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Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

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Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#31

This is a classic B2C vs. B2B. Simply put B2C is tough without network effect or funding to build it. B2C - Customer/User has time, not money. B2B - Customer has money, not time.

B2B has its own set of challenges too. Making a sale can be a lot more complicated and take easily a year.

Not all B2B is like that. In general smaller companies have much shorter sales cycles than large. Also tactical products (oh shit I have to solve this by Thursday) have shorter lead times than strategic products (how are we going to handle this issue for the next ten years).

The revenue per customer is lower but the volumes higher. It is doable.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#33
Congrats on the persistence! The lesson: things take time.

Took me about a decade. I also tried a note-taking app (every new developer's rite of passage it seems), an event guide, digital magazine, and an assortment of other projects whose domain names no longer resolve.

Suck as it may, each failure is a lesson in what not to do. If you find yourself back at square one and still have the drive to keep trying then it's only a matter of time before you create enough value to open wallets.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#35

I have a similar long history of failures, though my failures did generate income - just nowhere near enough to give up the day job. €20k a year at their highest point, €5k a year at other times. I notice similarities in what you're describing, particularly when it comes to your target market and products. B2C not B2B. And generic, anyone products, rather than targeted niche products. A lesson that took me a long, lo…

Is it not a lot easier to market and sell to consumers instead of businesses? The CaC is lower correct?

Depending on the niche, this can be true. But it's also generally true that low CaC equals low per-unit pricing and margins. Very difficult to run a business at a consumer-friendly price point without getting to really substantial scale.

For example, Netflix has all the benefits of scale, low cost of capital, etc. and their profit margin is 11% on a service that starts at $9/mo. So if your service has similar pricing power to Netflix, you might need order of 10,000 individual customers to cover a single engineer. And that's after the frequently massive investment required up front to build a product to B2C standards.

In B2B, it's often easier to find some niche that a) is underserved or not served at all, b) is relatively valuable to some set of customers, and c) can be served with a lower quality of finish because it's a business app.

In the B2B space, it's much easier to charge $49/mo, $99/mo, or higher because businesses tend not to be price sensitive in that range. Also, businesses often will need SSO or other "Enterprise" feature and so then you have a $10k+ annual contract for the same service. In this band of self-service B2B SaaS, there is typically not much of a "sales" process. Just post the info on the site and let prospects choose. You can do demos when it makes sense. But nothing like a 1-year intensive sales process. The sales process is closer to B2C, but for more money and less churn.

It's much easier to build a business when you only need to make 50 or 100 sales (and support 50 or 100 customers) to get to profitability.

Honestly, having bootstrapped & sold a SaaS myself, I would not consider bootstrapping anything with a starting price point of less than about $49/mo. And I would only go that low if customers were encouraged to land on a plan at $99/mo or higher.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#37
post #21

I'm 16 years in and have followed a similar path. I graduated college in 2004, started my business in 2005 and never took a job. Consulting has gotten me here and I've had up to 4 direct hires with me, but my dream has always been to run a product business. I must have attempted 3 dozen different ideas by this point. But on Friday last week, we reached our 100th subscriber. Combined with other free products, we now h…

how you bootstrapped yourself?

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#38
I did this for a couple of years as well.

I think the experience was invaluable, and I don't regret it, but I arrived at the conclusion that doing a startup is largely overrated.

Why stress out for 60 hours a week for years on end watching your savings dwindle when you could have been making great money at a medium or a big company with great benefits that doesn't force you to work on the weekends and allows you to take paid time off? If you land at FAANG or similar, you'll make more money than most startup people ever do anyway.

The startup community loves to talk trash about regular corporations, but for me the work/life/stress balance has been a great trade off.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#39
Good on you for continuing to try! I am just now seeing ~very meaningful success for my startup I founded about 10 years ago. An important component of my endurance was that I truly care about the mission of the business beyond financial gain...I think this has to be true for runaway success.

Shameless plug: we are using software to combat climate change (https://bractlet.com) and we're hiring (just like everyone else)! Feel free to email me directly (brian at bractlet dot com) if you are interested.

Re: Failed for the past 12 years as an tech entrepreneur

#40
I followed a very similar path for a long time. I am 37 now and have been in tech for over 20 years (I started very young). Over the years, I have worked many places, started my own consultancy, freelanced, and have tried starting many other businesses and online services over the years (invoicing, disposable email, some B2B services, project management, etc.).

Most of my business ideas have failed. Some have had limited success (a few hundred per month at most), and only ONE (my latest one) has been pretty noticeably successful right off the bat.

Just keep trying and pushing forward. It has taken almost 2 years since launch, but my Google Sheets add-on that imports bank transactions called BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.net ) is only just now very close to $1k MRR and still growing. It's funny to me because my most successful ideas have never been ones that were new or novel. Just practical, useful, and really well understood things that save people time or make their lives easier.

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