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

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

#151

Post by Terr_ »

Crazyontap wrote: post #113
themanmaran wrote: post #24

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/ . In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever wa…

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 ha…

> a lot of people discover it the hard way and most still haven't

Some of it may be "morality" component, for lack of a better word. Some people want the world to be one where people and ideas advance on merit rather than via popularity or "knowing the right people", and act upon that hope subconsciously or as a justification for avoiding unfamiliar risk.

I'd wager it's also a bit more common among software developers.

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

#152

Post by mythz »

raverbashing wrote: post #92
mythz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla does not advertise or pay for endorsements. Instead, we use that money to make the product great. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1129924410339495937

What do you think a presentation by Elon of the latest models is? What do you think putting a Tesla on a rocket and launching it towards Mars is? What do you think PR pieces talking about the latest Tesla tech are? Elon tweeting about Tesla is advertisement. It's not because it's not a pretty picture in a magazine page that it isn't.

not paid advertisements or endorsements as Elon says.

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

#153

Post by tone »

eigilsagafos wrote: post #14

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 la…

Might be a weird question, but what sort of consultancy opportunities do you get? I have worked for a long time in a design and development agency and I (think) I saw very little opportunity or demand for consultancy.

To the point where I legitimately don't know who or in what situation all these businesses are that are spending so much money on 'consultancy'. When do these businesses seek consultants and what for? I know that might be a far reaching question, so any examples would be appreciated.

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

#154

Post by jcims »

winrid wrote: post #95

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.

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.

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

#155

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

fxtentacle wrote: post #150

"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 th…

How were you able to purchase a hosting company? Is your consulting business that big?

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

#157

Post by alexellisuk »

fxtentacle wrote: post #150

"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 th…

Do you also act as an SRE for those apps hosted on your bespoke hosting platform?

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

#158

Post by lbriner »

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.

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

#159

Post by shafyy »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #140
shafyy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DHH and Jason Fried are masters of marketing. Marketing != paid ads. They are great storytellers and have been doing it consistently for the past 20 years with blogs, books and podcasts. The story they built around their products also serves a culture and philosophy of people using their products, and telling other people about it.

In every big company I've worked for marketing is distinct from sales. Marketing is about lead generation, sales is about lead conversion. If you want to sell into enterprise then you are going to need sales people and hence an expensive product that covers that cost. Those big deals need a lot of hand holding to go through. There are plenty of counter examples though, where marketing is doing most of the work and th…

Of course sales is different from marketing. I was responding to the parent who said that Tailwind and Basecamp didn't do paid ads.

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

#160

Post by Zealotux »

can16358p wrote: post #121

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…

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.

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