I second this one… I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.
> Tesla does not advertise or pay for endorsements. Instead, we use that money to make the product great.
Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
51–60 of 492 posts
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#52Ran 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.
First one doesn’t work anymore with remote being so common they demand the same wages as everywhere else.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#53Not 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
Care to share a few examples?
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#54Marketing, sales people, and such are all great but if you don't have product-market fit yet, you're beating up a dead horse here by focusing on growth. One of the first things I do when starting a new SaaS is setting up an event tracker (think mixpanel). At this stage, you barely have any users so no need for fancy analytics stuff. I just stare at the event log until I figure stuff out. Why are they not clicking on that button? Why are they skipping this card? Lots and lots of problems can be discovered and tracked by this way.
After all this, if I have a weekly user retention hovering around 30%, I can't be more happy. Then it's time to grow.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#55Quoted post unavailable.
Were you specifically discriminating against minorities before you "decided" to hire them? That would be illegal in a lot of countries
I think this question should have been formulated in a less punishing tone.
Either (s)he started to hire minorities EVEN more because they had some advantage.
Either if (s)he was discriminating them before but (s)he realized the mistake pointing out what was doing was wrong it's not useful given (s)he tellin it already and it might only make the person assume a defensive position about the previous stance.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#56I second this one… I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.
> Tesla does not advertise or pay for endorsements. Instead, we use that money to make the product great. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1129924410339495937
They don't advertise to consumers.
They have an enormous B2B sales team.
Sales reps are for B2B, not B2C.
Generally speaking, business to business customers expect a certain amount of investment from your company into integrating with them when they offer you a contract.
Sales is part of this.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#57Data segmentation. Segmentation of existing customers to find similar customers. With a reasonable number of paying customers there is always a sub segment who find you valuable. Wish we had invested more time finding more customers similar to that segment early on.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#58Interview your customers and ask them what their biggest problems are, and why they like you.
Find and interview people who aren’t YET your customers and ask them why they aren’t.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#59Marketing. 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…
My CEO spends half of his time acting as a sales rep, writing blogs, hosting workshops, et cetera. Honestly this would overwhelm me after a while and I'm glad he's there to do the job.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#60Ran 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.
First one doesn’t work anymore with remote being so common they demand the same wages as everywhere else.
It works.
These days the secret is you have to hire the good South Americans.
Exploit the fact corporate America hasn't caught on to routing contracts through Upwork et al. Then don't get greedy, keep the TCE delta below 20%, so they stay more than 9 months.
You can take your pick of the finest FOSS contributors Guinea and Paraguay have to offer.
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Startup engineering management is so simple.
Buy a copy of Mythical Man Month.
Read it, read it again. Then re-read chapter 3.
Get two of the best, your Captain and your Copilot.
Encourage them to hire a pimply faced minion to edit the config files so they feel important, and so you avoid single point of dependency.
These days, get someone else who lives in Estonia/Ukraine/Sri Lanka for follow the sun support.
If you need more than two engineers + 2 assistants, you should have hired smarter engineers.
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Your secret path to success with international hiring is to avoid any country you know the name of.
Don't think you're thinking out of the box hiring from Brazil/Israel. Hunt down a decent dev from Ghana or Georgia.
If my Slack/Discord buddies are anything to go by, there's an extraordinary amount of gems out there who've made the choice to raise their kids in their home countries.
There's good talent in Thailand as well. RIP my friend the Thai data/cloud principal eng banking 14k USD.