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Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

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Re: Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

#21

Post by SoftTalker »

jedberg wrote: post #4

> It is just me - is that a red flag? Some people have asked me about my team and I told them it was just me. I got the feeling that it may have turned them off because the conversation kind of ended right there. Solo people and even small teams are a huge risk to enterprises. They will have to dedicate time to negotiating with you and integrating your solution. If you just disappear after that, that's a huge problem…

Be aware that more and more large orgs will have policy around software and services procurement for any software that will run on or touch internal enterprise systems or data, particularly protected data, regardless of price. This isn't 2004 anymore and engineers or even managers cannot just expense software purchases. It's only gotten harder to deal with big enterprise as a small software or services supplier.

Re: Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

#22

Post by wutwutwat »

Design tools shouldn’t be hard to sell if they are useful to others. The product should very much do the sales for you. These people know of your product, you’re exchanging emails and getting beers, and yet those people aren’t coming to you and asking how can they get access. Design tools specifically don’t require rubbing elbows with folks over beers to sell, not if it’s useful. Designers will have zero hesitation jumping on something that saves them time or makes their workflows less tedious.

No offense intended but if other people found value in it you’d be making sales and they’d be praising it to their designer friends. Design products that people want are easy sells. This is a smell you don’t have product market fit. But, that’s ok, because it’s a thing you built for you, so if it doesn’t solve anyone else’s problem you’ve still solved your own. If your product has competition, how are they able to sell to folks? Are they small? Maybe it’s niche and there’s just no market to penetrate.

Why the b2b targeting? Aim it at b2c and skip the enterprise bs. Again, if it is valuable to designers, they will purchase for themselves personally and use it at both work and at home, and that is frictionless compared to contract negation and vetting, snail paced security audits, and nonsense terms and scope creep added to sign a deal. It’s not needed here imo and it’ll force you to sell your souls to get deals and your passion project will morph into a monster you don’t even like.

Re: Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

#23

Post by irf1 »

4) consider sharing your journey, challenges, accomplishments, product updates and demos on twitter, adding tags like #buildinpublic and #indiehacker helps. also periodically post on places like reddit in the form of 'this is who I am, this is the problem I experienced, this is the solution I have built so far, hope to hear your questions & feedback'

5) bootstrapping is super hard (doing it right now) and early on usually accompanied by some contract work on the side to sustain yourself until ramen profitability

happy to connect and point out some examples if it helps ioannis@algora.io best of luck!!

Re: Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

#24

Post by vsareto »

wutwutwat wrote: post #22

Design tools shouldn’t be hard to sell if they are useful to others. The product should very much do the sales for you. These people know of your product, you’re exchanging emails and getting beers, and yet those people aren’t coming to you and asking how can they get access. Design tools specifically don’t require rubbing elbows with folks over beers to sell, not if it’s useful. Designers will have zero hesitation j…

You probably still need a decent sample size when finding a market fit, so I wouldn’t write it off as not being useful unless there’s been 10-20 impressions.

Re: Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

#25

Post by Klonoar »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #14

Something that seems to be not well known by the general public: Landing a big contract with a big company early on can be very problematic. They have a history of screwing small companies. Small companies often seem to imagine this will solve all their problems. It seems to be the business equivalent of the fantasy of winning the lottery and then having it made in the shade. In reality, winning the lottery frequentl…

I ran into this early on and it’s a very tight rope to walk. You’re early and trying to keep the big fish so you over-extend and then you’re stuck with that level until you figure out how to reset the expectations - which can be tricky to do.

It blocks you from doing other more critical things that, while they might not make you revenue today, will potentially make you revenue later.

I’ve never been a fan of VC money but if you’ve gone through this kind of bootstrapping you can certainly appreciate some of what it solves - tho the grass is always greener and all that.

Re: Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

#26

Post by gnicholas »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #14

Something that seems to be not well known by the general public: Landing a big contract with a big company early on can be very problematic. They have a history of screwing small companies. Small companies often seem to imagine this will solve all their problems. It seems to be the business equivalent of the fantasy of winning the lottery and then having it made in the shade. In reality, winning the lottery frequentl…

I can see how this might happen, but it's also a very good way to establish credibility with other customers (and funders, if you're looking to go that route). IME, it all but eliminates questions about "are you too small?" if you're already doing business with a big, well-known company.

You should try to ascertain whether they are likely to be aligned with your other customers in terms of feature development, and seek to find other large-ish customers so that you're not totally dependent upon that one. You should also try to make the dependence bilateral — make it so that you're delivering tons of unique value to them, so that they can't say "add X feature or we're dropping you".

Re: Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

#29

Post by Joel_Mckay »

1. It is just me - is that a red flag?

You are not big enough to drive enough revenue to grow yet. A company takes a lot of work besides a few good ideas, and most people just can’t afford to risk sweat equity. Asking software/engineering people to work for “free”/”shares of nothing” sours most conversations pretty quickly. People with skills usually get scammed once or twice before they learn this lesson.

2. How do I set appropriate milestones for me to reach?

You are currently in the independent-contractor or owner-operator class. If you plan to self bootstrap, than don’t enter into a public market without a war chest over $500k. You will need to hit hard and fast in a very lucrative/narrow niche, then bail-out of the sector before an army of losers show up to compete. A small team of 5 can do a lot, but focus on hard small problems if you want to survive. Recall people don’t make money writing software, but rather reselling the same product/services many times over.

3. I'm in a small town in PNW.

No, your product in hand at a trade-show is all that matters, and a small office for meetings is like $600/month. Again, think about disposable-products and services as you can’t protect anything yet. Strategic truth means not volunteering information that can harm your position. The only difference between a bum in a cheap suit and a CEO is money.

4. What are some ways to do marketing?

Trade-shows and related events where in-person meetings are more probable, and listen to what customers are shopping for at first. Each event is usually worth about 5 months of online marketing in terms of sales leads.

5. I've been inspired by the Startup School videos.

Most startup rants are BS stories of winning a lottery… No one relevant shows up to an event with 450 competitors and talks about what they are planning.

YMMV, =)

Re: Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

#30

Post by ye-olde-sysrq »

jmduke wrote: post #19

(Context — I run Buttondown ( http://buttondown.email/ ) as a solo founder, with a handful of contractors on support/documentation but no other W2s.) 1. You need to either a) have an answer for "what happens if you get hit by a bus?" or b) create a product for customers to whom that doesn't matter. In general, people really _like_ being able to chat with the founder directly (lean into that! it's a superpower!) but f…

VC can be a great way to break into markets that just have inherently large moats or barriers to entry. Stripe is an example: you can code all you like but you literally can't move money without going through a ton of very annoying (to devs, anyway) footwork to get cozy with the existing financial institutions. The connections your VCs give you can matter as much as the money.

They can also literally kill your company. VCs have a very specific strategy: they give some money to 1000 companies knowing that 990 of them will return 0% in the hopes that of the remaining ten, 9 of them return %X000 and one returns %X0000. Given this, they are going to have very little interest in finding a company that will return even "good" results. They're going to push you to shoot for huge growth or die trying. And given the choice between "grow modestly and safely" and "grow faster but risk exploding" they will push you to pick the latter, because in their business model they can't even count low enough to measure returns that are just 10x.

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