5 ms·

I feel like I've been in quicksand for the last year. I've built something that my cofounder and I are using internally for remote collaboration, along with a c

by _teyd 5y ago

I feel like I've been in quicksand for the last year. I've built something that my cofounder and I are using internally for remote collaboration, along with a couple support people, and it's great. But none of us have been able to figure out how to talk about it in a way that generates interest. This is really hard if you're more of a natural builder than a seller.

Flankk 5y ago
You should have a deep understanding of why your product exists. Other people don't, they only see what is on the surface. I recommend Start With Why for more on this idea. Sales is a bunch of smoke and mirrors. It's the difference between remote collaboration software and sipping a pina colada in the shade while enjoying the ocean breeze.
hluska 5y ago
Hey friend, I understand exactly where you’re coming from. When I started high school in the 90s, my stutter was such that you would have had a lot of trouble understanding me. When I started building stuff, marketing seemed like voodoo. I learned. And frankly, I was so inept that if I can learn, you’re going to be an expert. You’ve got this. Seriously, you’ve got this. I’d put my last dollar on you because you’ve got this. If you’d like some advice, think back to when you were learning how to write code. You wrote some monstrosities that you likely wouldn’t write today. But that was okay because you were learning. Think about marketing the same way. You don’t have to be perfect because you’re learning so just chill and have some fun. Tactically, approach marketing like you’re learning a totally new programming paradigm. Try something, test it and measure. For example, you’re in a thread right now with a lot of hackers. One of whom is writing a message to try to encourage you. Now might be a really good time to put a link to your product. You might not get any traffic. In that case, this was a really bad marketing tactic. You may get traffic and zero sales. In that case, this was a really good exposure campaign but remember that people die of exposure. You may get traffic and some sales. If that happens, you can deduce that something about the link or where you have placed it (on HN in general or on this thread in particular) is powerful. There’s a piece of data for you. Try it out and see what happens. Worst case scenario, blame me and the shitty fucking school that gave me a marketing degree. Best case scenario, we’re going to have a party when you go over a million in revenue. You’ve got this. I believe in you. If you’re here, you’re more than intelligent enough. You’ve got this. It’s not even a matter of belief in you, it’s fact. You’ve got this. Share that beautiful, perfect product. (Note - the second you start to share it, the market may tell you it’s neither perfect nor beautiful. That’s a very good sign. Anyone can build something fit to be ignored. It takes one hell of a good team to build something that people will shit all over.) :) (Note 2 - Chill and have fun.)
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Big difference is, you can try inputting code into a compiler all day. But opportunities to sell are few and far between.
- j4yav 5y ago
  I love this reply, thank you!
nicoburns 5y ago
What makes it better than what’s out there? There are a lot of tools in this space!
- j4yav 5y ago
  It's designed from the ground up for async collaboration and focus (you collaborate on decisions like you might an issue, rather than interruptive chat discussions or worse, meetings.) It's based on how I saw collab work at a unicorn I worked at that was doing remote work well pre-pandemic, and that I've seen replicated elsewhere. However, it feels very foreign to people who haven't experienced that. What I've seen is you don't really "get" it until you try it, and getting people to try it is really hard. I suspect there's some correct way I can talk about it that helps people see the value more quickly, but I haven't figured it out yet.
  - mdorazio 5y ago
    > It's designed from the ground up for async collaboration and focus (you collaborate on decisions like you might an issue, rather than interruptive chat discussions or worse, meetings.) This doesn’t really tell me anything. Can you provide a real-world example of how it would work on a project? Is there a ~10 second video or gif of it in action? Or even more basic, what specifically made you angry enough with existing tools that you felt the need to create this? What did you want to do that you couldn’t? (And please avoid the term async in your explanation - it will help you be clearer).
    - _teyd 5y ago
      The app has a list of topics that anyone can add to. Each topic has a due date so you know when it is wrapping up, and they also have an explicit context and outcome; the topic creator sets the context, and the outcome is the bit that everyone collaborates on by editing together/using the discussion thread. Once the topic is done and a decision made, you lock the topic, saving the context, decision, and the discussion thread for later reference. It's better than Slack because it lets you engage with discussions more mindfully and across time zones, rather than as they come up in easy to miss and fragmented threads, and ensures that the decision is self-documenting when it's done. It's also better than something like Notion, an Issue, or Google Doc because it has better embedded conversation threads, and comes with the structure for separating context and decision. Everything else we tried was too free form, this brought just enough structure to get everyone on the same page and make decisions/discuss topics without getting in the way, while having some consistency to finding them and how the conversations were structured. Does this help? There is a video up at https://asyncgo.com https://asyncgo.com, but it suffers from how hard it has been to figure out how to talk about the app clearly.

by _teyd 5y ago

Flankk 5y ago

You should have a deep understanding of why your product exists. Other people don't, they only see what is on the surface. I recommend Start With Why for more on this idea. Sales is a bunch of smoke and mirrors. It's the difference between remote collaboration software and sipping a pina colada in the shade while enjoying the ocean breeze.

hluska 5y ago

Hey friend, I understand exactly where you’re coming from. When I started high school in the 90s, my stutter was such that you would have had a lot of trouble understanding me. When I started building stuff, marketing seemed like voodoo. I learned. And frankly, I was so inept that if I can learn, you’re going to be an expert. You’ve got this. Seriously, you’ve got this. I’d put my last dollar on you because you’ve got this. If you’d like some advice, think back to when you were learning how to write code. You wrote some monstrosities that you likely wouldn’t write today. But that was okay because you were learning. Think about marketing the same way. You don’t have to be perfect because you’re learning so just chill and have some fun. Tactically, approach marketing like you’re learning a totally new programming paradigm. Try something, test it and measure. For example, you’re in a thread right now with a lot of hackers. One of whom is writing a message to try to encourage you. Now might be a really good time to put a link to your product. You might not get any traffic. In that case, this was a really bad marketing tactic. You may get traffic and zero sales. In that case, this was a really good exposure campaign but remember that people die of exposure. You may get traffic and some sales. If that happens, you can deduce that something about the link or where you have placed it (on HN in general or on this thread in particular) is powerful. There’s a piece of data for you. Try it out and see what happens. Worst case scenario, blame me and the shitty fucking school that gave me a marketing degree. Best case scenario, we’re going to have a party when you go over a million in revenue. You’ve got this. I believe in you. If you’re here, you’re more than intelligent enough. You’ve got this. It’s not even a matter of belief in you, it’s fact. You’ve got this. Share that beautiful, perfect product. (Note - the second you start to share it, the market may tell you it’s neither perfect nor beautiful. That’s a very good sign. Anyone can build something fit to be ignored. It takes one hell of a good team to build something that people will shit all over.) :) (Note 2 - Chill and have fun.)

DarylZero 5y ago
Big difference is, you can try inputting code into a compiler all day. But opportunities to sell are few and far between.
j4yav 5y ago
I love this reply, thank you!

nicoburns 5y ago

What makes it better than what’s out there? There are a lot of tools in this space!

j4yav 5y ago
It's designed from the ground up for async collaboration and focus (you collaborate on decisions like you might an issue, rather than interruptive chat discussions or worse, meetings.) It's based on how I saw collab work at a unicorn I worked at that was doing remote work well pre-pandemic, and that I've seen replicated elsewhere. However, it feels very foreign to people who haven't experienced that. What I've seen is you don't really "get" it until you try it, and getting people to try it is really hard. I suspect there's some correct way I can talk about it that helps people see the value more quickly, but I haven't figured it out yet.
- mdorazio 5y ago
  > It's designed from the ground up for async collaboration and focus (you collaborate on decisions like you might an issue, rather than interruptive chat discussions or worse, meetings.) This doesn’t really tell me anything. Can you provide a real-world example of how it would work on a project? Is there a ~10 second video or gif of it in action? Or even more basic, what specifically made you angry enough with existing tools that you felt the need to create this? What did you want to do that you couldn’t? (And please avoid the term async in your explanation - it will help you be clearer).
  - _teyd 5y ago
    The app has a list of topics that anyone can add to. Each topic has a due date so you know when it is wrapping up, and they also have an explicit context and outcome; the topic creator sets the context, and the outcome is the bit that everyone collaborates on by editing together/using the discussion thread. Once the topic is done and a decision made, you lock the topic, saving the context, decision, and the discussion thread for later reference. It's better than Slack because it lets you engage with discussions more mindfully and across time zones, rather than as they come up in easy to miss and fragmented threads, and ensures that the decision is self-documenting when it's done. It's also better than something like Notion, an Issue, or Google Doc because it has better embedded conversation threads, and comes with the structure for separating context and decision. Everything else we tried was too free form, this brought just enough structure to get everyone on the same page and make decisions/discuss topics without getting in the way, while having some consistency to finding them and how the conversations were structured. Does this help? There is a video up at https://asyncgo.com https://asyncgo.com, but it suffers from how hard it has been to figure out how to talk about the app clearly.