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Definitely. You will reach a point where perhaps you will be spending 70% of your time building out novel features, while the remaining time is spent reiteratin

by Tarlen 10y ago

Definitely. You will reach a point where perhaps you will be spending 70% of your time building out novel features, while the remaining time is spent reiterating on your existing features to make sure they stay relevant. And the beauty of being a solo founder (even more so a digital nomad living sparingly) is that you don't have to go head to head with the giants, even if you were to just tickle them with a stick and steal 0.1% of their customers, you'd be doing very well for yourself. And since you cannot match their wallet, try to beat them in efficiency. With smart technology decisions, you can maintain incredibly low operational costs, while ensuring massive scalability (shout out to Elixir).

pc86 10y ago
> even if you were to just tickle them with a stick and steal 0.1% of their customers Just be careful with this line of thinking. This is the fallacy of "it's a $2 trillion market, so if we get .001% of .001%...!"
- ksarmentrout 10y ago
  What makes this a fallacy? Because it's encouraging low expectations? I've heard this reasoning before and it's always seemed optimistic to me.
  - anthony-james 10y ago
    The fallacy is when people use the size of a market as support of why they should enter it, sort of like this: Founder: "We should enter X market! It has $1 Trillion worth of annual business." VC: "It must be heavily saturated, with mature, efficient companies. Why should we fund you?" And now is the fallacy - instead of replying with something like "we have better A, we do B differently and we're priced at C," they say "well we don't have to take over the entire market, we ONLY need .001% and we'll be billionaires!" And the fallacy, more specifically, is similar to an appeal to probability, because using such broad metrics aim to give the VC a false sense of confidence - that even if the founders aren't 100% successful, they only need to be .00001% successful for them to make a killing. But it still doesn't answer the original question: How does a founder go from 0% to .000001%. But when you're evaluating the marketplace, it's perfectly reasonable to say "I need x% of the market to break even, y% to earn a profit" and extrapolate from there. The idea itself isn't bad, it's when it's used improperly.
- Tarlen 10y ago
  Valid point, to avoid this trap I did a modest amount of initial market research and realized a lot of people were having problems with my competitor's offerings and were actively looking for alternative solutions. I set out to test this as quickly as I could and just kept going at it when I verified they were willing to backup their frustrations with their creditcard.

by Tarlen 10y ago

pc86 10y ago

> even if you were to just tickle them with a stick and steal 0.1% of their customers Just be careful with this line of thinking. This is the fallacy of "it's a $2 trillion market, so if we get .001% of .001%...!"

ksarmentrout 10y ago
What makes this a fallacy? Because it's encouraging low expectations? I've heard this reasoning before and it's always seemed optimistic to me.
- anthony-james 10y ago
  The fallacy is when people use the size of a market as support of why they should enter it, sort of like this: Founder: "We should enter X market! It has $1 Trillion worth of annual business." VC: "It must be heavily saturated, with mature, efficient companies. Why should we fund you?" And now is the fallacy - instead of replying with something like "we have better A, we do B differently and we're priced at C," they say "well we don't have to take over the entire market, we ONLY need .001% and we'll be billionaires!" And the fallacy, more specifically, is similar to an appeal to probability, because using such broad metrics aim to give the VC a false sense of confidence - that even if the founders aren't 100% successful, they only need to be .00001% successful for them to make a killing. But it still doesn't answer the original question: How does a founder go from 0% to .000001%. But when you're evaluating the marketplace, it's perfectly reasonable to say "I need x% of the market to break even, y% to earn a profit" and extrapolate from there. The idea itself isn't bad, it's when it's used improperly.
Tarlen 10y ago
Valid point, to avoid this trap I did a modest amount of initial market research and realized a lot of people were having problems with my competitor's offerings and were actively looking for alternative solutions. I set out to test this as quickly as I could and just kept going at it when I verified they were willing to backup their frustrations with their creditcard.