mockups using relatively accessible tech like Bootstrap, HTML, JS etc. (b) overcompensating for my tech shortfall by giving 2x of what I can in areas like marketing, customer interviews, alpha partnerships, fundraising etc., and (c) using (precious) capital to outsource the first version of my app instead of waiting for tech co-founders.
As I see it, it's Carpe Diem. There's no way I can earn serious developer cred in weeks or even months, so I might as well look for alternative approaches instead of moping around, wishing I'd followed the software developer road 15 years ago instead of the MBA one :)
You are absolutely right on both comments! And additional comments:
1) I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers".
2) Absolutely agree. When I say "I should build that", in fact what I wanted to say was something like "I should have looked for more X prospects that would pay for what they wanted, get their money and then build that".
It's also useful to remember that until you have an actual product, the company really does not need a sales person, because there is nothing to sell. A startup does need a lot of things besides a developer, like customer development. But customer development is not the same as straight sales! I have seen some teams flame out because there's a sales person there with nothing to sell feeling useless, and the rest of the team feeling like they are dead weight, and meanwhile real priorities aren't getting dealt with.
> 1) General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on working for you, you may want to have a brief heart-to-heart with yourself on whether you are sufficiently skilled at selling to build a company which will live or die based on your sales ability.
But I think "selling" the product to a developer is a difficult sell: harder than selling a product which exists and solves a pain point to a company who has money and is looking to solve their pain point.
If "selling" means getting the developer to work for no cash (only e.g. equity). A good developer has a job, and has lots of job offers, all offering them real money now. I'm not sure it'd be possible to persuade most of them to work for no cash.
I'm in a hurry and didn't read the article - but on 1, developers are far from normal consumers or businesses, consider far different things reasonable and interesting and are a totally different "sell" - much as founders themselves are far different from normal employees and simply can't be judged on the same basis. I don't think your point 1 is valid at all. (Likewise, just because you can convince a developer, doesn't make you an actual salesperson, doesn't mean you can convince a customer!)
I don't understand people's (not necessarily the OPs)utter obsession with philosophies. Especially in the startup world when being adaptive and surviving is key.
Lean Startup, great book, decent ideas, not the religion that it's become. I'm sick of hearing, hey do this the lean way and it'll "significantly improve" how well you do, after all it's the blueprint for success. Personally, I don't buy into that. Here's my view of success in reality: do whatever works (that's legal & up to your moral standards), be opportunistic and get lucky (yes, hard work and measuring metrics alone don't do crap).
MVP and idea validation are great concepts & helpful common language. In hindsight all "successful" startups seem to have a "pattern", but in all seriousness, there isn't a friggin algorithm for success in startups, otherwise algorithms would've replaced entrepreneurs a long time ago. (Although selling success patterns & software based on such to wantreprenuers is a great idea)
I'm sorry the Sergio's experience happened. It's easy force cause and effect onto a narrative. It very well could have been that the developer Sregio met was at a point in his life where he really just wanted to build something great and did end up building the awesomest thing. Instead of trying to dissect the reasons his startup failed, had luck been a little more favorable, we might be trying to analyze how it became a huge success.
Bottom line, my heartfelt congratulations to Sergio on being successful at stepping up, despite the risks and having a crack at it. If you had never stepped up and we all gave in to our negative biases and overanalyzed the crap out of everything before we started we'd still be polishing stone wheels.
I know how shitty it feels. But remember, hindsight is 20-20 and cause and effect should really be cause+luck and effect. Hope you're a better entrepreneur and will be back in the game soon.
"The developer had no intention of being the project’s developer (?) he was not really a developer, he was a computer science graduate who owned a webdev shop and was used to managing, not coding."
Heard this story so many times. Amazing how many people join a startup and don't want to do the actual work. Remember that scene in The Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg calls his outsource team about progress on that latest feature? No? Me either.
"Since we were 3 business people, we spent all this time into idiot plans, budget forecasts, BUSINESS CARDS, fancy website… all useless things which in the end did not contribute to anything."
I've been apart of a lot of startups and this is far and away the best advice. It was a common theme with two startups I worked for during the boom years. One CEO's hubris was stunning. 10 million privately funded and he blew most of it on season tickets and suits at stadiums to "entertain" big prospects (nevermind we didn't have any "big" prospects at the time!), remodeled the office to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars, it goes on, but you get the idea.
When you're in a startup, it really is about getting your product shipped, and making sure that's where the focus is.
Great writeup and glad you saw the errors of your ways. Lots of people never gain the wisdom you have until after two or three failed attempts.
"Instead of surfing the wave and adapting my idea to what a real prospect client was telling me they wanted"
FFS don't do this. There are far too many startups beached on the shores of "well, this one SRS BZNS client wanted us to change what we were doing so we did. Where'd all the rest of our clients go?"
I'm not saying "don't pivot", but "just making what they wanted" (where N(they) = 1) turns you into a poorly-paid contract developer who's also paying to host the result, not an entrepreneur.
I personally would view building something for X client a viable option if it was going to be a large sum of money. Then use that money to fund the company and the product you really want to build and sell.
It can be hard to get that one or two clients who can fund the company, but it is a viable strategy as long as you have the right mindset. We, Datalanche, had this opportunity but unfortunately (like most deals) it didn't work out. Had we successfully made the deal, it would have been a multi-million dollar contract which would have easily funded the entire company and the flagship product and we wouldn't have given away any control.
I want to shine some light on one side problem, scratched here:
The problem today is (out of the perspective of a developer): To many companies rely on just "hire any (cheap) developer" to ramp up the product. I see it all the time: Quality is not asked for, many companies (specially in the web business) just want the cheapest developers. They search for a student (at best), because he is cheap and will just make a small time estimation and an even smaller fixed price offer for the project. The student will happily work overtime that is not covered by the initial estimation.
Than the companies go mad, when either the programmer is running away or the whole project runs into a blind alley (or both at the same time), because the "totally expensive" programmer had not enough experience e.g. with database development and the database structure just lets you shiver. Then the shouting and anger is big: "Damn programmers -- all are liars and lazy!"
But the "cheap, cheap!" culture seams to be unstoppable. If you tell people in advance about "quality" and "professionalism", they don't listen or just laugh at you. It seams, all the people just have to find out the hard way -- but I guess, even than most of them will not learn at all.
I believe this is a marketing problem (from the developers). See, I am a non-tech founder, I don't understand why X is cheaper than Y. If I perceive the same benefit, I will get the cheapest one.
(This is hypothetical, but not so much: I understand a bit of tech and even so I don't have so much clue on how to judge a developer besides what he shows me he had done).
Do people find it really ok to have video and a website spelling "try it free" and then have only an email input form ? I know that testing if demand exists is important, but doesn't it have adverse effect on your reputation to somehow lie to your prospects ?
I think you're saying its a lie because there is no product yet? I can see how you think that. If he did build the product first though and one person signed up and he had to pivot to something fairly different, that'd be a lie too then effectively. Except, now he wasted a lot of time building.
My POV is if you're only taking email addresses for people to know when it's available anything on the site is just your plan. Plans always change.
I'm left wondering, though, what you actually did over the two years? You imply that you were working on it full time. Two years full time is a lot of time. You can do pretty much anything in that time (including, as others have mentioned, learn to code).
Hardly, no, one mistake that I didn't mention (because I am still processing it) is how long we took to have v1 (more than a year). This was a mix of my incompetence, too many features and also an inexperienced developer (in fact we changed developers once too).
So, yeah, a looooot of the time was put into building the product, refining it, getting bugs out of the way, testing it again, finding the same bugs...
Then there was marketing. Finding more clients, because we believed finding more people meant someone would buy the product.
PS: I was not completely full time, the developer was. In those 2 years, I have been freelancing (one needs to eat).
A business person trying to start a tech startup.... It's like a business person looking for musicians to start a band. This is beyond ridiculous. Either bring some skill to the table or go create a "business startup" and stop polluting the industry with yet another failed idea and even worse a "post mortem" of why it failed.
PS: This includes Marketing, Managers as well as the Business peanut gallery.
I replied the same thing above: tech business are usually not about tech, they are empowered by tech. A company that uses phones to sell their products is not about "phones", they are about the product and the phone is just a tool. For me, the web was just a tool.
A lot of non-tech co-founders exist and they succeed, so certainly not absurd.
Good article but I would look at this "failure" from a glass half full perspective. You "won" because you've learned valuable lessons you can take to your next idea. I've had many products that have not gained many users in their respective marketplaces but I learned from each and everyone of them. All these experiences has brought me where I am today (CTO of a 45+ employee company). No failures in my past as far as i'm concerned; just lots of self teaching (that you can't get in school).
>> ""An Indian company expressed desire to buy something from me other than the thing I was building, so I should have built that instead.""
I may be the minority but I agree with him but on one condition. If this Indian company wanted to pay a small monthly subscription fee for your product I would never have agreed developing "their" ideas. I would have taken their feedback and put in the big pile with all the other feedback I gathered up. But I would have pitched this Indian company a different story, I would have pitched them a professional services contract instead of a product. I did something similar in the past and it worked out very well because in a business money is king. With no money you can't do the things you need to do, like attend conferences to sell your idea, buying adwords, hiring solid developers, paying yourself a salary so you can devote your time to the idea.
In my case the customer was willing to pay ~$10k a month to get what he wanted. We built it for him while building our own product. Once we got big enough and could sustain ourselves without our original customer, I gave the customer away. The developer who maintained the project was interest in taking on the project himself. We came up with a 6 month transition plan, including lots of product/project management help, office space, etc. It was a win/win situation at the end.
Doing this is not for everyone though. There are many days I cursed this customers for taking up the majority of our resources. We had to be very good at differentiating between their requirements and the markets requirements. We weren't perfect at it but it worked out in the end.
... one of the prospects was an HR person from a huge Indian manufacturer. They wanted the system NOW and wanted to speak to me. [...] I just needed to build what they wanted.
I know startups that charged down the other path, being hyper responsive to their big customers, and they suffered for it because their biggest customer steered the product vision straight to crazy town. Such startups essentially become the contract development shop of a few big customers, living and dying by the whims of those big customers. Yes, you can pay the bills, but you're essentially working full-time for a few customers rather than building your own enterprise.
I wonder how much their conversion was impacted by internationalisation problems. It looks like they were attempting to target the US, but their pricing page wasn't localised for that market. Unless they really were charging one thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars per team. Price is shown as £19,90 instead of $19.90
Also due to what I perceived as a thousand separator, not a decimal mark, I initially read the price as nineteen thousand and nine hundred dollars!
A mistake I made early on was trying to provide a product as cheap as possible. Constantly worried that no one would pay what we asked for.
Basically being afraid to ask for the value it was really worth.
I think there was a comma/period swap, but if I'm reading correctly it looked like the product was positioned at $30 / mo?
Assuming that's correct - it's really not a meaningful amount to any company that has enough employees and management to actually be a user of the product.
I think a $30 / mo with a free 30 day trial period (once product launches and they can actually try it ;) ) that requires a credit card for the trail could have worked.
Would still need a product to actually try, but that's not much different than saying get a free trial and just taking in email addresses.
If anyone remembers the Minimalytics / Small HQ folks - I thought they did a good job with their signups. The only thing for me was I disappointed by how minimal their product was in beta. It was so basic I didn't have any use for it, and running our own startup, didn't have time to wait. We ended up building it internally.
I probably would have converted to a paying user if it was more developed at beta. Not their fault though, they did a good job I thought(if you're reading Small HQ).
Firstly, the Indian corporation which contacted him, apparently was asking for something totally different. If they were asking about 3 or 4 features that could be added, I don't think that it would be a problem. But the author didn't do anything wrong there. They were looking for a developer probably not a product or not his product whatsoever.
If you accept his argument as true, that he should switch and follow the tide, then you might as well start looking for freelancer developer job.
< J/K>
Awesome quote:
> The result of this was that in the end we had to hire a full-time (and paid) developer. So we had zero revenue, 4 co-founders and a paid employee (which was effectively the only one doing real work).
I laughed really hard reading this line. My girlfriend came from next room to make sure I was okay!!! That's awesome, like 4 guys watching a movie, say the 'Social Network', and deciding to do a startup!!!
</ J/K>
Jokes apart, I think the author has got it all wrong. There are ten million reasons why a small startup failed. Most of the time is hard to tell exactly why.
But seriously, only people who have proved time and again their ability to deliver a product to the market and are famous for turning ideas into money, are able to struck deals before having a product. And we probably all know them (Jobs, Musk, etc). For the rest of us that's not how things work, I'm sorry to say that he is still getting it all wrong.
In the real world, you can't sell something that doesn't exist, these things happen only on Wall Street.
Thanks for the write up - It's always better to learn from other people mistakes. I think however you and the most of the other posters miss the most basic problem because they mostly seem not to have tried the site and that is that, to me at any rate, it seems the product is not very good. It seems to be basically a 40 question form with questions like "People in the team know the weaknesses and strengths of other team members." that you mark from 1-10 and is not customizable. Personally I hate that stuff - you spend ages filling the thing out and then when you find the average response is say 7 what do you do then? There's not obvious action. If you had a form with a question saying say "what do you thinks the biggest problem with your team?" and people were able to say anonymously that say "there were four founders without the right experience and only one dev really working" then that would at least be useful. I think before worrying about the market etc you should have tested your system on real teams to see if it actually helped them much. This could have been done with zero or little tech - say either a paper questionnaire or just write your questions in an email and have people email their answers back to you. The fact that 200 people tried the product and none bought does imply a product problem but it if you define your product as trying something to fix team management problems then I think the issue is not that there is no demand for that but that your product does not work in that regard. If it was me and I could code a bit, rather than scrap the thing I think I might try changing it to see if it could be made to work at the team improving level. You could say cut it to say five 0-10 type questions and five "what's the biggest problem?" type questions and then try that with a couple of real teams and see if they found it helpful.
Your evaluation certainly have merits and a lot of it we confirmed when speaking to clients later. Just one thing to make clear: I have 5+ years of team management/leadership development and I used a similar tool I created and evolved (in paper form) to improve a loooot of teams. So the tool works - BUT you are correct, it is a pain to apply and you probably need consultancy to get out of the team management hole if you are not a skilled manager.
I think for first time bootstrappers, investing some time in a quality blog on a particular field you would like to build products for is really really useful. Apart from having a good audience to launch your first product, it helps you interact with people before you have something to sell to them. You learn more about their problems, the existing market, competition and so on.
__If there is just one thing you should learn, it is: Just speak to prospects and extract their pain, then sell the painkiller (before building the product). If they are willing to buy, do take their money and invest that money into building the product.__
This advice always seemed like a stretch to me. Does anybody pay for a product that's not ready yet?
"Does anybody pay for a product that's not ready yet?"
Isn't kick starter build around that concept? If people think something is looking good and might help them considerably they might be open to pay for developmental costs.
This is a great article full of truth. My respects to the author because it takes courage to accept one's mistakes, but it's critical for getting up and moving forward in a better direction. How many ideas are sitting in my brain, but all I can think of is how to exactly am I supposed to validate that any of them are worth my life?! I mean, really, a startup will mean I will have no life. With my loved one in a startup already, I don't know if I could really start something without the support. Looking back, were any of the big companies that started as a small STARTUP founded by poor people? I think not. I haven't heard a single story of an actually poor person, who founded a startup and is now rich.
You want to know how to validate your idea faster? Don't have a free plan. Will people give you their credit card... that's what you want to know. And those are the people you want feedback from.
[+] [-] patio11|12 years ago|reply
Two elaborations:
1) General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on working for you, you may want to have a brief heart-to-heart with yourself on whether you are sufficiently skilled at selling to build a company which will live or die based on your sales ability.
2) His advice about starting with 1 anchor client for a SaaS, expanding to 10 via expenditure of shoe leather, and then starting to worry about scalable approaches to customer acquisition is very, very good. (I don't know if I definitely would endorse the "An Indian company expressed desire to buy something from me other than the thing I was building, so I should have built that instead." That would turn on a lot of things, including how serious that company was about actually buying the thing. There is a world of difference between "I would buy a Widget from you" and "I commit to accepting delivery of a Widget from you, where a Widget broadly does X, my timeframe is Y, and your payment will be $Z." I'd be looking for a letter of intent or a check as a filter for seriousness following that Skype call before making a bet-the-business decision on it, personally, but I obviously don't know the specifics of what was said.)
[+] [-] r0h1n|12 years ago|reply
I don't think sales skills are completely fungible across domains. A great business seller may not actually be a great motivational/aspirational seller, and vice versa. So it's wrong, IMHO, to assume that just because you may be incapable of convincing a developer to join you, you will also be incapable of convincing a customer to buy your product.
That said, I'm facing somewhat the same issue myself - so they way I'm solving it is by (a) rolling up my sleeves and trying to build a bare-bones MVP/mockups using relatively accessible tech like Bootstrap, HTML, JS etc. (b) overcompensating for my tech shortfall by giving 2x of what I can in areas like marketing, customer interviews, alpha partnerships, fundraising etc., and (c) using (precious) capital to outsource the first version of my app instead of waiting for tech co-founders.
As I see it, it's Carpe Diem. There's no way I can earn serious developer cred in weeks or even months, so I might as well look for alternative approaches instead of moping around, wishing I'd followed the software developer road 15 years ago instead of the MBA one :)
[+] [-] sergioschuler|12 years ago|reply
1) I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers".
2) Absolutely agree. When I say "I should build that", in fact what I wanted to say was something like "I should have looked for more X prospects that would pay for what they wanted, get their money and then build that".
[+] [-] loomio|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianmsmith|12 years ago|reply
But I think "selling" the product to a developer is a difficult sell: harder than selling a product which exists and solves a pain point to a company who has money and is looking to solve their pain point.
If "selling" means getting the developer to work for no cash (only e.g. equity). A good developer has a job, and has lots of job offers, all offering them real money now. I'm not sure it'd be possible to persuade most of them to work for no cash.
[+] [-] logicallee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Killah911|12 years ago|reply
Lean Startup, great book, decent ideas, not the religion that it's become. I'm sick of hearing, hey do this the lean way and it'll "significantly improve" how well you do, after all it's the blueprint for success. Personally, I don't buy into that. Here's my view of success in reality: do whatever works (that's legal & up to your moral standards), be opportunistic and get lucky (yes, hard work and measuring metrics alone don't do crap).
MVP and idea validation are great concepts & helpful common language. In hindsight all "successful" startups seem to have a "pattern", but in all seriousness, there isn't a friggin algorithm for success in startups, otherwise algorithms would've replaced entrepreneurs a long time ago. (Although selling success patterns & software based on such to wantreprenuers is a great idea)
I'm sorry the Sergio's experience happened. It's easy force cause and effect onto a narrative. It very well could have been that the developer Sregio met was at a point in his life where he really just wanted to build something great and did end up building the awesomest thing. Instead of trying to dissect the reasons his startup failed, had luck been a little more favorable, we might be trying to analyze how it became a huge success.
Bottom line, my heartfelt congratulations to Sergio on being successful at stepping up, despite the risks and having a crack at it. If you had never stepped up and we all gave in to our negative biases and overanalyzed the crap out of everything before we started we'd still be polishing stone wheels.
I know how shitty it feels. But remember, hindsight is 20-20 and cause and effect should really be cause+luck and effect. Hope you're a better entrepreneur and will be back in the game soon.
[+] [-] ry0ohki|12 years ago|reply
Heard this story so many times. Amazing how many people join a startup and don't want to do the actual work. Remember that scene in The Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg calls his outsource team about progress on that latest feature? No? Me either.
[+] [-] sergioschuler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|12 years ago|reply
I've been apart of a lot of startups and this is far and away the best advice. It was a common theme with two startups I worked for during the boom years. One CEO's hubris was stunning. 10 million privately funded and he blew most of it on season tickets and suits at stadiums to "entertain" big prospects (nevermind we didn't have any "big" prospects at the time!), remodeled the office to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars, it goes on, but you get the idea.
When you're in a startup, it really is about getting your product shipped, and making sure that's where the focus is.
Great writeup and glad you saw the errors of your ways. Lots of people never gain the wisdom you have until after two or three failed attempts.
[+] [-] kylereeve|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] al2o3cr|12 years ago|reply
FFS don't do this. There are far too many startups beached on the shores of "well, this one SRS BZNS client wanted us to change what we were doing so we did. Where'd all the rest of our clients go?"
I'm not saying "don't pivot", but "just making what they wanted" (where N(they) = 1) turns you into a poorly-paid contract developer who's also paying to host the result, not an entrepreneur.
[+] [-] CanSpice|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpedela|12 years ago|reply
It can be hard to get that one or two clients who can fund the company, but it is a viable strategy as long as you have the right mindset. We, Datalanche, had this opportunity but unfortunately (like most deals) it didn't work out. Had we successfully made the deal, it would have been a multi-million dollar contract which would have easily funded the entire company and the flagship product and we wouldn't have given away any control.
[+] [-] PythonicAlpha|12 years ago|reply
The problem today is (out of the perspective of a developer): To many companies rely on just "hire any (cheap) developer" to ramp up the product. I see it all the time: Quality is not asked for, many companies (specially in the web business) just want the cheapest developers. They search for a student (at best), because he is cheap and will just make a small time estimation and an even smaller fixed price offer for the project. The student will happily work overtime that is not covered by the initial estimation.
Than the companies go mad, when either the programmer is running away or the whole project runs into a blind alley (or both at the same time), because the "totally expensive" programmer had not enough experience e.g. with database development and the database structure just lets you shiver. Then the shouting and anger is big: "Damn programmers -- all are liars and lazy!"
What went wrong, stated Uncle Bob correctly in his Blog: http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/11/19/HoardsOfNovice...
But the "cheap, cheap!" culture seams to be unstoppable. If you tell people in advance about "quality" and "professionalism", they don't listen or just laugh at you. It seams, all the people just have to find out the hard way -- but I guess, even than most of them will not learn at all.
[+] [-] sergioschuler|12 years ago|reply
(This is hypothetical, but not so much: I understand a bit of tech and even so I don't have so much clue on how to judge a developer besides what he shows me he had done).
[+] [-] thu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkxanthos|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guynamedloren|12 years ago|reply
I'm left wondering, though, what you actually did over the two years? You imply that you were working on it full time. Two years full time is a lot of time. You can do pretty much anything in that time (including, as others have mentioned, learn to code).
> idiot plans, budget forecasts, BUSINESS CARDS, fancy website [and writing articles]
I find it hard to believe you can work on those things for two years, day in and day out.
[+] [-] sergioschuler|12 years ago|reply
So, yeah, a looooot of the time was put into building the product, refining it, getting bugs out of the way, testing it again, finding the same bugs...
Then there was marketing. Finding more clients, because we believed finding more people meant someone would buy the product.
PS: I was not completely full time, the developer was. In those 2 years, I have been freelancing (one needs to eat).
[+] [-] Elizer0x0309|12 years ago|reply
PS: This includes Marketing, Managers as well as the Business peanut gallery.
[+] [-] d0m|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergioschuler|12 years ago|reply
A lot of non-tech co-founders exist and they succeed, so certainly not absurd.
[+] [-] cblanc|12 years ago|reply
The Beatles had Brian Epstein for example (aka The Fifth Beatle)
[+] [-] wehadfun|12 years ago|reply
Somebody has to find customers, make sure there is a way to accept their money, ...
[+] [-] bloat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrath|12 years ago|reply
>> ""An Indian company expressed desire to buy something from me other than the thing I was building, so I should have built that instead.""
I may be the minority but I agree with him but on one condition. If this Indian company wanted to pay a small monthly subscription fee for your product I would never have agreed developing "their" ideas. I would have taken their feedback and put in the big pile with all the other feedback I gathered up. But I would have pitched this Indian company a different story, I would have pitched them a professional services contract instead of a product. I did something similar in the past and it worked out very well because in a business money is king. With no money you can't do the things you need to do, like attend conferences to sell your idea, buying adwords, hiring solid developers, paying yourself a salary so you can devote your time to the idea.
In my case the customer was willing to pay ~$10k a month to get what he wanted. We built it for him while building our own product. Once we got big enough and could sustain ourselves without our original customer, I gave the customer away. The developer who maintained the project was interest in taking on the project himself. We came up with a 6 month transition plan, including lots of product/project management help, office space, etc. It was a win/win situation at the end.
Doing this is not for everyone though. There are many days I cursed this customers for taking up the majority of our resources. We had to be very good at differentiating between their requirements and the markets requirements. We weren't perfect at it but it worked out in the end.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|12 years ago|reply
Seriously, if somebody could cull 2 or 3 of these a day and deliver in a weekly or monthly format? It'd be worth a subscription.
Thanks for the article!
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|12 years ago|reply
One failure story per week should be sufficient to be constantly aware of typical problems.
[+] [-] snorkel|12 years ago|reply
I know startups that charged down the other path, being hyper responsive to their big customers, and they suffered for it because their biggest customer steered the product vision straight to crazy town. Such startups essentially become the contract development shop of a few big customers, living and dying by the whims of those big customers. Yes, you can pay the bills, but you're essentially working full-time for a few customers rather than building your own enterprise.
[+] [-] aaronbasssett|12 years ago|reply
Also due to what I perceived as a thousand separator, not a decimal mark, I initially read the price as nineteen thousand and nine hundred dollars!
[+] [-] sergioschuler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] advertising|12 years ago|reply
Basically being afraid to ask for the value it was really worth.
I think there was a comma/period swap, but if I'm reading correctly it looked like the product was positioned at $30 / mo?
Assuming that's correct - it's really not a meaningful amount to any company that has enough employees and management to actually be a user of the product.
I think a $30 / mo with a free 30 day trial period (once product launches and they can actually try it ;) ) that requires a credit card for the trail could have worked.
Would still need a product to actually try, but that's not much different than saying get a free trial and just taking in email addresses.
If anyone remembers the Minimalytics / Small HQ folks - I thought they did a good job with their signups. The only thing for me was I disappointed by how minimal their product was in beta. It was so basic I didn't have any use for it, and running our own startup, didn't have time to wait. We ended up building it internally.
I probably would have converted to a paying user if it was more developed at beta. Not their fault though, they did a good job I thought(if you're reading Small HQ).
[+] [-] atmosx|12 years ago|reply
If you accept his argument as true, that he should switch and follow the tide, then you might as well start looking for freelancer developer job.
< J/K> Awesome quote:
> The result of this was that in the end we had to hire a full-time (and paid) developer. So we had zero revenue, 4 co-founders and a paid employee (which was effectively the only one doing real work).
I laughed really hard reading this line. My girlfriend came from next room to make sure I was okay!!! That's awesome, like 4 guys watching a movie, say the 'Social Network', and deciding to do a startup!!! </ J/K>
Jokes apart, I think the author has got it all wrong. There are ten million reasons why a small startup failed. Most of the time is hard to tell exactly why.
But seriously, only people who have proved time and again their ability to deliver a product to the market and are famous for turning ideas into money, are able to struck deals before having a product. And we probably all know them (Jobs, Musk, etc). For the rest of us that's not how things work, I'm sorry to say that he is still getting it all wrong.
In the real world, you can't sell something that doesn't exist, these things happen only on Wall Street.
[+] [-] tim333|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergioschuler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karterk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subbu|12 years ago|reply
This advice always seemed like a stretch to me. Does anybody pay for a product that's not ready yet?
[+] [-] brickcap|12 years ago|reply
Isn't kick starter build around that concept? If people think something is looking good and might help them considerably they might be open to pay for developmental costs.
[+] [-] sergioschuler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thehme|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antidaily|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wehadfun|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfreeman|12 years ago|reply