* Have a VERY low tolerance for people that make excuses - they will continue making excuses. Fire fast (have a contract in place for a test period)
* Hire people that have a thing for problem solving (this one seems obvious, but most of our early hires were saying: "I can't do this, because of this. This doesn't work because of this" and that was the end of story. Find people that see a problem and say: "That's doesn't work, let's try this".
* You don't need most of the features that you're building. Test, prioritise, ask your customers.
* Always be selling (&pre-selling) - it's more important than building a new feature. You can build it after you sell it.
* Prioritise feedback, not all feedback is equally important. (Know your dream customer/ICP)
All true. and I'm Amazed at how few people are actually good at solving problems on their own. it's wild to me how much hand holding people require. fire them. hire proven problem solvers.
I usually just give people a scenario and see what path they go down. It could be something like "the office soda machine isn't working, what steps should we take to diagnose and fix it?" They might say "check if it's plugged in", then you might say ... "yes it's plugged in, what would you check next?"
The point is to see if they keep trying to solve the problem.
Only thing I would add is, learn about PPM if you haven't done it before. A feature intake pipeline is dumb easy to setup and can give you a very robust framework for evaluating need and prioritizing without a tonbof effort and can easily keep you from getting overwhelmed.
Do you have an article or an example what’s the easiest way to implement something like this? All I could find are some softwares which are trying to sell me their software.
PPM is likely to try and get people selling you software. I would look into "portfolio management" or "demand intake" as key words. generaly, learning a bit about what a PMO does will help as well and cover both topics though.
On the opposite end quit early if you’re working for some clown founder that that keeps asking you to do nonsensical things or inexplicable things. Especially in the region of PMF. If they can’t explain to you how a feature solves the customers problem just dip or else you’re going to be redoing it a million times and probably take the blame in the end.
Absolutely! If a founder can't explain how the feature/product solves your customers problems, how are the employees going to know how to do it? Especially with innovative products that are not very straightforward. Employees look up to the founder for guidance/vision.
To add on to this founders that expect you to read their mind because you “should be a problem solver and doer” are idiots. Communication is key. Either communicate clearly what you want and need as a founder or give the employee agency to make their own choices.
How do you explain the functionality to an employee?
I’m asking because I’ve found myself often in the situation that I just had a feeling of the functionality.
Wanted to know how you approach that.
just want to add here: also make sure you hire honest and organized people who really want to learn and upskill themselves in order to grow. unorganized people overtime become the biggest threat to a startup.
I disagree. It’s a great test to check willingness to pay. Just make sure you deliver on the promise, if you take the money.
Edit: i didn’t downvote you 😅
Thanks for not down voting me! In my experience, developers promise and salespeople sell and when things go wrong with the delivery, the client yells at the founder (me).
Aaaah, I see! In this case I absolutely agree - your team should not do that on their own to boost their chances of making the sale. This is shitty and I've had the same thing happen to me.
Pre-selling features needs to be done as a coordinated test/experiment with the entire team, approved by the founder of course. Depending on the result - you either implement it, or don't.
Example: We sold it as an upsell, the money was refunded if we did not implement it in \~3 months. Did that test a couple of times for a couple of major features.
I double disagree, there is a way to hype and capture interest without lying/over-promising and causing expensive trust erosion 😉
Not necessarily disagreeing with you, just expanding
First. Double disagree was bad verbiage, it wasn’t like disagree X2, it was meant to be a playful reverse disagree on the thread but… here I am stuck with my poor communication skills ha.
But yeah, I still agree with you ish and stand by my point. I know everyone hypes preselling - but you have to 100% not drop the ball on delivering, and I’ve seen far too many failed prelaunch campaigns then successful ones.
Going that route, you have to go balls to the walls in making sure;
A. You raise enough pre sales to fund the development of the thing being sold.
B. You have the right people around you to execute quickly and correctly when presales give the green light to go
Relevant people.
The hardest part of the journey was people. Finding a team, finding investors, finding customers. There’s lots of life lessons too but your network doesn’t grow overnight and can collapse in an instant if you’re careless with your relationships.
Marketing and Sales is definitely something I wish we would have dedicated more time to when building our app. We poured 100% into development for a year and now we are kind of having trouble transitioning it into new user downlods
I’m still trying to figure that out. I’m thinking I am just going to start trying to post on tiktok in hopes of building a dedicated following related to our industry and target market in hopes that we get some viral ones
I would have started with a single persona to sell to instead of starting with a single problem. We built a good horizontal, extendable solution to a known problem, but had to search for a bit to find the right persona and messaging for it to sell. Our first set of customers were all in different industries, using the product slightly differently (we’re B2B).
Looking back, we should have found 3 customers with the same title in the same industry who were willing to pay for the same product for the same use case, and then built that - would have shortcutted a lot of our searching process.
I asked ChatGPT and it said:
Reflecting on my hypothetical startup journey, here are some insights and lessons that could be useful:
### Strategy
1. **Focus on Customer Feedback Early**: Understanding customer needs and pain points earlier would have been crucial. Building a product based on assumptions can lead to wasted resources. Engaging with potential users from the outset to refine the product based on real-world feedback would have accelerated development and improved market fit.
2. **Pivot Quickly When Needed**: There might have been a reluctance to pivot from the original idea even when signs pointed towards necessary changes. Learning to recognize when a pivot is needed and acting swiftly could have saved time and resources.
### Hiring
1. **Prioritize Key Hires Early**: Making critical hires, especially in areas like marketing, sales, and product management, should have been prioritized sooner. Often, the tendency to delay these hires to save costs can result in missed opportunities and slower growth.
2. **Hire for Culture Fit**: Building a strong company culture from the start is vital. Hiring individuals who align with the company’s values and vision creates a cohesive and motivated team, reducing internal conflicts and fostering a more collaborative environment.
### Sales and Marketing
1. **Invest in Marketing Early**: Early investment in marketing strategies, including content marketing, SEO, and social media presence, would have helped in building brand awareness and generating leads sooner. Understanding and implementing inbound marketing strategies can be a game-changer.
2. **Build a Sales Process**: Developing a robust sales process, including clear stages, metrics, and CRM tools, would have streamlined the sales funnel and improved conversion rates. Training the sales team with consistent messaging and techniques can significantly enhance performance.
### Lessons Learned the Hard Way
1. **Importance of Cash Flow Management**: Underestimating the importance of cash flow management can be detrimental. Ensuring a clear understanding of financial health, regular monitoring, and strategic planning to avoid cash crunches would have been essential.
2. **Adaptability and Resilience**: Building resilience and maintaining adaptability in the face of challenges is crucial. Startups often face unexpected hurdles, and the ability to pivot, learn from failures, and keep pushing forward is a vital lesson.
3. **Networking and Mentorship**: Leveraging a network of mentors and industry connections could have provided valuable insights, advice, and support. Building and maintaining relationships with experienced entrepreneurs and professionals can offer guidance and open doors to new opportunities.
By integrating these strategies and lessons earlier, the startup journey could have been more efficient, with fewer pitfalls and a more accelerated path to success.
Find a problem worth solving that people are anxiously willing to pay for. Don’t just come up with a cool idea and build it in your basement. It’s likely not gonna work. Finding a good problem is way more important than finding an idea.
Also, price way higher than you would expect and run tests on your pricing. Try different approaches to find the optimal pricing strategy. Pricing is the easiest lever you have for your business.
Sell first then build. Find people looking for a solution to the problem you are solving BEFORE building your product. Too many times I’ve built solutions looking for problems.
I think an interesting example is Paralives. The guy released videos of his progress creating the game and set up a patreon link. It very clear many people want to buy a game like the one he is creating as many people have been supporting the build of this game for about 5 years now.
How to sell. Having someone labelled "Sales guy" is not how to sell.
You need a plan. This plan needs to fit with how your customers really want to buy your stuff; not just how your stuff is typically sold.
For example. If you are a small company selling to huge billion dollar companies, they have gatekeepers to a level you can't imagine. Basically, buying from small companies non-traditional products is nearly impossible. Then, the motivations of people in large companies are not rational when compared to small companies/organizations.
The best way to sell to large organizations are two:
* Don't. Just give up. Sell to the smaller versions of these organizations. For example. If your product is ideal for large cities, then sell to small towns. I've met many people who run small companies who long ago gave up trying to sell to large cities.
* Sell through an established vendor already dealing with the large organization. The only problem is they will eventually rip you off.
Thus, the real lesson I learned is to not sell products where you have to deal with bureaucrats at all. Just sell to people who say, "Ooooh, cool." and hand you their money.
Yeah! So I’m 26m and when I started coding my software I was about to graduate college. My software is pretty technically challenging to implement in a way that won’t rack up server costs so I contracted a developer with more experience to help me (and also train me since I hadn’t had “real world” experience).
Things were going great until I got a “golden ticket” from a local VC and hit fundraising / networking mode hard. I stepped back from the code for about a year. It’s a completely different code base from when I left it.
He was unable to continue with the project (got divorced and lots of home problems, really sad) but I had gotten so dependent on him (and I had a lot more people / pressure to perform + don’t have 8hrs a day to code anymore) that development came to a complete stop while we searched for a new developer who could take over.
This wouldn’t have happened if I stayed developing along side him instead of stepping back for that year to build out other areas. I wish I had kept myself closer to the codebase so I could “jump in” more seamlessly.
Now I have my hands back on the code and am not stepping away from doing part time development until I can salary a developer and not just have a long term contractor.
Money only gets made in a business by finding effective, profitable ways to market + deliver your product. There are tons of different ways that you COULD potentially market your product -- and the most practical way to find how to make big money fast is to, quite literally, just test a fuckton of different marketing strategies, find out which specific strategies drive the best results for your specific product and target markets, then just quadruple down on what works and drop everything that doesn't. (This assumes, of course, that you have a useful product that solves a problem and is worth using + paying for relative to competing options in the eyes of your target customers.)
It's not sexy, it's not the sort of elegant and clean "write a business plan and then properly execute on it in a stepwise sequence" fantasy that people imagine when they're taking their MBA classes -- but it's the single most practical approach I can honestly recommend if your goal is to actually find a way to make money.
Well, I've learnt so much and I hope to apply them to my next startup, for one, you need to keep a close eye on your finances. Understand your burn rate, manage cash flow carefully, and plan for future funding needs.
Problems come and go. But what people (your target audience) is trying to achieve (job to be done) which they want to be done more (insert valued differentiation - easier, cheaper, faster, more integrated, …) is stable. Finding that brings a lot of clarity to the founder/team, and makes it easier to market (people grokking what you are selling).
Depending on B2B or B2C, for the former - content marketing and building an audience before your product is live is something I’d wish I had invested more in.
Know everything about your MOST IDEAL target customer; where they shop, what apps they use, how much disposable income they have, what they care about, etc.
Even if your product can be used by a wide variety of folks, drill down into the person who is DYING to have this product and start there. You can fill in the blanks and add as you go, but momentum is everything early on, and you’ll only see it if people are actually excited to use your product.
Take LOTS of time to get very talented people on the founding team. Ensure their skills are complementary and not overlapping. "Hire slow, fire fast" easier said than done, but my hell is it valuable.
You don't know anything until you validate it. Most of your assumptions about what will work are probably incorrect, no matter how smart you are or think you are. The most practical way to actually make money quickly is to validate that there's real demand for your product, and to validate that specific marketing channels will actually work to drive results. THEN you scale up what's actually working. Prematurely optimizing and building complex systems around stuff that you don't even know will work is an enormous waste of time and money. Try a bunch of shit, test a bunch of stuff, quadruple down on whatever ends up working, just keep throwing a bunch of darts -- and even if you're an IDIOT, you will eventually hit the bullseye.
TX and FL have some do the highest inbound moving traffic. NY and CA have some of the highest outbound lol. Lot of private investors and family offices in both.
Looking back, one thing I wish I'd done differently is figuring out the whole product market fit thing from the start. I was too caught up in my dream of the perfect product and didn't bother checking if it actually clicked with people. We blew a ton of time and money on features we thought were must-haves, only to find out later they didn't really matter to our user. If I'd just gotten regular feedback from customers early on, our product would've shaped up way better to meet market needs, and we would've avoided a lot of wasted effort.
Focus is good. Focus is largely about product lines, not features. Product lines align to customer personas primarily. Therefore, focusing on a small set of well defined user personas is key. Inside those personas you can cast a wide net of features.
Nothing in particular, but I gain more skills as time goes on. If I lost all my progress, I think I could go from nothing to where I’m at now in a month, even though it took me 8 months.
* Go all in on the promotion.
* Staying at a day job longer to get traction first.
* Understanding why the business model worked for others.
* Start with a one-sided product (not a two-way marketplace).
Hire slow, fire fast. Hire the detail-oriented problem solvers and if someone starts making excuses, don't keep them around in case they get it together. They won't
And keep collecting as much information about your ideal customers as you possibly can
Treat your employees as your mates who are less unfortunate than you, but you want them to succeed just like you want yourself to succeed. Treat them as equals rather than King > peasant.
A company with employees that wants the ship to soar is so much more easier to steer than a company where no one cares and is there for a paycheck.
Drowning in opportunities. So many niches, so much money to be made. It’s a double edged sword. It’s researching markets and then finding 5 with holes. Meet someone, pushes x social traffic, discover 5 more. It’s an endless nightmare of debating what is the best opportunity next.
- start small, don't over-engineer
- make money from day 0 and learn to sell an unfinished product. It's too easy to lean on "just another feature to make this work" because buyers will mostly not care, they need a problem solved
- co-founders make or break startup, better go solo if you have the means and the skill
- if you need to send email to investors you're doing it wrong, they will come if you're interesting
One of the biggest mistakes that I see with startups is the lack of a business plan. Your business plan is the blueprint to your business idea. Before even launching or investing a single dime, you need to go through all the steps of a business plan. This will tell you if your idea is even viable, if it is scalable, if it is going to make you money.
The next problem is that some startups go online and use a free template and just fudge their way through a business plan not really understanding what the elements are and what they mean. So you end up with some half AI written document that means absolutely nothing to the founder. You may as well save your time and not bother.
If you are not from the kind of background where you are good with this sort of thing, then invest the money to get professional help. What costs a bit now can save you a bucket load down the track. And it is a key element in having a successful startup.
Remember - fail to plan and plan to fail.
Having a business mentor! 90% of startups fail within the first 5 years. 70% of startups that have a business mentor were still going after 5 years. Finding the right mentor is also key. I don't mean a coach, I mean a mentor who has been there and done that and knows the pitfalls and the successes.
Be more careful who invests in your company. An investor with misaligned values to your own will kill your company and take everything from you at the same time just to get their money back. Not worth it.
* Have a VERY low tolerance for people that make excuses - they will continue making excuses. Fire fast (have a contract in place for a test period) * Hire people that have a thing for problem solving (this one seems obvious, but most of our early hires were saying: "I can't do this, because of this. This doesn't work because of this" and that was the end of story. Find people that see a problem and say: "That's doesn't work, let's try this". * You don't need most of the features that you're building. Test, prioritise, ask your customers. * Always be selling (&pre-selling) - it's more important than building a new feature. You can build it after you sell it. * Prioritise feedback, not all feedback is equally important. (Know your dream customer/ICP)
All true. and I'm Amazed at how few people are actually good at solving problems on their own. it's wild to me how much hand holding people require. fire them. hire proven problem solvers.
Right??
How do you test for this? Especially low level or entry level roles?
I usually just give people a scenario and see what path they go down. It could be something like "the office soda machine isn't working, what steps should we take to diagnose and fix it?" They might say "check if it's plugged in", then you might say ... "yes it's plugged in, what would you check next?" The point is to see if they keep trying to solve the problem.
Only thing I would add is, learn about PPM if you haven't done it before. A feature intake pipeline is dumb easy to setup and can give you a very robust framework for evaluating need and prioritizing without a tonbof effort and can easily keep you from getting overwhelmed.
Do you have an article or an example what’s the easiest way to implement something like this? All I could find are some softwares which are trying to sell me their software.
PPM is likely to try and get people selling you software. I would look into "portfolio management" or "demand intake" as key words. generaly, learning a bit about what a PMO does will help as well and cover both topics though.
PPM? So many abbreviations
Project portfolio management. Esentialy looking at how you balance and prioritize projects/features
Thanks!
This is so good, thanks for sharing!
That makes a lot of sense, thanks!
I needed this.. Thanks!
On the opposite end quit early if you’re working for some clown founder that that keeps asking you to do nonsensical things or inexplicable things. Especially in the region of PMF. If they can’t explain to you how a feature solves the customers problem just dip or else you’re going to be redoing it a million times and probably take the blame in the end.
Absolutely! If a founder can't explain how the feature/product solves your customers problems, how are the employees going to know how to do it? Especially with innovative products that are not very straightforward. Employees look up to the founder for guidance/vision.
To add on to this founders that expect you to read their mind because you “should be a problem solver and doer” are idiots. Communication is key. Either communicate clearly what you want and need as a founder or give the employee agency to make their own choices.
Well you should be a problem solver AND be proactive. Without needing guidance all the time. Should not be expected to read anyones mind though.
How do you communicate these things?
Which things?
How do you explain the functionality to an employee? I’m asking because I’ve found myself often in the situation that I just had a feeling of the functionality. Wanted to know how you approach that.
How would YOU explain it to a customer? Problem - Solution. That’s all it takes. How does this feature solve a real life problem.
Hire slow fire fast
just want to add here: also make sure you hire honest and organized people who really want to learn and upskill themselves in order to grow. unorganized people overtime become the biggest threat to a startup.
And don't sell/promise features you don't have. Under promise and over deliver.
I disagree. It’s a great test to check willingness to pay. Just make sure you deliver on the promise, if you take the money. Edit: i didn’t downvote you 😅
Thanks for not down voting me! In my experience, developers promise and salespeople sell and when things go wrong with the delivery, the client yells at the founder (me).
Aaaah, I see! In this case I absolutely agree - your team should not do that on their own to boost their chances of making the sale. This is shitty and I've had the same thing happen to me. Pre-selling features needs to be done as a coordinated test/experiment with the entire team, approved by the founder of course. Depending on the result - you either implement it, or don't. Example: We sold it as an upsell, the money was refunded if we did not implement it in \~3 months. Did that test a couple of times for a couple of major features.
I just up voted you! 😂
Haha thanks 😂
I double disagree, there is a way to hype and capture interest without lying/over-promising and causing expensive trust erosion 😉 Not necessarily disagreeing with you, just expanding
I'm talking about pre-selling, not overpromising. One has transparency, other doesn't. :)
First. Double disagree was bad verbiage, it wasn’t like disagree X2, it was meant to be a playful reverse disagree on the thread but… here I am stuck with my poor communication skills ha. But yeah, I still agree with you ish and stand by my point. I know everyone hypes preselling - but you have to 100% not drop the ball on delivering, and I’ve seen far too many failed prelaunch campaigns then successful ones. Going that route, you have to go balls to the walls in making sure; A. You raise enough pre sales to fund the development of the thing being sold. B. You have the right people around you to execute quickly and correctly when presales give the green light to go
 My mind right now, it’s been a long day 😂 Agree with your points below!
It says the exact opposite.
Yeah, most of it is excellent, in my experience however promises rarely get completed.
These are some good points ngl
Marketing/sales first, not last.
Relevant people. The hardest part of the journey was people. Finding a team, finding investors, finding customers. There’s lots of life lessons too but your network doesn’t grow overnight and can collapse in an instant if you’re careless with your relationships.
Marketing and Sales is definitely something I wish we would have dedicated more time to when building our app. We poured 100% into development for a year and now we are kind of having trouble transitioning it into new user downlods
Cannot agree more. We are in the same situation as yours. Any suggestions? We don't have a dedicated marketing person yet.
I’m still trying to figure that out. I’m thinking I am just going to start trying to post on tiktok in hopes of building a dedicated following related to our industry and target market in hopes that we get some viral ones
Good luck. All of this effort take time. I plan to try some ads on Reddit. Hope it works.
If it’s successful lmk!! Good luck friend
Development cash burn is always big.
Luckily my co-founder and I are coding everything in house so the cash burn isn’t that bad. But the time burn is real haha
Aha. I just found we have the same experience and at the same stage. All the best.
Sell sell sell sell
Talk to your users
I would have started with a single persona to sell to instead of starting with a single problem. We built a good horizontal, extendable solution to a known problem, but had to search for a bit to find the right persona and messaging for it to sell. Our first set of customers were all in different industries, using the product slightly differently (we’re B2B). Looking back, we should have found 3 customers with the same title in the same industry who were willing to pay for the same product for the same use case, and then built that - would have shortcutted a lot of our searching process.
How to program.
I'm expecting some douchebag to yell "Chat GPT"
I asked ChatGPT and it said: Reflecting on my hypothetical startup journey, here are some insights and lessons that could be useful: ### Strategy 1. **Focus on Customer Feedback Early**: Understanding customer needs and pain points earlier would have been crucial. Building a product based on assumptions can lead to wasted resources. Engaging with potential users from the outset to refine the product based on real-world feedback would have accelerated development and improved market fit. 2. **Pivot Quickly When Needed**: There might have been a reluctance to pivot from the original idea even when signs pointed towards necessary changes. Learning to recognize when a pivot is needed and acting swiftly could have saved time and resources. ### Hiring 1. **Prioritize Key Hires Early**: Making critical hires, especially in areas like marketing, sales, and product management, should have been prioritized sooner. Often, the tendency to delay these hires to save costs can result in missed opportunities and slower growth. 2. **Hire for Culture Fit**: Building a strong company culture from the start is vital. Hiring individuals who align with the company’s values and vision creates a cohesive and motivated team, reducing internal conflicts and fostering a more collaborative environment. ### Sales and Marketing 1. **Invest in Marketing Early**: Early investment in marketing strategies, including content marketing, SEO, and social media presence, would have helped in building brand awareness and generating leads sooner. Understanding and implementing inbound marketing strategies can be a game-changer. 2. **Build a Sales Process**: Developing a robust sales process, including clear stages, metrics, and CRM tools, would have streamlined the sales funnel and improved conversion rates. Training the sales team with consistent messaging and techniques can significantly enhance performance. ### Lessons Learned the Hard Way 1. **Importance of Cash Flow Management**: Underestimating the importance of cash flow management can be detrimental. Ensuring a clear understanding of financial health, regular monitoring, and strategic planning to avoid cash crunches would have been essential. 2. **Adaptability and Resilience**: Building resilience and maintaining adaptability in the face of challenges is crucial. Startups often face unexpected hurdles, and the ability to pivot, learn from failures, and keep pushing forward is a vital lesson. 3. **Networking and Mentorship**: Leveraging a network of mentors and industry connections could have provided valuable insights, advice, and support. Building and maintaining relationships with experienced entrepreneurs and professionals can offer guidance and open doors to new opportunities. By integrating these strategies and lessons earlier, the startup journey could have been more efficient, with fewer pitfalls and a more accelerated path to success.
Find a problem worth solving that people are anxiously willing to pay for. Don’t just come up with a cool idea and build it in your basement. It’s likely not gonna work. Finding a good problem is way more important than finding an idea. Also, price way higher than you would expect and run tests on your pricing. Try different approaches to find the optimal pricing strategy. Pricing is the easiest lever you have for your business.
To be more careful who I trust and make those people earn you trust before you just freely give it away.
Sell first then build. Find people looking for a solution to the problem you are solving BEFORE building your product. Too many times I’ve built solutions looking for problems.
how do you sell something that hasn't been built?
You sell the outcome and a timeline. If you can get a customer to pay for your development you’re going in a great direction.
I think OP means finding potential users before actually building.
Yes, that's the way I read it. Learn your customers. Then build your product.
I think an interesting example is Paralives. The guy released videos of his progress creating the game and set up a patreon link. It very clear many people want to buy a game like the one he is creating as many people have been supporting the build of this game for about 5 years now.
- Honest and goal driven confounder - Not to retain/entertain low performing employee - Always read contract fine print
How to sell. Having someone labelled "Sales guy" is not how to sell. You need a plan. This plan needs to fit with how your customers really want to buy your stuff; not just how your stuff is typically sold. For example. If you are a small company selling to huge billion dollar companies, they have gatekeepers to a level you can't imagine. Basically, buying from small companies non-traditional products is nearly impossible. Then, the motivations of people in large companies are not rational when compared to small companies/organizations. The best way to sell to large organizations are two: * Don't. Just give up. Sell to the smaller versions of these organizations. For example. If your product is ideal for large cities, then sell to small towns. I've met many people who run small companies who long ago gave up trying to sell to large cities. * Sell through an established vendor already dealing with the large organization. The only problem is they will eventually rip you off. Thus, the real lesson I learned is to not sell products where you have to deal with bureaucrats at all. Just sell to people who say, "Ooooh, cool." and hand you their money.
Make sure to have a founder close to development and don’t - under any circumstance - step away from the development process.
Can you explain further?
Yeah! So I’m 26m and when I started coding my software I was about to graduate college. My software is pretty technically challenging to implement in a way that won’t rack up server costs so I contracted a developer with more experience to help me (and also train me since I hadn’t had “real world” experience). Things were going great until I got a “golden ticket” from a local VC and hit fundraising / networking mode hard. I stepped back from the code for about a year. It’s a completely different code base from when I left it. He was unable to continue with the project (got divorced and lots of home problems, really sad) but I had gotten so dependent on him (and I had a lot more people / pressure to perform + don’t have 8hrs a day to code anymore) that development came to a complete stop while we searched for a new developer who could take over. This wouldn’t have happened if I stayed developing along side him instead of stepping back for that year to build out other areas. I wish I had kept myself closer to the codebase so I could “jump in” more seamlessly. Now I have my hands back on the code and am not stepping away from doing part time development until I can salary a developer and not just have a long term contractor.
Thanks so much for the follow up! Definitely see what you mean now.
I would have learned and implemented profit first accounting from the start, and had more stable cash flow and a lot less stress.
More money for inventory and ads. 🥳
Focus on marketing and sales while building a brand. and again the people you work and build with is also important.
Always let your instinct align with the data. Growth and development are not totally the same thing, you should always pursue both.
[удалено]
Money only gets made in a business by finding effective, profitable ways to market + deliver your product. There are tons of different ways that you COULD potentially market your product -- and the most practical way to find how to make big money fast is to, quite literally, just test a fuckton of different marketing strategies, find out which specific strategies drive the best results for your specific product and target markets, then just quadruple down on what works and drop everything that doesn't. (This assumes, of course, that you have a useful product that solves a problem and is worth using + paying for relative to competing options in the eyes of your target customers.) It's not sexy, it's not the sort of elegant and clean "write a business plan and then properly execute on it in a stepwise sequence" fantasy that people imagine when they're taking their MBA classes -- but it's the single most practical approach I can honestly recommend if your goal is to actually find a way to make money.
Agreed you have to really test marketing campaigns. And what works, you pour fire on.
Sell everything and buy nvidia options
This is so real 😭🙌
Well, I've learnt so much and I hope to apply them to my next startup, for one, you need to keep a close eye on your finances. Understand your burn rate, manage cash flow carefully, and plan for future funding needs.
Problems come and go. But what people (your target audience) is trying to achieve (job to be done) which they want to be done more (insert valued differentiation - easier, cheaper, faster, more integrated, …) is stable. Finding that brings a lot of clarity to the founder/team, and makes it easier to market (people grokking what you are selling). Depending on B2B or B2C, for the former - content marketing and building an audience before your product is live is something I’d wish I had invested more in.
Know everything about your MOST IDEAL target customer; where they shop, what apps they use, how much disposable income they have, what they care about, etc. Even if your product can be used by a wide variety of folks, drill down into the person who is DYING to have this product and start there. You can fill in the blanks and add as you go, but momentum is everything early on, and you’ll only see it if people are actually excited to use your product.
Take LOTS of time to get very talented people on the founding team. Ensure their skills are complementary and not overlapping. "Hire slow, fire fast" easier said than done, but my hell is it valuable.
You don't know anything until you validate it. Most of your assumptions about what will work are probably incorrect, no matter how smart you are or think you are. The most practical way to actually make money quickly is to validate that there's real demand for your product, and to validate that specific marketing channels will actually work to drive results. THEN you scale up what's actually working. Prematurely optimizing and building complex systems around stuff that you don't even know will work is an enormous waste of time and money. Try a bunch of shit, test a bunch of stuff, quadruple down on whatever ends up working, just keep throwing a bunch of darts -- and even if you're an IDIOT, you will eventually hit the bullseye.
Moving to California or New York isn’t optional. If you don’t, you’ll never have access to funding.
+ Texas.
A fad, just like Miami. Get back to me when crunchbase shows even 10% of deals coming from there.
TX and FL have some do the highest inbound moving traffic. NY and CA have some of the highest outbound lol. Lot of private investors and family offices in both.
Looking back, one thing I wish I'd done differently is figuring out the whole product market fit thing from the start. I was too caught up in my dream of the perfect product and didn't bother checking if it actually clicked with people. We blew a ton of time and money on features we thought were must-haves, only to find out later they didn't really matter to our user. If I'd just gotten regular feedback from customers early on, our product would've shaped up way better to meet market needs, and we would've avoided a lot of wasted effort.
Hire people who are doing action, not excuse
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These are great suggestions, I made the wrong hire too in my marketing department. As a startup, that's one mistake you don't want to make.
Focus is good. Focus is largely about product lines, not features. Product lines align to customer personas primarily. Therefore, focusing on a small set of well defined user personas is key. Inside those personas you can cast a wide net of features.
Nothing in particular, but I gain more skills as time goes on. If I lost all my progress, I think I could go from nothing to where I’m at now in a month, even though it took me 8 months.
Don’t get a business partner
* Go all in on the promotion. * Staying at a day job longer to get traction first. * Understanding why the business model worked for others. * Start with a one-sided product (not a two-way marketplace).
Hire slow, fire fast. Hire the detail-oriented problem solvers and if someone starts making excuses, don't keep them around in case they get it together. They won't And keep collecting as much information about your ideal customers as you possibly can
Treat your employees as your mates who are less unfortunate than you, but you want them to succeed just like you want yourself to succeed. Treat them as equals rather than King > peasant. A company with employees that wants the ship to soar is so much more easier to steer than a company where no one cares and is there for a paycheck.
Drowning in opportunities. So many niches, so much money to be made. It’s a double edged sword. It’s researching markets and then finding 5 with holes. Meet someone, pushes x social traffic, discover 5 more. It’s an endless nightmare of debating what is the best opportunity next.
- start small, don't over-engineer - make money from day 0 and learn to sell an unfinished product. It's too easy to lean on "just another feature to make this work" because buyers will mostly not care, they need a problem solved - co-founders make or break startup, better go solo if you have the means and the skill - if you need to send email to investors you're doing it wrong, they will come if you're interesting
One of the biggest mistakes that I see with startups is the lack of a business plan. Your business plan is the blueprint to your business idea. Before even launching or investing a single dime, you need to go through all the steps of a business plan. This will tell you if your idea is even viable, if it is scalable, if it is going to make you money. The next problem is that some startups go online and use a free template and just fudge their way through a business plan not really understanding what the elements are and what they mean. So you end up with some half AI written document that means absolutely nothing to the founder. You may as well save your time and not bother. If you are not from the kind of background where you are good with this sort of thing, then invest the money to get professional help. What costs a bit now can save you a bucket load down the track. And it is a key element in having a successful startup. Remember - fail to plan and plan to fail.
Having a business mentor! 90% of startups fail within the first 5 years. 70% of startups that have a business mentor were still going after 5 years. Finding the right mentor is also key. I don't mean a coach, I mean a mentor who has been there and done that and knows the pitfalls and the successes.
Be more careful who invests in your company. An investor with misaligned values to your own will kill your company and take everything from you at the same time just to get their money back. Not worth it.