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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?

#311

Post by veesahni »

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…

In the space we[1] operate, there's no shortage of competitors. Over the years, I've seen that those who can unlock marketing see a lot more success, even with a shittier product.

As a developer-turned-founder, a lot of marketing feels sleazy. Was it always this way? So much link-bait, fluffy posts that are really big ads, shallow content just for SEO, upvoting-rings on platforms, etc. There's so few who seem to put in an honest effort. I'm sure part of this is because Google is letting all this low quality stuff rank.

From day one, we've focused on honestly taking care of customers. Pushing customer visible bugs to the top of the list, following up when requested features are released, reprioritizing the roadmap to accommodate growing pain points, etc. It has has paid dividends over the years in the form of very strong referrals. Which are effectively pre-sold trials.

[1] https://enchant.com

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

#312

Post by snowwrestler »

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.

In marketing there’s owned media, earned media, and paid media.

Google initially focused on the first two. They promoted new products like Gmail or Chrome on their search home page, and in the press. It worked well for them because they were already a newsworthy company with a lot of web traffic.

Today, they work quite hard at all three.

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

#313

Post by gwbas1c »

ackbar03 wrote: post #196
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…

How do you deal with maintenence and stuff? Do you need on-site engineers? With SaaS you can just do it remotely but if it's on site you need to send someone over I guess

> How do you deal with maintenence and stuff? Do you need on-site engineers?

I worked on a similar product. It's just like shipping desktop software, but the people installing the on-premise server are much more savvy than someone who needs their hand held pushing a few buttons.

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

#314

Post by marcosdumay »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #209
urthor wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

To be fair with the book, that's what he describes as what he thinks a team should be. Not only there is margin for having more than one team, but the rest of the book completely ignores it and is about real people on real teams.

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

#315

Post by wlesieutre »

sfifs wrote: post #228
throw8932894 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I'm too young to remember Hotmail launch but GMAIL did market. Their marketing investments were 1. Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition. I'd say they ate the costs of storage as marketing investment. 2. Viral invitation format -> exclusively perception

> Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition

Gmail's free storage was two orders of magnitude better than the competition. Nearly three orders of magnitude bigger than Hotmail. They launched with a gigabyte against Hotmail's 2 MB and Yahoo's 6 MB.

We're so used to not worrying about email storage anymore that it's easy to forget just how small they used to be.

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

#316

Post by aaronsimpson »

fxtentacle wrote: post #176
alexellisuk wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I presume you mean site reliability engineer. Then yes, my clients purchase the whole package. Development, deployment, hosting, production maintenance. So if something goes wrong, really anything, I'm their first point of contact. Before, we had many situations where they asked me to take a look because something could have been a software issue but then turned out to be an AWS issue instead. That's always nasty if…

I've always found it interesting how simply "Not Megacorporation X" can be a competitive advantage. It doesn't make a lot of economic sense, but people will go through a lot of work - and it can be lucrative to you on the business-side facilitating this - to avoid having to interface with a faceless conglomerate like Amazon.

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

#317

Post by wing-_-nuts »

aaronsimpson wrote: post #308
sfifs wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every job sooner or later is a sales job. If we're not teaching this in the education system, I'd argue we're doing a poor job of teaching morals in the education system - although the American system - at least in the better schools - does a much better job of this than systems in Asia.

Agreed. Life in general is sales. Job interview? Sales. First date? Sales. Sales is more than "Here's my product/service. Give me money". It's the art of getting someone to do what you want. I can only speak to American culture, but I feel like most people feel icky about that because the first thought that comes to their mind is the car dealership guy that's trying to sell you garbage like gap insurance that you don…

I agree with everything except the 'first date'. I'm trying to find a person I'm compatible with, and who I can trust completely with who I am. Rough edges and all. I would much rather torpedo date 1 or 2 with a person I'm not compatible with than string things along for a couple of months and break up when she suddenly discovers those rough edges. This has not been a recipe for quantity, I'm hoping it's one for quality.

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

#318

Post by qwerty456127 »

nickfromseattle wrote: post #263
martin_a wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to it, but I've focussed on WordPress pages in the past. Some things I'd start with: - Minimize images (tinypng/tinyjpg) - Deactivate/Remove what you don't need (Plugins (!!!), RPC, Emojis, stuff like that which is ON by default in WP -> will strip down the code) - Strip down & combine scripts - Reduce third-party dependencies, try making them first-party (fonts, analytics) - Minify scripts and CSS - Use…

These are overly technical things that technical founders will be drawn too. But it's not what matters (at least, until you have hundreds of pages ranking). Google Search is very similar to LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in the sense that the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited, return visitors, etc) the more visibility Google will give you in the SERPs. For most SaaS, there aren't a few…

> the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited

IMHO actually good UX metrics mean as low time on-site and pages visited as possible. An ideal user experience (I would, as a user, be glad to pay for) is when you visit the page, immediately find what you want, do you job as quickly as possible and go away.

A good valuable website caring about users rather than ad-spamming them would optimize for this, not for users to waste huge amounts of time wandering through pages until they can achieve their goal.

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

#319

Post by Vanclief »

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…

Any recommendations on good books for marketing?

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

#320

Post by [deleted] »

gwbas1c wrote: post #313
ackbar03 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with maintenence and stuff? Do you need on-site engineers? With SaaS you can just do it remotely but if it's on site you need to send someone over I guess

> How do you deal with maintenence and stuff? Do you need on-site engineers? I worked on a similar product. It's just like shipping desktop software, but the people installing the on-premise server are much more savvy than someone who needs their hand held pushing a few buttons.

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