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I know you didn't ask this way but I can tell you how NOT to do it and how to avoid a lot of pain. Don't just build the product in the hopes that people will c

I know you didn't ask this way but I can tell you how NOT to do it and how to avoid a lot of pain. Don't just build the product in the hopes that people will come to you. Aside from doing market Research et Al, it's equally important that you figure out if you will be able to "market" the product. If you don't have a thoroughly planned GTM strategy that's peer reviewed by people who understand your market, you might end up with a great solution but no access to potential buyers.

jensneuse 3y ago
An example would be if you target enterprise but know that enterprises would never buy from you because you're too small or not trustworthy, you need a way to overcome this hurdle. Or, you're targeting individuals but there's a competitor with $300M funding who owns all marketing channels. You might not be heard in the noise.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I once was the dev lead working for a mid size non tech company. The company found the perfect product to meet their needs. It was built by an Indy developer. If we signed the contract with him, we would represent 60% of his revenue. The director of IT and CTO were reticent to base their entire data capture system that was going to be rolled out to thousands of field workers to him. I suggested that they only sign the contract if the developer was willing to put their entire codebase in escrow and agree that we had a non exclusive right to the code under license. Everyone agreed and the lawyers talked and made it happen. I led a quarterly validation of the code in escrow. He would come onsite and I would watch him download the code from the escrow company and build it from scratch and deploy it and I would do a smoke test.
  - germinalphrase 3y ago
    Did this arrangement work out for everyone?
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      They gave him a shit ton of money and he started focusing more on the company’s needs. I had the idea from being on the other side. I worked for a small struggling startup 3 companies before then where our major customer had us do the same. When we were bought for scraps, the customer exercised the right to the escrow and the customer negotiated the rights from the acquiring company to let me work for them under contract. I made out like a bandit. I was one of the only three people in the world who knew how to compile and maintain the proprietary VB like mobile development platform - an SDK, a VM (something akin to the JVM)
  - moneywoes 3y ago
    What marketing channel did they use to find the dev?
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      He wasn’t a consultant. He wrote software that made it easy to develop data capture forms on iOS and Android. They had already done the initial contract before I got there. I was brought in as the dev lead for the next phase, integrations as we acquired companies, migrations, etc. I don’t know how they original found the software. But it became much more crucial as they expanded and the company I was working for was aiming to go public.
ilikerashers 3y ago
The counter to this is "analysis paralysis". Better to get good at building stuff than spend all your time trying to come up with the perfect product. I've seen people invest 100k+ and years in products that never had a market but I've also seen people invest no money and years in talking about "stuff".

jensneuse 3y ago

An example would be if you target enterprise but know that enterprises would never buy from you because you're too small or not trustworthy, you need a way to overcome this hurdle. Or, you're targeting individuals but there's a competitor with $300M funding who owns all marketing channels. You might not be heard in the noise.

scarface_74 3y ago
I once was the dev lead working for a mid size non tech company. The company found the perfect product to meet their needs. It was built by an Indy developer. If we signed the contract with him, we would represent 60% of his revenue. The director of IT and CTO were reticent to base their entire data capture system that was going to be rolled out to thousands of field workers to him. I suggested that they only sign the contract if the developer was willing to put their entire codebase in escrow and agree that we had a non exclusive right to the code under license. Everyone agreed and the lawyers talked and made it happen. I led a quarterly validation of the code in escrow. He would come onsite and I would watch him download the code from the escrow company and build it from scratch and deploy it and I would do a smoke test.
- germinalphrase 3y ago
  Did this arrangement work out for everyone?
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    They gave him a shit ton of money and he started focusing more on the company’s needs. I had the idea from being on the other side. I worked for a small struggling startup 3 companies before then where our major customer had us do the same. When we were bought for scraps, the customer exercised the right to the escrow and the customer negotiated the rights from the acquiring company to let me work for them under contract. I made out like a bandit. I was one of the only three people in the world who knew how to compile and maintain the proprietary VB like mobile development platform - an SDK, a VM (something akin to the JVM)
- moneywoes 3y ago
  What marketing channel did they use to find the dev?
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    He wasn’t a consultant. He wrote software that made it easy to develop data capture forms on iOS and Android. They had already done the initial contract before I got there. I was brought in as the dev lead for the next phase, integrations as we acquired companies, migrations, etc. I don’t know how they original found the software. But it became much more crucial as they expanded and the company I was working for was aiming to go public.

ilikerashers 3y ago

The counter to this is "analysis paralysis". Better to get good at building stuff than spend all your time trying to come up with the perfect product. I've seen people invest 100k+ and years in products that never had a market but I've also seen people invest no money and years in talking about "stuff".