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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?

#21

Post by clove »

paxys wrote: post #5

Not my own business but from my experience at the B2B SaaS company I work for – Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will star…

If I have my own digital products as a side-hustle, is it worth hiring salespeople? Or is it really only worth it for big businesses/B2B with big ticket prices?

Example product of mine: https://damonverial.com/the-gap-gameplan/

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

#24

Post by themanmaran »

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 way to 10x, or make it go viral. A big motivator was Paul Graham's "do things that don't scale" post [1]. So we just sat down and talked to people.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

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

#25

Post by awb »

Ran a web agency from ‘08-‘13, grew it to 20 FTEs fully remote then sold it.

A few accelerants:

1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the US.

2) Started replacing myself by hiring multiple managers, which helped when I sold the business as it was no longer just about me.

3) Converted long-term clients to pre-paid retainer billing with helped create predictable workloads and revenue streams.

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

#26

Post by ethbr0 »

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #20
exclusiv wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trello. Word. Excel. Gmail.

> Word. Excel. Microsoft absolutely has sales people for the B2B side of Microsoft Office constantly shilling Office 365. This absolutely doesn't sell itself.

And even ignoring the modern sales, it's arguable they were so good at sales in the 90s (when there were far more competitors) that they created the modern Office situation.

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

#28

Post by fphhotchips »

exclusiv wrote: post #11
kcplate wrote: post #10

I second this one… I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.

Trello. Word. Excel. Gmail.

Reformed salesperson here, you're 1 for 4, and Trello really should only get half a point because they've given up massive swathes of their addressable market to others (Wrike, Asana, Monday).

Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world.

Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work. Google has a long term channel based sales model, and a newer but rapidly growing direct enterprise sales team. They're constantly trying to get GApps in against the aforementioned behemoth MS team.

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

#29

Post by sam0x17 »

paxys wrote: post #5

Not my own business but from my experience at the B2B SaaS company I work for – Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will star…

I do miss the days when merely building a good + cool product was enough and organic search traffic would do the rest. The early 00s were great

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

#30

Post by mathattack »

claaams wrote: post #12
kcplate wrote: post #10

I second this one… I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.

It's a cliche joke, but recreational drugs do not need advertising.

No marketing, but sales.
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