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Jason Lemkin recommends giving it 24 months to start a B2B SaaS. B2B SaaS is a long road despite the big splashes sometimes seen like Slack or Intercom. https:

• mlevental 8y ago
  >Also watch the CEO of Segment talk about their journey to product market fit. this is exactly the lecture that crystallized for me the problems i'm facing (i watched it last sunday). we (full-timers) have no product market fit and we (advisors/investors) are simply plowing ahead (and have been for months) trying to figure out whether that's actually the case or whether we're simply failing as novice entrepreneurs (bad at sales, bad at messaging, etc.)
• threeseed 8y ago
  Slack was developed internally for years at Tiny Speck before being released. So they aren't like most startups who generally start their 24 month period with a lengthy period of product development.
  • hhw3h 8y ago
    great point. So in fact Slack's superficially meteoric rise was prefixed by a long incubation period within Tiny Speck. So if you shift the timeline to when the precursor internal version of Slack was developed it supports the point of most B2B SaaS companies needing 24 months to prove real traction.
  • elvirs 8y ago
    this is actually a very good argument to 'ship fast, fix later' proponents. I think 'ship half ass product asap' doesnt really work in SaaS because there isnt endless pipeline of prospective clients and word spread quickly in small circles. The product must be market ready and impressive to a certain degree to achieve positive resonance in its circle.
• kofejnik 8y ago
  if it takes 24 months, how do you convince investors to fund those 24 months of searching, before you can show any meaningful numbers?
  • adventured 8y ago
    The same way it has always worked if you're going to exist on an investor's money: reputation and qualifications. A bit of luck helps as well. Reputation of course involves things such as your past work experience, your past VC experience, past outcomes, who you've networked with that might refer you to an investor, and so on. This is largely about what you've done and how it forms the opinion of others. Qualifications is what skills you possess, what you've accomplished, your education, your personal history, etc. This deeply ties into reputation. You can claim to be the greatest programmer ever, that's going to be incredibly difficult to verify for most venture capitalists, most basically won't bother attempting to verify it: they're going to judge you by reputation, partially in tandem with your claims.
  • tibbetts 8y ago
    You can and should show meaningful numbers while searching. And you should probably do some of your 24 months and numbers before you quit your day job and ask for money. “We talked to 15 friendly CIOs at mid sized banks, and they all said that pen theft was a top three problem for them in 2018, they plan to budget up to $30k to solve it in 2019. We are pretty sure we can build RFID pen tracking systems for under $100 per pen, but we haven’t figured out how to price it for our market. I do know two bank branch managers who are willing to run beta tests.” I mean, that’s still a dumb idea, but you can get started putting numbers around something without running down the whole 24 month clock. And usually most of the risk is in the product market fit, not in your tech team’s ability to create pen trackers. Edit to add: now, if you integrate blockchain into your pen trackers, and have an ICO for pencoin, then this is totally fundable. Mid sized retail banks are definitely looking for a way to spend money on blockchain.
• epberry 8y ago
  That lecture was exactly what I needed right now - thank you.