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No offense taken! Especially since you're right We are a scrappy company and we're looking to mature, given the figures we've done the last year. I'd love to k

No offense taken! Especially since you're right We are a scrappy company and we're looking to mature, given the figures we've done the last year. I'd love to know if you'd still have the same opinion after going through our customer workflow (since yes, what we've discussed is our internal workflow)

lazide 5y ago
I wasn’t able to find a way to your customer experience/UI workflow the first time I read the article (which is odd - you have some words that seemed to clearly be intended to be links to it, but they were dead to me). Second time, I just went to your footer to your holding company, and was able to figure out the actual product from the list there. I didn’t download it though. I also figured out that some of your links ARE live, just not the ones I expected, and will take me to the app. Despite being interested at the beginning, I lost momentum and stopped. You clearly have a viable product, and have already started doing some solid sales despite having no sales (or marketing) expertise - which is great, and you’re in an awesome place! The next challenges are finding and scaling more ways to reach customers, conveying the value you can provide them in a way they can understand at scale, and converting those ‘take my money!’ potential folks into actual orders. Then executing on them at scale, of course. The sales and the execution side are separate sets of expertise. Managing people from those backgrounds to get what you want is also a challenge for most execution/technical founders. Most folks with your background and having done what you have, will be quite comfortable with the execution side and people who also like it. If you think of it as a computing system, you’ve got a great 32 core machine with an awesome GPU and 32GB of memory. You’re bottlenecking on the 80’s era Amiga tape drive you somehow managed to boot off of. If you get yourself even a halfway decent 20GB drive from a decade+ ago, you’ll be doing leaps and bounds more business. If you find a modern SSD, even more. There are a number of books out there for how to do sales as a technical founder, I can try to dig one up if you’re interested.
- chdaniel 5y ago
  You're clearly having some experience, if not lot Is there any chance I can get your mentorship over a vid call? No commitment for more The 32-core, 32 GB of memory made sense to me EDIT: Just to not risk losing this in a not-seen-HN-reply — if yes, let me know where I can reach out, or my Twitter is this: https://twitter.com/chddaniel https://twitter.com/chddaniel
  - lazide 5y ago
    From what I can see in the thread, you’re smart, you obviously have a solid sense of what customers need (product wise) and ability to execute on it, you’re motivated, you don’t put up with BS, and you can listen to harsh but accurate criticism - you’re going decently far regardless, in my opinion. You’ve also found a decent product with a clear market need and have turned it into positive cash flow. That is the start of something that can be leveraged very well if you know how to do it. I’m just taking a wild guess here - take what’s useful and please ignore the rest. I don’t know you. What may be helpful is realizing that much of what got you here may be getting in the way of getting you to the larger opportunity. For one, being no BS means you may be neglecting good opportunities to get exposure and business because it feels fake. You may not be aware of the business models of the people who build large audiences or how to leverage them, of the influencer or advertising markets and tools for instance. I think you have some opportunity if you get someone clever who specializes in it. But first you need to find out someone who knows that that looks like, or iterate and learn yourself. Your being locked into the product and able to see through bs may also be stopping you from truly understanding the mindset/awareness of the bulk of users (and their general lack of knowledge), in a way that you can clearly reach them. Knowledge of actual capabilities and the full system can be a real curse in selling, because it makes everything too complicated and makes it hard to understand where 99% of your potential customers will be - which is complete ignorance of you, your product, and the space. And you have to make it easy for them to give you money, and use every opportunity you can to show your product and how it helps people, or you’re wasting visibility and leads you’ll never get back. This thread is obviously helping you, and I never cry over the past. Future posts could be even better (and get you more revenue) with a bit more work on some very minor (time wise) details. I did make a prior employer a bit under half a billion ARR by identifying the need for, starting, and then leading an effort that fixed some similar (but not as severe from what I can tell) challenges for one of their products. This was from within Engineering as an Engineer and later senior Eng leadership. They did have a more established product and presence. Unfortunately, I am also busy getting my third startup moving and this week and next are not great for taking on anything new. A friend of mine who is very low BS and has given me some useful (and brutally direct) feedback that I’ve personally found invaluable is Naeem Zafar [https://www.naeemzafar.com/ https://www.naeemzafar.com/]. He’s done a lot of books and classes on various elements (mostly so he doesn’t have to keep repeating himself). I’d be curious what you learn if you go through the 7 Steps to a Successful Startup ebook. It’s only about 30 pages, quite to the point, and $10. It may help you structure some of what you have now in a way that may point out the gaps in the skill sets on your team and the structure that could help you. It may not. I don’t really use Twitter, but I’ll put it on my list to reach out in a couple weeks and see if any of this was helpful. I’ll make sure to mention this thread. Best of luck! Making a viable business is one of life’s greatest challenges and you’re showing good promise.

lazide 5y ago

I wasn’t able to find a way to your customer experience/UI workflow the first time I read the article (which is odd - you have some words that seemed to clearly be intended to be links to it, but they were dead to me). Second time, I just went to your footer to your holding company, and was able to figure out the actual product from the list there. I didn’t download it though. I also figured out that some of your links ARE live, just not the ones I expected, and will take me to the app. Despite being interested at the beginning, I lost momentum and stopped. You clearly have a viable product, and have already started doing some solid sales despite having no sales (or marketing) expertise - which is great, and you’re in an awesome place! The next challenges are finding and scaling more ways to reach customers, conveying the value you can provide them in a way they can understand at scale, and converting those ‘take my money!’ potential folks into actual orders. Then executing on them at scale, of course. The sales and the execution side are separate sets of expertise. Managing people from those backgrounds to get what you want is also a challenge for most execution/technical founders. Most folks with your background and having done what you have, will be quite comfortable with the execution side and people who also like it. If you think of it as a computing system, you’ve got a great 32 core machine with an awesome GPU and 32GB of memory. You’re bottlenecking on the 80’s era Amiga tape drive you somehow managed to boot off of. If you get yourself even a halfway decent 20GB drive from a decade+ ago, you’ll be doing leaps and bounds more business. If you find a modern SSD, even more. There are a number of books out there for how to do sales as a technical founder, I can try to dig one up if you’re interested.

chdaniel 5y ago
You're clearly having some experience, if not lot Is there any chance I can get your mentorship over a vid call? No commitment for more The 32-core, 32 GB of memory made sense to me EDIT: Just to not risk losing this in a not-seen-HN-reply — if yes, let me know where I can reach out, or my Twitter is this: https://twitter.com/chddaniel https://twitter.com/chddaniel
- lazide 5y ago
  From what I can see in the thread, you’re smart, you obviously have a solid sense of what customers need (product wise) and ability to execute on it, you’re motivated, you don’t put up with BS, and you can listen to harsh but accurate criticism - you’re going decently far regardless, in my opinion. You’ve also found a decent product with a clear market need and have turned it into positive cash flow. That is the start of something that can be leveraged very well if you know how to do it. I’m just taking a wild guess here - take what’s useful and please ignore the rest. I don’t know you. What may be helpful is realizing that much of what got you here may be getting in the way of getting you to the larger opportunity. For one, being no BS means you may be neglecting good opportunities to get exposure and business because it feels fake. You may not be aware of the business models of the people who build large audiences or how to leverage them, of the influencer or advertising markets and tools for instance. I think you have some opportunity if you get someone clever who specializes in it. But first you need to find out someone who knows that that looks like, or iterate and learn yourself. Your being locked into the product and able to see through bs may also be stopping you from truly understanding the mindset/awareness of the bulk of users (and their general lack of knowledge), in a way that you can clearly reach them. Knowledge of actual capabilities and the full system can be a real curse in selling, because it makes everything too complicated and makes it hard to understand where 99% of your potential customers will be - which is complete ignorance of you, your product, and the space. And you have to make it easy for them to give you money, and use every opportunity you can to show your product and how it helps people, or you’re wasting visibility and leads you’ll never get back. This thread is obviously helping you, and I never cry over the past. Future posts could be even better (and get you more revenue) with a bit more work on some very minor (time wise) details. I did make a prior employer a bit under half a billion ARR by identifying the need for, starting, and then leading an effort that fixed some similar (but not as severe from what I can tell) challenges for one of their products. This was from within Engineering as an Engineer and later senior Eng leadership. They did have a more established product and presence. Unfortunately, I am also busy getting my third startup moving and this week and next are not great for taking on anything new. A friend of mine who is very low BS and has given me some useful (and brutally direct) feedback that I’ve personally found invaluable is Naeem Zafar [https://www.naeemzafar.com/ https://www.naeemzafar.com/]. He’s done a lot of books and classes on various elements (mostly so he doesn’t have to keep repeating himself). I’d be curious what you learn if you go through the 7 Steps to a Successful Startup ebook. It’s only about 30 pages, quite to the point, and $10. It may help you structure some of what you have now in a way that may point out the gaps in the skill sets on your team and the structure that could help you. It may not. I don’t really use Twitter, but I’ll put it on my list to reach out in a couple weeks and see if any of this was helpful. I’ll make sure to mention this thread. Best of luck! Making a viable business is one of life’s greatest challenges and you’re showing good promise.