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Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

• soumyadeb 5y ago
  Launch (instead of waiting for the perfect product) For us it was Show HN. But can be anything - Product Hunt, Redit, etc.
• skrish 5y ago
  Data segmentation. Segmentation of existing customers to find similar customers. With a reasonable number of paying customers there is always a sub segment who find you valuable. Wish we had invested more time finding more customers similar to that segment early on.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• probolsky 5y ago
  I became a specialist. In my industry there are a ton of general consultants. Some make millions, most get by. When I chose to specialize, not compete with the general consultants, but make all of them clients, that’s when business took off.
  • urthor 5y ago
    There's a reason all those consultants went general though isn't there? Historically speaking, building your practice as a specialist consultant is difficult. It works for certain niches only.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• auspex 5y ago
  Not being afraid to lose to learn… Reach out to customers with the MVP and just incorporate the feedback until the feedback changes from “we can’t use it because…” to “we need this integration” to “we need this pricing”
  • jasfi 5y ago
    It took me a while to learn/accept this point. But there are too many such points that founders need to know, or it kills the business. I'm now working on a web app to help founders build companies. I'm trying to pack it with useful advice such as this. https://cxo.industries https://cxo.industries
• paxys 5y ago
  Not my own business but from my experience at the B2B SaaS company I work for – Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will start eating your lunch unless you take that leap. It doesn't matter how smart your engineers are and how fully featured and bug free your product is. Unless you have a stellar sales team with the right leads who are pushing it on people with all their might, it is going nowhere.
  • paulstovell 5y ago
    This 100%! My experience here: https://twitter.com/paulstovell/status/1389881033470869504 https://twitter.com/paulstovell/status/1389881033470869504 This talk by Paul Kenny is a really good talk here about the value of the sales function even if you don't want the revenue: Paul Kenny: Selling Sales to Techies (2010): https://vimeo.com/96703844 https://vimeo.com/96703844
    • enraged_camel 5y ago
      Hey, thank you for this. Can I pick your brain about it sometime? I couldn't find contact info in your profile - my email is ege at pricetable dot io edit: why am I getting downvotes...
      • paulstovell 5y ago
        Thanks! My DM's are open, or paul at [my HN handle].com, happy to talk to anyone making this transition.
        • MathCodeLove 5y ago
          Does HN have DM's?? The client I use at least doesn't show them anywhere.
• buzzard1 5y ago
  • MisterMower 5y ago
    Which kind did you get?
    • bendbro 5y ago
      Please downvote me for the sin of laughing at this.
      • system2 5y ago
        I snorted.
  • mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    Were you specifically discriminating against minorities before you "decided" to hire them? That would be illegal in a lot of countries
    • giorgioz 5y ago
      I think this question should have been formulated in a less punishing tone. Either (s)he started to hire minorities EVEN more because they had some advantage. Either if (s)he was discriminating them before but (s)he realized the mistake pointing out what was doing was wrong it's not useful given (s)he tellin it already and it might only make the person assume a defensive position about the previous stance.
      • mohanmcgeek 5y ago
        No matter, race still seems to be a criteria in their hiring process and that's.. racist.
        • giorgioz 5y ago
• soupsranjan 5y ago
  1. When we started to specialize in a vertical and created the narrative and the product for that vertical. This is esp. true in domains with many legacy players. 2. For some reason or the other, we have always had delays in announcing our fundraising rounds: both Seed and Series A announcements were delayed by 3-6 months. The moment we announced, we got a step magnitude more inbound customers. Lesson here is to not be a perfectionist and be willing to share the company/product publicly earlier, so you can incorporate customer feedback early. PS: If it helps provide context for (1) above, our domain is fraud prevention; and we focused on payment fraud for Fintechs/Crypto instead of going after generalized fraud prevention across all categories like ecommerce.
  • buzzard1 5y ago
    There's no causal relationship between the extra 3-6 months per round and the revenue increase?
• kcplate 5y ago
  I second this one… I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.
  • Kiro 5y ago
    My first customer was a friend. They told other people and it snowballed through word of mouth. I haven't spent any time or energy on marketing and have no salespeople.
  • exclusiv 5y ago
    Trello. Word. Excel. Gmail.
    • BoysenberryPi 5y ago
      > Word. Excel. Microsoft absolutely has sales people for the B2B side of Microsoft Office constantly shilling Office 365. This absolutely doesn't sell itself.
      • ethbr0 5y ago
        And even ignoring the modern sales, it's arguable they were so good at sales in the 90s (when there were far more competitors) that they created the modern Office situation.
    • fphhotchips 5y ago
      Reformed salesperson here, you're 1 for 4, and Trello really should only get half a point because they've given up massive swathes of their addressable market to others (Wrike, Asana, Monday). Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world. Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work. Google has a long term channel based sales model, and a newer but rapidly growing direct enterprise sales team. They're constantly trying to get GApps in against the aforementioned behemoth MS team.
      • 5y ago
• eigilsagafos 5y ago
  Me and my two co-founders are asking ourselves this all the time, and in retrospect every strategic change could have happened sooner if we had learnt faster and kept “doing things that don’t scale” as PG famously wrote years ago. The funny thing is that we think we are doing great in that regard only to realize again and again that we have to iterate faster and stop the urge to prematurely optimize for scale. Our latest learning that we retrospectively should have seen earlier is to get rid of our fear of becoming consultants. We come from a consultancy background and have seen to many startups around us wanting to build products, but taking on consultancy assignments leaving them no time to build their product. We have been so determined not to fall into that trap, realizing now that we have missed out on some great opportunities when selling to enterprises.
  • antoniuschan99 5y ago
    Are you saying to take on the consultancy contracts? I fall into that trap as the consultancy contracts are essentially my day job. Also the contracts and my product don’t have anything related to each other :(
    • hvidgaard 5y ago
      Until your startup is a full on company with multiple hires, consultancy work is revenue and can be a source of other business ideas that you might hire people for and make into another reliable revenue stream. I know a handful of people who started with creating websites, then took some consultancy work and now have an entire different software company. They used those two things as a bootstrap to get going with opportunities that presented.
      • berkes 5y ago
        We've recently come across this conundrum too. But we chose to forego the "consultancy" jobs. Reason is that we optimize for learning (we're at that stage). And while consultancy may look like a good opportunity for learning, that it allows you to get paid for investigating the real problem domain of your customers it is not optimised for that. Far from it. My decades of consultancy and freelancing experience has told me that it always takes longer to implement the solution than to identify the problem. Implementing is a great opportunity for learning the details of the problem, sure. But Implementing also eats vast amounts of time to "Horizontally center that Div on the Dashboard": any non-trivial, time-consuming but utterly uninteresting for our startup. I really don't want to spend two weeks implementing another authz/authn integration and login flow for a consulting customer. When in those two weeks I can interview at least three other customers. Esp. because authn/authz is but a detail to our startup, and has nothing to do with our domain.
• yesimahuman 5y ago
  Moved up market and started selling to enterprise. Go where the money is.
  • pingeroo 5y ago
    I'm in the process of doing this now with my first enterprise meeting coming up this week. Could you share more insight on the shift from D2C to B2B? What challenges did you face while making this transition and how did you combat them?
    • yesimahuman 5y ago
      The hardest thing is product. If you are starting with a product that is focused on non-enterprise users, you aren't going to have product on day one, and often what enterprises need is quite different from what startups or indies or consumers need. So, step one is doing a lot of discovery and talking with the market to figure out what to build. Beyond that, scaling up a GTM engine (sales, marketing, customer success, etc) is a multi-year effort but it's a bit more formulaic than product, so there are a lot of resources and people out there you can hire to help you with that. Not a strength of mine so I lean on our COO and the rest of the team for that part so I can focus on product.
• themanmaran 5y ago
  Marketing. The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales. No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/ https://rysolv.com/. In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever way to 10x, or make it go viral. A big motivator was Paul Graham's "do things that don't scale" post [1]. So we just sat down and talked to people. [1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
  • rosenjcb 5y ago
    My CEO spends half of his time acting as a sales rep, writing blogs, hosting workshops, et cetera. Honestly this would overwhelm me after a while and I'm glad he's there to do the job.
  • sdoering 5y ago
    I could not agree more. I still find it difficult to talk about me providing services to others. I find it difficult, but once I do the pipeline opens up. I was actually overwhelmed last year (my first as a freelancer on the side) and will scale back a bit to strengthen the foundations a bit better this year - but actually talking to people and when doing so always trying to create a little bit of value for them (and be it by 'oh now you mention that you need x, Paul over there is great and is actually looking for a way to sell x). I am part of a business network and currently am working on providing a free short workshop for the people with online shops in basics about usability and conversion optimization. It will already provide them with the tools to make their shops better and also act as a marketing tool for deeper work on that topic with them (or a few of them). And in parallel, as I am compiling the materials nonetheless I also will create additional ways to use the content in blog posts, Instagram and by creating checklists for others as a way to build an email list. So this next to a day job and client work will probably be enough for me this year in marketing and business development work. Let's see what comes of it. [Edit typo]
  • Crazyontap 5y ago
    I kinda expected this as the top comment. It's just so simple stupid yet it's a wonder that a lot of people discover it the hard way and most still haven't. I think it just comes down to fear of rejection in the end. Making a product, adding features, working on things and even showing your "cool" demo to friends isn't same as asking strangers for money.. because people can say a million nice things about what you have to offer until you ask them to put in their credit card number. Then the you get to know what they really think.
• awb 5y ago
  Ran a web agency from ‘08-‘13, grew it to 20 FTEs fully remote then sold it. A few accelerants: 1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the US. 2) Started replacing myself by hiring multiple managers, which helped when I sold the business as it was no longer just about me. 3) Converted long-term clients to pre-paid retainer billing with helped create predictable workloads and revenue streams.
  • maxrev17 5y ago
    This sounds great, but in the UK the tax implications mean sadly it is better to retain money in a business and drip feed it over retirement :p haha
  • throwaway1777 5y ago
    First one doesn’t work anymore with remote being so common they demand the same wages as everywhere else.
    • urthor 5y ago
      It works. These days the secret is you have to hire the good South Americans. Exploit the fact corporate America hasn't caught on to routing contracts through Upwork et al. Then don't get greedy, keep the TCE delta below 20%, so they stay more than 9 months. You can take your pick of the finest FOSS contributors Guinea and Paraguay have to offer. -------------------------------------------------------- Startup engineering management is so simple. Buy a copy of Mythical Man Month. Read it, read it again. Then re-read chapter 3. Get two of the best, your Captain and your Copilot. Encourage them to hire a pimply faced minion to edit the config files so they feel important, and so you avoid single point of dependency. These days, get someone else who lives in Estonia/Ukraine/Sri Lanka for follow the sun support. If you need more than two engineers + 2 assistants, you should have hired smarter engineers. ------------------------------------------------------- Your secret path to success with international hiring is to avoid any country you know the name of. Don't think you're thinking out of the box hiring from Brazil/Israel. Hunt down a decent dev from Ghana or Georgia. If my Slack/Discord buddies are anything to go by, there's an extraordinary amount of gems out there who've made the choice to raise their kids in their home countries. There's good talent in Thailand as well. RIP my friend the Thai data/cloud principal eng banking 14k USD.
• annadane 5y ago
  Added rocket engines to the base
  • annadane 5y ago
    It was a joke, lighten up
    • smegsicle 5y ago
      it was a downmod, lighten up!
• DecayingOrganic 5y ago
  Marketing, sales people, and such are all great but if you don't have product-market fit yet, you're beating up a dead horse here by focusing on growth. One of the first things I do when starting a new SaaS is setting up an event tracker (think mixpanel). At this stage, you barely have any users so no need for fancy analytics stuff. I just stare at the event log until I figure stuff out. Why are they not clicking on that button? Why are they skipping this card? Lots and lots of problems can be discovered and tracked by this way. After all this, if I have a weekly user retention hovering around 30%, I can't be more happy. Then it's time to grow.
  • StillBored 5y ago
    Back, when I did heavyweight GUI development, I went onsite for the first few customer installs and watched the customers operate the system (usually after fixing some bug LoL). Those always gave me basic UI tweaking ideas, but the real lightbulbs would come on when I asked questions like "why didn't you just do X instead of Y" or "how would you change this to make it easier". Or various other generic questions, the answers were frequently enlightening about how to tweak training materials or the UI, but I usually got one or two killer ideas that were more significant and ended up being the kinds of things later users would rave over. So, I can't help but think you missing the most important changes if your not actually talking to the end users about what they are thinking or why they are doing particular actions that aren't always what you expect.
    • DecayingOrganic 5y ago
      You’re absolutely right, I do need to spend more time with users and really listen to them. It’s just my ego doesn’t want to be hurt so it feels safer just looking at the event log lol
      • can16358p 5y ago
        Agreed. The best example for this is Hallway usability testing: give the app/website to someone random walking the hallway and watch them try to navigate the interface and analyze what they easily do and what they can't understand. When we develop products we (all the team) tend to get used to knowing where is each functionality and how to use them, but someone unfamiliar might just not find what we "simply" find.
• olivertaylor 5y ago
  Interview your customers and ask them what their biggest problems are, and why they like you. Find and interview people who aren’t YET your customers and ask them why they aren’t.
• camhart 5y ago
  Marketing. Raise prices.
• artembugara 5y ago
  We’re ~17k MRR right now. Being doing it for almost 2 years. What made us take off is I and my cofounder running through our savings. I did it for ~15 months. One thing I had to start doing earlier is not trying to get everyone buy our product (we sell news articles published online as a source of data for insight mining) [0] I’ve lost so much time on people who’d never be able to use what we have unless we completely change our product. And yeah, marketing is super important. And, it’s going to take some time. [0] https://newscatcherapi.com https://newscatcherapi.com
• winrid 5y ago
  Add enterprise-y features without alienating small/middle market customers, and then charging out the ass for it. People are very happy with it, too, as long as we provide good support.
  • jcims 5y ago
    I work for an enterprise-y and this is good advice. Feature-wise a decent audit log and single sign-on are table stakes. If you don't have those we keep looking, but those shouldn't impact your SME customer focus at all and are things that can be upcharged for (particularly the latter). Core value features available via API is also super important because we absolutely aren't going to be logging into your UI. Again something that can trigger differentiated pricing. SOC2 is one of those non-functional requirements that can open up markets for you but you're going to pay for in time and energy. If enterprise-y is on your horizon I suggest at least understanding it so you don't make decisions that are counterproductive. But wait until you start to hear the music before you get up to dance with that one...it can be a pain.
    • winrid 5y ago
      What questions do you ask around the audit log? We audit a lot of things but it'd be a good idea to improve that if we can. Thanks enterprise-y person. :)
      • jcims 5y ago
        Basically? who, what, when, were, why and how. AWS CloudTrail is far from perfect but it has been battle tested as much as any SaaS audit log out there. Who: userIdentity.arn What: requestParameters.*, responseElements.* When: eventTime Where: sourceIPAddress, sourceVpce, userAgent Why: userIdentity.issuer/rolesession How: eventName, eventSource Baller move is to include internal ops actions in your log. Main thing is to think of it as a product rather than an a feature. People don't want 10 different audit logs...everything should flow through it. With CloudTrail this extensibility comes through the requestParameters/responseElements sections. Most of the schema is fixed but in these sections its service-specific. In terms of integration, push audit via webhook or various cloud event/message brokers is ideal, but at bare minimum the customer needs to be able to ingest that data wholesale to integrate with their security stack.
• sir_pepe 5y ago
  If just being self-employed counts and raising the bottom line counts as "take off": I should have made my services much more expensive much sooner. I less than 40% percent of potential customers balk at your rate, it's time to give yourself a raise.
• hackernws21 5y ago
• hackernws21 5y ago
  • crackercrews 5y ago
    Hm, new account posts the same comment here multiple times. Makes me wonder if he's the editor of this website and is following his own advice...
• marketingplayer 5y ago
  Marketing, mostly SEO. Sooner you plant some seeds, sooner the results will come. And I like the compound effect of it.
• n-e-w 5y ago
  Honestly, the two best things you can hire once you have some minimal traction are the best lawyer you can afford and the best accountant / business manager you can afford. The third bit of advice is just something you should tattoo inside your eyelids: cash is king. Now, on with the first two. "Hiring the best you can afford" doesn't mean hiring the best brand (Skadden. PwC etc). Find the person with the best technical expertise relevant to what you're pursuing. They're often stars from those shops who've gone out on their own -- just like you did. Why? Don't you want to spend your money on a star engineer or great marketing? No. Because you're in this game to win. And winning these days (whether going for an exit or, you know, an actual profitable business) needs you to have at least the following: (1) Not make (or, more likely, not know how to avoid) stupid mistakes or ill-advised moves legally. (2) Not screw up the administration of your business Even if you do everything else right, errors in either 1 or 2 can prove fatal. Like, literally, you will lose everything. Good lawyers are like good soldiers these days. You don't go to war without soldiers. And you don't do modern business without the best legal help you can get. Even in the most advantageous, optimistic, friendly scenario, run it by an attorney who knows their stuff. First. During. Last. Or wander onto the battlefield with people who outgun you. You've been warned. Next: good business administrators are worth their weight in gold. It is a distinct skill and some people really are called to love and be good at book-keeping, accounting, cash flows etc. Do not screw yourself on taxes, audits, book-keeping, invoices slipping through cracks, agreements not being fulfilled or anything in the "admin of business" that keeps you from staying laser focused on you do well -- which is not business admin. Finally -- remember, business is business. Repeat it to yourself early and often. Business is business. The VC who seemed really friendly and just "gets you"? Business is business. That particular contract term that just doesn't sit right with you -- but the person on the other side keeps telling you not to worry about it? Business is business. Your cofounder is your best friend but now they're not pulling their quota? Business is business. This isn't being machiavellian. It's that everyone will be applying it to you. Ultimately, good lawyers and good business administrators will ensure that you remember "business is business". Don't leave things to chance. Don't trust. Don't be emotional . Business is business and if you're not controlling your agenda, someone will be controlling it for you. There's enough sh*t in business you can't control. At least stay in control of what you can.
  • 5y ago
• zuhayeer 5y ago
  Invest in SEO early. And I mean invest all the way, including all the different structured metadata into all of your pages to get your website to appear the best on search results [1]. The long tail and residual effects of it get pretty insane. [1] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/get-started https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
  • phasersout 5y ago
    a more comprehensive roadmap regarding SEO https://learningseo.io https://learningseo.io
  • pawelwentpawel 5y ago
    I second that. SEO is a slow growing channel and it takes some time to get effects. Starting earlier can help out. Also, make sure that your page loads fast - especially the content that you are trying to index. Low hanging fruit like optimising image size or cleaning up your imports can have a big effect. When just starting out with little backlinks, good page speed loads can be the differentiator that will put you ahead. Use https://pagespeed.web.dev https://pagespeed.web.dev to check how fast your website loads.
    • qwerty456127 5y ago
      > Also, make sure that your page loads fast To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?
      • SXX 5y ago
        Actually this isn't always the case. Some people just make mistake of using few mbs of some high-quality PNGs on their landing pages which can be much worse than just mere JS framework bundle. Also both Angular and React are not as heavy as one might expect, but 3rd-party components might bring tons of unnecessary deps.
      • martin_a 5y ago
• can16358p 5y ago
  Not exactly "business" from a company perspective, but: Learning Solidity. I've been in crypto space for a long time, always wanted to learn Solidity to write contracts, but always postponed. Played with some toy code in the past years and that was it. Recently got back in the scene and saw how many new business opportunities it opens and how financially feasible they are now I hate myself for not going more serious in crypto and Solidity in the past years. Anyway, later is better than never. (Which applies to pretty much everything in life)
  • arkmm 5y ago
    Any resources you'd recommend for someone trying to get back into the scene after a long hiatus? Looking for nuanced/informative discussions without too much hype.
    • can16358p 5y ago
      Sure. I'd suggest getting into Discord communities, of course not "shitcoins" and "ponzi-like tokens" but the ones that do actual developments for NFT platforms, DeFis, DAOs and blockchain gaming (which I personally believe has a great future). Learning Solidity for EVM-based chains and Rust (my next personal goal) for Solana is a good start. A toy NFT project (or whatever interests you) on your local chain might be a nice start to get used to the mechanics.
  • Zealotux 5y ago
    How do you get opportunities in that scene? Do you get paid in cash or cryptocurrencies? Aren't you afraid of an eventual impending crash of the markets? I also thought of learning about so-called smart-contracts but I'm skeptical of investing time in something that looks like it could crash any day, or maybe I'm just missing a big opportunity.
    • fragmede 5y ago
      Crash of which market, stocks or housing? ;) There’s always a reason not to do something. In this case, if you listen to the naysayers, the market has both already crashed (BTC’s only $43k?) and has yet to crash (BTCs inherent value is $0). If you listen to its proponents, btc’s gonna be worth $200k, just hodl until next year, so you'd be stupid not to get in on it. The real question is what’s the opportunity cost of learning about the smart contract ecosystem? If you’re a back end developer and you're going to learn frontend development or something else that’s going to open up new career paths in the next few months instead, then your next steps are worth a second thought. If you're just going to be drinking beer and playing video games then might as well try and learn about smart contracts.
• endymi0n 5y ago
  To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner: "The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people are still waiting for customers." Let's say I've have been having kicked my ass more than I can count on some beliefs I've had, but I yet have to regret working with him.
  • Softcadbury 5y ago
    Guys, you learned nothing ! You are the top comment on HN, you should share the link to your project :)
    • raverbashing 5y ago
      Remember the ABCs A - Always B - Be C - Selling That is, seize the opportunities of presenting your work and your company.
      • eej71 5y ago
        I'll be that guy. Actually it's Always Be Closing. Obligatory Glenngary Glen Ross scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7y6EOGY87U&t=104s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7y6EOGY87U&t=104s
        • faeyanpiraat 5y ago
          Watch it from the beginning, its great
        • raverbashing 5y ago
          Yes ;) But in the context, selling makes more sense than closing.
        • marginalia_nu 5y ago
• fxtentacle 5y ago
  "Commoditize your complement" I had hosting issues in many of my companies and consulting projects, running from "WTF is this AWS bill $10k???" to "WTF did our 10gbit/s download just kick Heroku offline?" But people can only appreciate the things I build for them if they are hosted well. So I took the obvious next step and purchased a small struggling hosting company. We then introduced nicer tooling that imitates the AWS and Heroku APIs if possible, to make using their servers as easy as possible for me. And now I can offer managed hosting to all of my consulting clients. For them, it's slightly cheaper prices and (in contrast with AWS and Heroku) they can just call me when things don't work. And for me, it's reliable high-margin revenue.
  • MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
    How were you able to purchase a hosting company? Is your consulting business that big?
    • qeternity 5y ago
      There are thousands upon thousands of hosting companies out there, most of which are barely breaking even, and are sold often for not much money.
      • fxtentacle 5y ago
        This. They were struggling to find enough customers to break even. I had the customers but lacked the hosting knowledge and technology.
        • swah 5y ago
          Just to understand: did you buy any actual hardware? Or "hosting company" means services on top of another hosting company that actually has hardware somewhere?
          • fxtentacle 5y ago
• trwhite 5y ago
• lbriner 5y ago
  Be ruthless about hiring and your team. Think about recruitment early on to work out how you can get the right people to do the jobs. As someone said, "if you think hiring a good person is expensive, try hiring a bad one". Plan for how to get rid of people who are not working out (easier in some countries than others). Be super focused. It is easy to chase the money in similar but different directions and then you lack a coherent business strategy or brand. We burned time building a hardware-based version of our product, which we didn't want long-term, because a customer had money. Took about 3 months of the entire company's time and we never saw any of that money. Honestly evaluate your product/service constantly, but especially in the early days. Is it really something that can be sold or is it low-value and low-volume? Do people want it or need it? You need to believe in your product enough to charge the right amount (usually more than you are charging) otherwise you send the wrong message to customers and possibly cannot afford to support it if it becomes popular. Think in terms of what you are saving your customer rather than how much it seems like it should cost for a e.g. piece of software. I would disagree with some of the comments below. Marketing is important but not necessarily early on and not necesarily involving hiring someone. Same with SEO. Can be useful but very market segment dependent. Instead, the one skill of the CEO is to see what is working and what isn't and to deal with it. If you can see a funnel with nothing coming in the top, maybe you do need marketing. On the other hand, if you get the leads but can't close anything, you either have a product or a sales problem.
• gigantecmedia 5y ago
  Stop obsessing with VC money. Focus on winning customers' hearts and souls. Do things that don't scale (but bring food to the table). Most importantly, keep your optionality, which is the ability to pivot to whatever the market needs, not YOU or YOUR TEAM or YOUR INVESTOR needs.
• franze 5y ago
  for freelancers / consultants: counter-cyclical marketing start your marketing sprint when you already have a s##tload of work. otherwise you will always have a cycle of "too much work <> no work" + lots of stress because of that. you need to start hussling way before the "no work" phase. and that timespan always overlaps with the "too much work" phase.
• thom 5y ago
  I’ll give the exact opposite of what you ask, just because we could easily have chosen not to do it. Our business was initially built on analysing data from a commercial provider and selling those insights to customers. The provider required that both we and each of our customers paid a high license fee. It became pretty clear that the provider was moving towards lots of tools and value added features on top of their data that would directly compete with us. At that point we had the choice to either work hard to keep differentiating our stuff, or do the crazy thing and attack their moat by collecting our own data. I will admit I was somewhat doubtful that we could pull it off, it was insanely ambitious for a company that was four people at the time against an incumbent that had been around for more than a decade. Ultimately we worked with another small provider to create a data spec, acquired them and all their human collectors, and now we sell our tools on top of our own data, with its own unique selling points. We went from a fun hobby to a fairly prominent player in our industry. Our competitors have gone on to consolidate and do some exciting stuff too so I hope we were a bit of a kick up the bum there. I think we could easily have chickened out or waited until we were bigger and the outcome would not have been nearly as positive. So I guess the lesson is sometimes that you have to picture the endgame right from the start, and pursue it as aggressively as possible, instead of with baby steps that might feel safer or more natural.
  • lootsauce 5y ago
    I’m interested what is your site?
    • isoprophlex 5y ago
      check their profile! about: CTO @ StatsBomb. Sports analytics - computer vision, data science, stream processing, data viz. Always hiring: https://statsbomb.com/careers/ https://statsbomb.com/careers/
• wolframhempel 5y ago
  Creating an on-premise version of our product for enterprises (as opposed to a pure SaaS version) Turns out there is still a lot of money in selling technology to large enterprises that they can host and run themselves on an annual licensing model. We were initially afraid of the long and high-touch enterprise sales cycles, complex procurement processes and enterprise integration requirements (complex permissions, LDAP auth, audit trails etc.) and thus wanted to do a simpler SaaS version with a monthly plan. But I learned that if you start on the enterprise angle early, you can get some incredibly sticky customers with five, six or even seven figure annual license payments and very predictable cashflows you can raise or borrow against.
  • ackbar03 5y ago
    How do you deal with maintenence and stuff? Do you need on-site engineers? With SaaS you can just do it remotely but if it's on site you need to send someone over I guess
    • 8b16380d 5y ago
      A previous org did it with a tarball and install/upgrade script. Docker is also more prevalent, so handing them an image may work well too.
      • ryall 5y ago
        We did both, customer got an iso image with a single line install command. The installer would automatically download all the docker containers and lock the system down. Since this was the customer’s initial impression (and we wanted the IT gatekeepers to be happy), we strove to get installation as close to turn-key as possible
    • wolframhempel 5y ago
      Given that our customers were global and wanted help quickly, screen sharing was usually the way to go. In addition the server logged any error to a local file the customer sent over when reporting an incident. One thing I feel is really important is to have an actual person with an email address receive these and reply to them - rather than a ticketing system. This personal connection does wonders in maintaining a good relationship with the customer, especially if things go wrong.
• k__ 5y ago
  Marketing is very important. Keep in mind, people need to learn about your app before they install it, not after. Sales is only important if you're doing B2B, and even then I would be cautious, because sales people are sly. If you aren't careful, they sooth your board and suddenly you will be replaced by one of them.
• flurly 5y ago
  I used to immediately launch on Hacker News, Reddit, Product Hunt, etc. the moment I finished my side projects. The problem I found with this approach is 1. Often times the product is a leaky bucket, and you experience a massive spike in traffic and very quickly see your growth asymptotically approach zero. 2. These platforms often times also are filled with people waiting to abuse your platform. For flurly, all of my original fraud problems originated from my product hunt launch. Thus for GraphJSON, I went with a different approach. I shared my progress on my twitter account and mostly had my builder friends use the product. Over the past 6 months, the product has continually improved due to the constant feedback of this community. Word naturally spreads and so does the growth.
  • e12e 5y ago
    That's https://www.graphjson.com/guides/about https://www.graphjson.com/guides/about ? Looks quite interesting - nice to see someone else thinking (and realizing) that you could go a long way with clickhouse + search/filter/visualization.
    • flurly 5y ago
      Yes! Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions! Would love to get your feedback on the product.
  • hardwaresofton 5y ago
    > For flurly, all of my original fraud problems originated from my product hunt launch. I think it might be time to stop using Product Hunt for me. I find that I reliably get email spam after posting projects there. Along with the spam, there's usually little to no useful feedback.
• simmo9000 5y ago
  Establish what "trust" is. The play-by rule-book. My approach has mostly been to get out of the way of what I don't know and hold on whilst having blind trust. Like riding a horse, hold on and give direction of the course with balance of freedom to run. Give more freedom and get more trust and enjoy the exhilaration, however hold the reins too tight and you will be fighting all the way. Walk the tightrope so to speak. Know if you give too much freedom it will buck you off and run for the hills, however, if you can maintain the balance of direction and trust, good things will come. One go I had was a communications service provider in the naughties that went from zero to 20 mill revenue in one year and it did alright in the end, but with hindsight, I can see so many better ways that almost everything could have been handled. In my opinion, the main problem that most businesses experience is TRUST. (On every level) Without it there is no business. Business by definition is about more that one person so trust is imperative. Is trust equally mutual within your business? Can you quantify that trust? Can other staff in the business? And the customers? The board? The shareholders? If it is there with all parties than the world will be you oyster! If not, well that is just business. (But you should mitigate it to take care of your own future) Wicked growth makes the green eyes shine... Greed comes through the cracks everywhere. Not sure what can be done about this. Company Constitution? Culture? These are just ramblings of a semi-serial pseudo-successful entrepreneur. I apologise. I don't know any answers but I do know that 'trust' is one of the crucial key elements of a successful business. Trust between every party. Find the balance of trust between ALL steak-holders and get it ALL in writing. +2cents.
  • simmo9000 5y ago
    And... More importantly understand what YOU want! Set your goals as to what will make you happy. Idle ideas like "I want a house and a happy family" become flexible and then you will chase that flexibility. Make sure that when you realise, truly, your goals of "business", only then, you will be happy, accept, and at that point, if you desire, set a new goal. ( I <3 , ) Do not shift YOUR goalpost of what you define that "Take Off" moment is. 9.. 8.. 7..
  • dennis_jeeves 5y ago
• mrborgen 5y ago
  Charge for our product. I'm the founder of Scrimba.com, an interactive code-learning platform. We went almost two years from when we launched our very first free course until we launched our very first paid course. In the meanwhile, we planned the "perfect" business model and also pivoted to a Teams-based product for a while. Had I just dared to put up a pricing wall in front of our second course instead, we'd have gotten the signal we needed from the market much earlier. Once we started getting revenue, everything else became a lot easier (what to invest more in, which courses to prioritise, what to do in general).
  • superasn 5y ago
    Sometimes the free product helps you get traction during the initial hard phase of your business when nobody knows your name. A lot of businesses do this as a growing strategy so don't fully discount the backlinks, leads, social media it gave you.
    • rmbyrro 5y ago
      Freemium can work, but without VC it's really hard to sustain. For bootstrappers and small ventures, I'd rather spend the free subsidy in ads. If you do it right, it just works. I hate ads, but they work.
      • rozenmd 5y ago
        I learned this lesson the hard way - 11 months of freemium, decided to add a trial because "why not?" - now something like 95% of new users choose the trial of the Pro plan, instead of the free tier.
        • rmbyrro 5y ago
          Nice! Mind if I ask whether it improved conversion to paid and what was the impact to your CAC?
  • doitLP 5y ago
    I love your platform and I will happily pay for my next course there!
• mittermayr 5y ago
  I added a simple self-made affiliate system. It had two implementations. One allowed to purchase 10 or 20 "accounts" in bulk, resell for any price you want. And the other one meant that if two other people signed up for a free account, your account was moved up to the second level (basic, premium, pro). Once one of your referred accounts upgraded, then your account was moved up to the highest tier. I implemented that over a weekend and it took off dramatically after that.
  • dinkleberg 5y ago
    That’s interesting. Did you find both implementations were effective or was one more useful than the other?
    • mittermayr 5y ago
      Depends a bit on the clientele you're serving I guess. At first, the referral part (encourage others to upgrade your account) worked very well, I saw people either onboarding their other accounts, friends' accounts, or just heading straight to Twitter to let everyone know they're recommending the service (so their account would upgrade for free). So that brought users. The "buy in bulk" was silent for a while, until a few freelance social-media managers discovered that they could buy account slots for their clients in bulk here, and then charge their clients for that plus a fee on top (which I didn't regulate). So that surely brought the biggest chunks of purchases albeit irregularly so.
• rodmena 5y ago
  Automation, Change control management, IAM
• meet1906 5y ago
  Founder's personal brand What i mean here is that many a times customers employees and investors believe more on the founder's word and promises than the product or revenue model or anything else, so to make the world believe that even though not everything seems clear now but will be eventually or just getting those early set of loyal evangelisers for your application or your community, the founder's personal brand and his or her's personal brand in the market matters more For example - Kunal shah of cred or Ranveer Allahbadia of Monk E or Karan from Unacademy or Elon Musk per say, their companies get that initial set of customers or branding or even money per say, just because their founders have a respectable personal brand in the market As its said " you don't invest 100% in the product always, you invest in the leader building it "
• meet1906 5y ago
  Founder's Peronal Brand What I mean here is that surley marketing,Creating MVPs and all the other software development lifecycle principles matter but whats most important now is having faith in the leader building it and that surely depends on his or her's personal brand,if he or she has a good personal brand, then getting that loyal set of early paying loyal customers or your company's true evangelisers or your employee's personal idol or your investor's faith - everything gets scaled up when your name is a respectable name in the market Example Kunal shah from Cred - even though his product is still not halfway near to a profitable stage, people trust that this is possible because Kunal is building it or example elon musk, people know about tesla or paypal or spacex more because its elon's companies rather than having a good awesome product or marketing strategy (i agree tesla is awesome though xD) Be it getting the faith of your stakeholders, customers or team or just getting a respect from the market and at least the fact that your entry in the market becomes 90% more easier if you have a great personal brand and like its said "people trust people more than anything else and you achieve that trust by getting a respectable personal brand first and then shaping it out on the products you make or startups you incubate or invest in" And as said in india, investors invest in founders till serie a rounds rather than the product xD So I would go for personal brand of the founder is something which many founders don't think its important but is actually really helpful for a longer run :)
• jmacd 5y ago
  Experimenting with how we price the product and how we bundle/package our plans. With all other metrics in the business staying the same, it had a massive impact on cash flow and (eventually) profitability.
• wedgeantilles 5y ago
  Marketing
• holgersindbaek 5y ago
  It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them. One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed and improving SEO. A couple of years later, the site is now earning $10k+ a month .
  • oops 5y ago
    Really nice execution! How is it monetized though? I don't see any ads, only an "upsell" to a native app but it also appears to be free? Edit: I see the ad sidebar now. FYI on my first visit I played for several minutes and this never opened
    • TimLeland 5y ago
      I wonder if the delay is intentional so users start paying and want to finish. If they saw ads, they may immediately leave. Also ads can slow down a website load times so the delay may be for SEO.
    • holgersindbaek 5y ago
      It's intentional. The first 5 games are ad-free. Most of the ad-revenue are from people who stick, so I kind of try to give people the best experience the first 5 games.
      • dataexporter 5y ago
        Isn't that kind of like penalizing your regular - repeat customers?
        • bigprof 5y ago
          Except they are not his "customers", they are his product :)
• flippyhead 5y ago
  Read this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LE4SR32/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LE4SR32/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
• robhunter 5y ago
  Founders personally selling Can't outsource this or even hire for it in the early days Has to be the founders
• marmoure 5y ago
  keep a clean code base
• dan-jackson 5y ago
  1. find the right business partners 2. launch before its ready 3. getting our value proposition down to one sentence for each user type 4. seo instead of vanity marketing 5. freemium model instead of free or paid 6. listening to customer feedback 7. deliver tangible results to paid customers before fundraising 8. "do things that don't scale" to compete with large competitors who are focused on IRR and monetization
• bitexploder 5y ago
  Hired a business consultant. Built systems for sales, marketing, etc. Had real goals. Everything about growing a business is hard. The easier part was the actual consulting work. Still hard. We sold after building for 9 years with a good exit.
• jayolden 5y ago
  My answer is marketing, it is vital, and it would have been much better if we started marketing earlier.
• digitcatphd 5y ago
  I think for me it has been a couple things: 1. Focus: Adopting management by objectives and concentration exclusively on them 2. Hiring: Spending more time finding top talent through referrals and being more prepared for interviews
• taffronaut 5y ago
  I took a couple of sales training courses. One was an intro course for non-sales staff, and the other was for B2B selling with a longer sales cycle. Both very much helped with the social interaction side of selling, and the second one was very useful for structuring marketing approach and material.
  • OfflineSergio 5y ago
    What courses did you take? Is there any online one you recommend?
    • taffronaut 5y ago
      One was a Sandler course - an intro to sales for non-sales professionals. The other was Huthwaite SPIN. I find the SPIN Persuasive Case Analysis method very useful. Sandler was 1 day F2F and Huthwaite was via Zoom. I guess they all offer remote options now but IMHO a live/Zoom trainer is important as there's stuff you don't get first time, and there are often only cryptic error messages at best in real life situations.
• sema4hacker 5y ago
  Abandoning Macintosh for Windows. Released software for Mac in 1989, but sales stayed flat. Finally released for Windows in 1994, and sales took off. Time and money spent on marketing + engineering had a 10x better ROI under Windows. Gave up on Mac in 1999.
• mfrye0 5y ago
  Like other people mentioned, starting to market is the main one, but I think the bigger one was charging more for the product. I was charging close to nothing for our original product, and I can't tell you how many people would argue with us or try to haggle. As soon as we increased our pricing, we started landing bigger companies who just paid without any question and required little to no support. The memes are true about this sort of thing.
• daledugba23 5y ago
  use www.useairlock.com for follow up with prospects. Certainly accelerates pipeline closing.
• daledugba23 5y ago
• makeee 5y ago
  Charge more! My product[1] was originally free, then $49, then after a year I started to bump up the price more aggressively. It's now $249 and I probably should have started with that. Devs either aren't willing to pay for boilerplate code (happy with open-source options) or $249 is nothing to them if it saves a week of dev time. Last year I hit my goal of $100k in revenue :) 1. https://divjoy.com https://divjoy.com
• deedubaya 5y ago
  High-value B2B product. Magazine ads! Postcards! Care packages! It can be hard to stand out digitally. It's easy to stand out in a world of junk mail and generic scenic-beach-view-with-just-a-small-logo magazine ads though.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• hermitcrab 5y ago
  I've been writing and selling my own software on the web full time since 2005. On the whole it was a 1000 small improvements to the software, website and marketing that improved the sales day by day and year by year. Rather than a blinding flash of inspiration that tripled sales overnight. But probably the single best improvement in sales came when I 'segmented' my event table planning product from a single price to 3 different price points, with the top one 10x the original price. Some details at: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/02/28/how-i-increased-sales-by-adding-extra-price-points/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/02/28/how-i-increased-sa...
  • semireg 5y ago
    Agreed on the thousand small improvements. I now spend my days prioritizing work that will move the sales needle with the minimum amount of work.
• bharti13 5y ago
  [dead]
• motyar 5y ago
  Add a payment option / add "buy" button. https://bruzu.com https://bruzu.com was hobby project for months until I added plans. Now we have few customers nad I am taking it more seriously.
• JeanPierreK 5y ago
  Creating on-boarding training discussing the nuances of different parts of the business. I use teachable now since it's powerful and inexpensive in my opinion at 99 bucks a month. I know this already sounds like a paid promo for them but It's not. I run a blood testing company and we have 150,000 customers who are keen on improving their lifestyle and health. I've been running digital operations since 2004. And I WISH i had been smart enough to document each tiny nuance, tip, how to and share it. Makes learning faster, keeps new team members engaged and happy since they are more comfortable they are in turn less likely to quit, and you don't have to hold everyones hand as much or at all. I could write a book on other things. but 1 other massive improvement was selecting mission critical stats to come inbound to me automatically in slack. i.e. site down, checkout errors, sales revenue comparable to previous period, customer tickets, i never have to go look for it. I connected it all to slack in one way or another and i see it first thing each morning. It helps me spot issues before they become big problems and it feels like i can see around corners because you get the pulse of the business. Hope this helps. if you need some more help just email me jp AT jean-pierre.com fun fact: This is my first real comment in Hacker News, I figured after seeing so many articles that helped me over the years, I'd give back. Thank you Hacker News and Y Combinator for all the great stuff over the years.