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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?

#201

Post by libertine »

OJFord wrote: post #174
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…

For every one of these stories though, is there a 'we pushed too hard too soon, the product wasn't ready, people were already turned off it by the time it was'?

But aren't there red flags?

How can you push too hard too soon, if people were turned off by the product?

Unless you're burning budget in an unsustainable manner... but that's not what OP said.

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

#202

Post by amelius »

throw8932894 wrote: post #200
endymi0n wrote: post #137

To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner: "The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people…

"Build it and they come" works, for example Hotmail and Google did not invest into marketing initially. But it works in non saturated market with a few players.

Wasn't there a waiting list for Hotmail/Gmail in the beginning?

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

#203

Post by Aeolun »

OJFord wrote: post #174
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…

For every one of these stories though, is there a 'we pushed too hard too soon, the product wasn't ready, people were already turned off it by the time it was'?

The thing is, if your market is so small that you can’t burn out a few people on your product and still have potential customers, you’ve already lost.

Maybe the first 10 will leave while you figure out where to go. That sucks, but it’s fine.

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

#204

Post by Cthulhu_ »

throw8932894 wrote: post #200
endymi0n wrote: post #137

To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner: "The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people…

"Build it and they come" works, for example Hotmail and Google did not invest into marketing initially. But it works in non saturated market with a few players.

They didn't need to; Hotmail offered free e-mail accounts which was unheard of at the time; Gmail went viral for offering 1GB of storage which was unheard of at the time. The latter also had scarcity with its invite system, I'm not sure if that helped make it more popular or not. Definitely helped prevent it from collapsing under its own success though.

Anyway, I think any service now that shows up offering something used by many that is now paid for free will become popular on its own.

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

#205

Post by wizwit999 »

wolframhempel wrote: post #169

Creating an on-premise version of our product for enterprises (as opposed to a pure SaaS version) Turns out there is still a lot of money in selling technology to large enterprises that they can host and run themselves on an annual licensing model. We were initially afraid of the long and high-touch enterprise sales cycles, complex procurement processes and enterprise integration requirements (complex permissions, LD…

This is a great point, and its not necessarily just on prem either. Adding those enterprise features can be a great move to make your product more attractive. We're trying to make the audit trails part a lot easier at Apptrail (https://apptrail.com).

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

#206

Post by raverbashing »

eej71 wrote: post #194
raverbashing wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember the ABCs A - Always B - Be C - Selling That is, seize the opportunities of presenting your work and your company.

I'll be that guy. Actually it's Always Be Closing. Obligatory Glenngary Glen Ross scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7y6EOGY87U&t=104s

Yes ;) But in the context, selling makes more sense than closing.

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

#207

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

shafyy wrote: post #118
mythz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailwind? They've built strong brand awareness through the quality of their OSS tailwindcss product who's been successful without any paid advertisements or sales people that I can see. Similarly Ruby on Rails was great brand awareness for 37 Signal's Basecamp who AFAIK doesn't believe in advertising, and has made a point to pay for a "non Ad" against companies selling ads against their Basecamp trademark https://twi…

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.

I dunno. I hear that a lot but whenever I'm working on a project with a client who uses Basecamp, it takes a good few seconds for me to remember that the URL I need to trigger autocomplete is "launchpad.37signals.com". Having your product name in the URL seems like Marketing 101 to me.

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

#208

Post by qwerty456127 »

pawelwentpawel wrote: post #119
zuhayeer wrote: post #110

Invest in SEO early. And I mean invest all the way, including all the different structured metadata into all of your pages to get your website to appear the best on search results [1]. The long tail and residual effects of it get pretty insane. [1] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

I second that. SEO is a slow growing channel and it takes some time to get effects. Starting earlier can help out. Also, make sure that your page loads fast - especially the content that you are trying to index. Low hanging fruit like optimising image size or cleaning up your imports can have a big effect. When just starting out with little backlinks, good page speed loads can be the differentiator that will put you…

> Also, make sure that your page loads fast

To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?

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

#209

Post by throwawaylinux »

urthor wrote: post #89
throwawaylinux wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you need more than two engineers + 2 assistants, you should have hired smarter engineers. Oh, I half thought you were serious until this point. I still don't get the joke though.

Well, I mean I don't want to judge all startups. In fact if you take any of this offhand advice as gospel, well I wouldn't. Maybe I should have scattered "probably" and "often" about the place. 1: ------------------------------------------------------------ When you read the book, ole Fred is not a fan of large engineering units. Forget two pizzas (Bezos is from New York, two pizzas for him is ~10 people). Fred's vie…

Your comments are difficult for me to understand, although you do have a fun and whimsical style!

I wasn't taking it as gospel and I agree some engineering outfits are (or at least appear to be) overstaffed or inefficient, and a small number of very driven and talented people can produce some incredible things. But when it comes to making a product it can take a radically larger amount of engineering effort than it would appear.

PS Semi is an example of an ARM-beating company which was founded by a visionary engineer who almost certainly had the big ideas himself or within a small group of technical leadership. It still took a hundred engineers 4 years to bring out their first product.

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

#210

Post by saimiam »

fxtentacle wrote: post #172
qeternity wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are thousands upon thousands of hosting companies out there, most of which are barely breaking even, and are sold often for not much money.

This. They were struggling to find enough customers to break even. I had the customers but lacked the hosting knowledge and technology.

Buy my startup @ https://PretzelBox.cc. Jokes aside, PretzelBox is a hosting company aka backend in a box and your comments are giving me a ton of hope.
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