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Great piece. I agree that revenue brings momentum, without it it's hard to know where you're going or if you're doing things right. I'd say especially as a tec

by toumhi 15y ago

Great piece. I agree that revenue brings momentum, without it it's hard to know where you're going or if you're doing things right. I'd say especially as a technical single founder (me), it's all too easy to focus on building features and having the mindset of "If I build 1 more feature, then they will come (and buy)." The real hard thing (for us) is to convince other people to buy. And that's probably something you should spend most of your time on: Figure out who your customers are. Figure out why they would buy. I know we have a tendency to spend time with what we're comfortable with (for me that would be coding and SEO). It takes real determination to do things that are hard to do and for which we have no clue. For me it would be cold calling and convincing businesses to buy my solution, since people arriving on my website seem to have other intentions in mind, for a reason I have yet to discover.

adii 15y ago
Being a (relatively) non-technical founder, I'm on the opposite of that spectrum though... I can conceptualize new ideas & business models, but don't have the skills to get it to MVP where I can convince a technical co-founder of the merits of the project and get them to join the team.
thhaar 15y ago
I'm in a similar boat to toumhi and the OP: semi-technical (basic PHP + CMS + outsourcing) with slight feature-creep and sales-sweats issues. Besides that, I'm a WooThemes customer[1] and have been amazed at how well their model has worked. I often mention this to my HTML-template/Dreamweaver 'website designer' friends, but I think WooThemes have nothing to worry about - they're too far ahead of the curve with too polished a product to need to worry about competition. The 37signals bootstrapped article is a great overview of their progress. So I try to emulate, only my users are not as web-savvy as WooThemes' users. It seems that more traditional sales channels must be used to overcome the chicken/egg userbase issues. But, I have time on my side, so I will persevere and hopefully manage to generate initial revenues one o' these days. [1] Highly recommended as a quick way to get family + friends set up with a very presentable web presence.

by toumhi 15y ago

adii 15y ago

Being a (relatively) non-technical founder, I'm on the opposite of that spectrum though... I can conceptualize new ideas & business models, but don't have the skills to get it to MVP where I can convince a technical co-founder of the merits of the project and get them to join the team.

thhaar 15y ago

I'm in a similar boat to toumhi and the OP: semi-technical (basic PHP + CMS + outsourcing) with slight feature-creep and sales-sweats issues. Besides that, I'm a WooThemes customer[1] and have been amazed at how well their model has worked. I often mention this to my HTML-template/Dreamweaver 'website designer' friends, but I think WooThemes have nothing to worry about - they're too far ahead of the curve with too polished a product to need to worry about competition. The 37signals bootstrapped article is a great overview of their progress. So I try to emulate, only my users are not as web-savvy as WooThemes' users. It seems that more traditional sales channels must be used to overcome the chicken/egg userbase issues. But, I have time on my side, so I will persevere and hopefully manage to generate initial revenues one o' these days. [1] Highly recommended as a quick way to get family + friends set up with a very presentable web presence.