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Nathan Barry’s $5k App Challenge: My Seasoned Bootstrappy Advice

36 points by route3 14y ago

mijustin 14y ago
Nathan and Amy: this is awesome. By letting us “listen in” on your dialogue the lessons in here feel genuine. Great work. To add a little fuel to the fire, I’ll make a few comments: > Amy: "I’ve never seen anyone do successful presales for a software product, for the record." I guess it depends on the definition of “successful” – Jason Cohen had 40 pre-sales before he started building WPEngine: http://blog.asmartbear.com/stop-customer-interviews.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/stop-customer-interviews.html > Amy: "I don’t know ANYONE… ANYONE… who outsourced their product and made a success out of it." Again, it depends on your definition of “success” but I personally think Rob Walling is pretty successful, and he outsources almost all of his development: http://www.softwarebyrob.com http://www.softwarebyrob.com
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  It depends more on your definition of "know." :) Serious question: Isn't Rob originally a developer? We outsource a lot of our development too, but outsourcing part (even if it's a large part) as a developer is very different than outsourcing all of it, or outsourcing the "core competency" of your product/business, or outsourcing all the code from day 1. Which I still find sketchy and predict will land a person in trouble if they are unable to work on their own product, just as I describe in the transcript! As for Jason, I didn't know that, that's great. He does write that 40 promised, but only "20 actually did before launch." What I meant, in my terse way, was "presales to fund the development," which is what I understood Nathan to mean because of his only-$5k budget. Jason had some proof of concept in 20 people but that probably paid for just about nothing :) Or… he was able to get a significant pre-sale $$$ by reaching larger, institutional clients with his connections and track record! Which isn't something a bootstrapper starting out should count on. Thanks for clarifying!
  - revorad 14y ago
    In the comments of his post, Jason wrote: "Customers are bad about figuring out features, but good about explaining their pain or what they'd like solved." In your chat with Nathan, you said that people are not good at explaining or even noticing their pains. I guess your experience differs from Jason's in that respect. Mine is probably somewhere in the middle :-) So, if your prospects are not aware of their pain, how do you sell them your solution? I expect you have to educate them. It's probably unlikely that you just build something, unveil it, and they go "Of course I need this! Why didn't I think of it?! Silly me! Here's my money." But then how long do you spend on educating them? Is this why you recommend info products? So that you don't waste time educating for free? Or do you recommend doing landing page tests? This is turning into an interview, so I'll stop here. I don't expect you to give away all the secrets you teach in your courses, but would appreciate anything you can share. Thanks!
    - ahoyhere 14y ago
      We have to draw a line between "Customers" as in "Customer interviews" as in "People I want to learn about to maybe build something for who MIGHT become actual customers with money later" -- and actual customers, who are already paying you money. It's easier to get actual information out of actual customers, because they have something concrete to start with (your existing product). Speculating about potential problems with Customers™ of the first kind doesn't work so well. I don't think any of my products were products people would have complained about to start with, but once we (yes!) educated them, they were excited. Part of education means clearly showing the potential customer what pain they're in that they're currently ignoring. Most people block out daily pain & annoyances… even big ones. After all, if they haven't seen hope that it'll get better, why constantly be upset by it? Natural human coping mechanism. I think this is where big wins exist.
      - revorad 14y ago
        I agree with you that that's where the big wins exist. But, there also lies the eternal tarpit of dead products - email software, project management apps, to-do list apps, etc.
charlieirish 14y ago
This seems to be a fairly common problem amongst developers and designers. The first problem is actually shipping something that customers can buy. I'll skip over this because both Nathan and Amy have certainly been able to do that. So the next step, the 'white whale' project is the infamous second project. The advice out there suggests either: 1) Outsource Development (it certainly helps if you're a developer) or 2) Learn it the hard way and do everything yourself Rob Walling has certainly had fantastic success himself - all by outsourcing. In fact, if I remember correctly, Rob struggled to successfully launch countless products before he chose a different route. Rob chose to purchase existing businesses (HitTail, Beach Towels etc.) and then started marketing them . I don't believe he had any success before that. Amy Hoy has had great success with building everything herself - Freckle being a great example. However, Amy has also failed with Charm: "It ended up with me spending 2 years and $200k on something I had to shut down." It seems like it's not just as simple as choosing either option 1 or option 2. There are examples and counter-examples to both options.
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  FWIW, I never claimed to build everything myself… and we (my husband & I) made extensive use of freelance developers, support people, etc. Where do you think the $200k on Charm went? Not to my salary :) Charm would have been an enormous commercial success based on all the indicators, but we belatedly realized that running it would entail a stressful type of business we didn't want. Big fat "Duh" there. I stake full claim of my mistakes and warn others about it. This may sound like me twisting definitions but I don't think buying-an-existing-product is the same as outsourcing development, even if it is your only product. In the former, you've got something that already exists, that you can look at and try and poke around in; in the latter, you've got some rough designs and the hope that you picked the right freelancer. I've seen so many people take the latter course - true outsourcing - and flop around til their money was all gone. Despite trying very hard not to be a party to it, so many of my clients were like that. I eventually had to come to the conclusion that I could push them to cut back features and launch, but it wasn't my job to refuse to do what they asked just because it was dumb. On the other side, if you fully outsource your product, from scratch, what do you do if (as I mention in the transcript) you have a falling out and suddenly there's a major bug? You not only can't fix it yourself, you aren't sure if you know what it is, how to know if the person you hire can fix it, how to know if they've done a good job or not… plus your track record for hiring is already bad. It's a kind of helpless death spiral — tiny cuts leading to arterial spray. Sidebar: This has made me realize just how little I know about Rob's origin story, so I'm going to have to fix that :) And by "this" I mean "this discussion" and not "arterial spray," ha!
SMrF 14y ago
"I know Hacker News types think that’s a great list of niches, but it’s actually a really terrible one. You can’t sell to ANY of those people." This piece of the conversation really left me wanting more, especially since I've been using that very same list with no success over the years. What are some good niches? Better yet, what's a heuristic for picking good niches? She seems to suggest we should focus on an audience we already have, as Nathan has with web developers (designers?), or that we could easily build. So I am the local corporate javascript expert: perhaps I could rally that into an audience of javascript developers or maybe even people that really need javascript developers?
- SMrF 14y ago
  "Not only do those audiences not buy things, not only are they scattered and incoherent and unprofessional and in many cases incompetent and/or broke…" Ok, so to perhaps answer my own question I'm just going to reverse this. A good niche buys things (specifically software if you're selling it). A good niche is well defined, easy to find and filled with competent people with money to spend. I think it's interesting that we are defining a kind of person, not a job description or industry.
  - klaut 14y ago
    the keywords here are audiences vs niches. See, audences are made of people with worldviews. Niche is.. well, impersonal agregate, an industry - without any beliefs, pains, dreams...
  - ahoyhere 14y ago
    I think it's interesting that we are defining a kind of person, not a job description or industry. People buy things… job descriptions and industries don't :)
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  I wrote about niches vs worldviews and even included a free lesson from my class, because it's such an important & under-reported topic: http://unicornfree.com/2011/niches-are-for-suckers/ http://unicornfree.com/2011/niches-are-for-suckers/ When I said Nathan was throwing away every advantage he had, and he ought to go vertical, I meant to go with an audience where you already have experience, pull, connections, insider knowledge. That's what I mean by "vertical." So yeah, if you're a go-to JavaScript guy, why would you start anywhere else but there? You'd just be pissing away your advantages.

36 points by route3 14y ago

Nathan and Amy: this is awesome. By letting us “listen in” on your dialogue the lessons in here feel genuine. Great work. To add a little fuel to the fire, I’ll make a few comments: > Amy: "I’ve never seen anyone do successful presales for a software product, for the record." I guess it depends on the definition of “successful” – Jason Cohen had 40 pre-sales before he started building WPEngine: http://blog.asmartbear.com/stop-customer-interviews.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/stop-customer-interviews.html > Amy: "I don’t know ANYONE… ANYONE… who outsourced their product and made a success out of it." Again, it depends on your definition of “success” but I personally think Rob Walling is pretty successful, and he outsources almost all of his development: http://www.softwarebyrob.com http://www.softwarebyrob.com

ahoyhere 14y ago
It depends more on your definition of "know." :) Serious question: Isn't Rob originally a developer? We outsource a lot of our development too, but outsourcing part (even if it's a large part) as a developer is very different than outsourcing all of it, or outsourcing the "core competency" of your product/business, or outsourcing all the code from day 1. Which I still find sketchy and predict will land a person in trouble if they are unable to work on their own product, just as I describe in the transcript! As for Jason, I didn't know that, that's great. He does write that 40 promised, but only "20 actually did before launch." What I meant, in my terse way, was "presales to fund the development," which is what I understood Nathan to mean because of his only-$5k budget. Jason had some proof of concept in 20 people but that probably paid for just about nothing :) Or… he was able to get a significant pre-sale $$$ by reaching larger, institutional clients with his connections and track record! Which isn't something a bootstrapper starting out should count on. Thanks for clarifying!
- revorad 14y ago
  In the comments of his post, Jason wrote: "Customers are bad about figuring out features, but good about explaining their pain or what they'd like solved." In your chat with Nathan, you said that people are not good at explaining or even noticing their pains. I guess your experience differs from Jason's in that respect. Mine is probably somewhere in the middle :-) So, if your prospects are not aware of their pain, how do you sell them your solution? I expect you have to educate them. It's probably unlikely that you just build something, unveil it, and they go "Of course I need this! Why didn't I think of it?! Silly me! Here's my money." But then how long do you spend on educating them? Is this why you recommend info products? So that you don't waste time educating for free? Or do you recommend doing landing page tests? This is turning into an interview, so I'll stop here. I don't expect you to give away all the secrets you teach in your courses, but would appreciate anything you can share. Thanks!
  - ahoyhere 14y ago
    We have to draw a line between "Customers" as in "Customer interviews" as in "People I want to learn about to maybe build something for who MIGHT become actual customers with money later" -- and actual customers, who are already paying you money. It's easier to get actual information out of actual customers, because they have something concrete to start with (your existing product). Speculating about potential problems with Customers™ of the first kind doesn't work so well. I don't think any of my products were products people would have complained about to start with, but once we (yes!) educated them, they were excited. Part of education means clearly showing the potential customer what pain they're in that they're currently ignoring. Most people block out daily pain & annoyances… even big ones. After all, if they haven't seen hope that it'll get better, why constantly be upset by it? Natural human coping mechanism. I think this is where big wins exist.
    - revorad 14y ago
      I agree with you that that's where the big wins exist. But, there also lies the eternal tarpit of dead products - email software, project management apps, to-do list apps, etc.

charlieirish 14y ago

This seems to be a fairly common problem amongst developers and designers. The first problem is actually shipping something that customers can buy. I'll skip over this because both Nathan and Amy have certainly been able to do that. So the next step, the 'white whale' project is the infamous second project. The advice out there suggests either: 1) Outsource Development (it certainly helps if you're a developer) or 2) Learn it the hard way and do everything yourself Rob Walling has certainly had fantastic success himself - all by outsourcing. In fact, if I remember correctly, Rob struggled to successfully launch countless products before he chose a different route. Rob chose to purchase existing businesses (HitTail, Beach Towels etc.) and then started marketing them . I don't believe he had any success before that. Amy Hoy has had great success with building everything herself - Freckle being a great example. However, Amy has also failed with Charm: "It ended up with me spending 2 years and $200k on something I had to shut down." It seems like it's not just as simple as choosing either option 1 or option 2. There are examples and counter-examples to both options.

ahoyhere 14y ago
FWIW, I never claimed to build everything myself… and we (my husband & I) made extensive use of freelance developers, support people, etc. Where do you think the $200k on Charm went? Not to my salary :) Charm would have been an enormous commercial success based on all the indicators, but we belatedly realized that running it would entail a stressful type of business we didn't want. Big fat "Duh" there. I stake full claim of my mistakes and warn others about it. This may sound like me twisting definitions but I don't think buying-an-existing-product is the same as outsourcing development, even if it is your only product. In the former, you've got something that already exists, that you can look at and try and poke around in; in the latter, you've got some rough designs and the hope that you picked the right freelancer. I've seen so many people take the latter course - true outsourcing - and flop around til their money was all gone. Despite trying very hard not to be a party to it, so many of my clients were like that. I eventually had to come to the conclusion that I could push them to cut back features and launch, but it wasn't my job to refuse to do what they asked just because it was dumb. On the other side, if you fully outsource your product, from scratch, what do you do if (as I mention in the transcript) you have a falling out and suddenly there's a major bug? You not only can't fix it yourself, you aren't sure if you know what it is, how to know if the person you hire can fix it, how to know if they've done a good job or not… plus your track record for hiring is already bad. It's a kind of helpless death spiral — tiny cuts leading to arterial spray. Sidebar: This has made me realize just how little I know about Rob's origin story, so I'm going to have to fix that :) And by "this" I mean "this discussion" and not "arterial spray," ha!

SMrF 14y ago

"I know Hacker News types think that’s a great list of niches, but it’s actually a really terrible one. You can’t sell to ANY of those people." This piece of the conversation really left me wanting more, especially since I've been using that very same list with no success over the years. What are some good niches? Better yet, what's a heuristic for picking good niches? She seems to suggest we should focus on an audience we already have, as Nathan has with web developers (designers?), or that we could easily build. So I am the local corporate javascript expert: perhaps I could rally that into an audience of javascript developers or maybe even people that really need javascript developers?

SMrF 14y ago
"Not only do those audiences not buy things, not only are they scattered and incoherent and unprofessional and in many cases incompetent and/or broke…" Ok, so to perhaps answer my own question I'm just going to reverse this. A good niche buys things (specifically software if you're selling it). A good niche is well defined, easy to find and filled with competent people with money to spend. I think it's interesting that we are defining a kind of person, not a job description or industry.
- klaut 14y ago
  the keywords here are audiences vs niches. See, audences are made of people with worldviews. Niche is.. well, impersonal agregate, an industry - without any beliefs, pains, dreams...
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  I think it's interesting that we are defining a kind of person, not a job description or industry. People buy things… job descriptions and industries don't :)
ahoyhere 14y ago
I wrote about niches vs worldviews and even included a free lesson from my class, because it's such an important & under-reported topic: http://unicornfree.com/2011/niches-are-for-suckers/ http://unicornfree.com/2011/niches-are-for-suckers/ When I said Nathan was throwing away every advantage he had, and he ought to go vertical, I meant to go with an audience where you already have experience, pull, connections, insider knowledge. That's what I mean by "vertical." So yeah, if you're a go-to JavaScript guy, why would you start anywhere else but there? You'd just be pissing away your advantages.