101–110 of 256 posts
Technology isn't the business. Technology enables the business.
Investors will want you to build technology to inflate the company IP and worth, but will leave you when you fail to bring in profit due to focusing on tech too much.
If you sell through a channel, that channel is your customer, not the end user. They have needs and actually those needs (not desires, needs) are more important than the end users' -- if your channel doesn't sell the product it doesn't matter how much you've worked to add that end-user feature.
Have the entire exec team go on a sales call once a quarter (not all together on the same call!). They don't have to say anything in the call (in fact it's much better they don't). I remember a CFO I told to go on a sales call telling me it was the first time in his career he had been in front of a customer, and that he really had had no idea what the customer thought about what we did. It makes the team far more effective.
Don't allow inter-departmental sniping. We all know it: sales guys won't sell the product and always want stupid one-off features; engineering is lazy and won't write what the customers actually want; marketing is just lying all the time. Instead make sure everybody understands that without sales folks, no paycheck. Without engineers, the sales folks have nothing to sell. Without marketing, who will know that they need our product, and how can we prioritize which features to build? That mild-mannered A/R clerk is the real difference between paycheck and no paycheck.
Don't do free pilots for enterprise. There's always someone interested in new products and technologies. If they can't put some skin in the game they aren't serious. Ideally cover your costs, but in any case make sure the number is larger than the person you're talking to is automatically authorized to spend (this means they'll need to get some buy in, PO, contract etc). They don't have to give it all to you up front, they just need some commitment and desire to do business if the pilot works. And they have to give you some payment up front, a meaningful amount.
Don't have one customer be all of your revenue (ideally don't have one customer be more than 20% of revenue). Edit: note that Google has this problem: 80+% of revenue is advertising, and Google is a large part of the overall advertising market. They have been trying, and failing, to fix this for more than a decade. This is a case where you want to be able to say "we aren't google".
Don't go in too high in the organization. If your first call is to the CEO and you convince them to try your product, it will be handed off to someone who likely only cares because the CEO said so, and would be quite happy to screw around a little and then tell the boss "yeah, we looked into it but it didn't work out". Follow the standard enterprise sales playbook and go in at the right level and find your "coach": the person who is committed to getting your product into the company because it will make their life better (perhaps promotion, but at least better execution).
This is for when you are bigger: If you work with another company, and your company meets with their CEO, your CEO should go to that meeting. Until you're Apple-sized, always treat your partners and customers as peers. If not, why are you working with them at all?
- Product Market Fit - find that before continuing to perfect the product. - Market size and especially addressable market size. We learnt it the hard way with children's apps. - Tech is a tool. Unless you are doing groundbreaking research, dont be in awe of the tools (tech), nor let it go crazy expensive. - One needs a deep reserve of patience and strength, you will get challenged in all dimensions. - Sometimes you…
Apply your technical skills to a non-technical business. Dont start a tech startup in a tech hub. Run a business completely unrelated to tech and use your skills to improve that business, theres SO much low hanging fruit out there. The venn diagram of tech skills and a non-tech business is where the opportunities are. This applies to many other unrelated skills.
Best advice in the thread so far. You’re chances of success are 10x higher trying to build technology for tanning salons than it is building the next new docker kubernetes react native infrastructure as a service. Unsexy sells.
Except tanning salons (or hairstylists or dog walkers or plumbers) usually a) dont have cash to spend b) Dont see their problems as software related c) are in many cases hostile to software, due to geniune bad software
I remember some time ago when I used to hang out in bootstrapped.fm, every week a person would come in and say "Oh I built a software for salons/hairstylists/dog walkers" how I can sell it? 4 weeks later they had shutdown their business, and a new person would come in, rinse and repeat.
The wrinkle here is that it's not always obvious what projects will create business value. Unfortunately, if you're not in an organization with deep pockets and a long time horizon for projects to succeed, it's almost always a better business decision to work on projects that have a direct link to creating business value.
2. Using a technology because [insert large successful company or startup here] uses it well at scale is almost always the wrong decision for a startup. What works for Google, Meta, Uber, etc. will likely not work for your startup until you reach a certain critical level of scale.
3. Headcount is vanity metric. If a company is proud that they have a large team, you should probably run. Employees cost money and employee salaries count toward OPEX vs. CAPEX. What matters is revenue per employee, but many startups are pre-revenue.
4. Scaling your organization or technical stack before you have product market fit is a waste of time. Silicon Valley history is littered with dead startups you've never heard of that burned through their runway building over-engineered systems designed to scale to meet the demand of users that never came. The same is true of startups that built out massive sales departments before they had a product that people wanted to buy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sales fixes everything. Very hard to learn for engineers and designers often.
Unless the product you are selling is defective.
Many founders start applying methodologies and hiring for roles they know from other companies, even though they're not at a scale that justifies it.
Here's 30 years of experience for you: 1. Few business problems can't be solved by more sales. 2. Cut expenses when the storm is approaching, not when you're soaking wet. 3. You can't eat assets or inventory. Don't get emotional about what you own, only about your cash balances. 4. Banks are your friend only when you don't need them. Corollary: One bank for borrowing, one for cash balance accounts. 5. 70 completed ca…
Good sales people are critical to success. Most sales people aren't good, pick them with care.