> there are two separate personas that you need to “create”: The user persona and the buyer persona. Even more important: stop using personas, start using actual people. I've experienced many startups make unforced errors by conflating people into personas. A better way is to tag people with attributes, such as specific interests, explicit concerns, tasks to be done, usage goals, learning preferences, and the like. W…
Definitely - but those are normally called "development partners" in B2B, right?
> there are two separate personas that you need to “create”: The user persona and the buyer persona. Even more important: stop using personas, start using actual people. I've experienced many startups make unforced errors by conflating people into personas. A better way is to tag people with attributes, such as specific interests, explicit concerns, tasks to be done, usage goals, learning preferences, and the like. W…
Those two personas were very helpful to me in my previous life as a technical marketer; they helped me learn when to leave a job. Any time a company I have worked for told me they're shifting emphasis from talking about our product with the actual users to talking about "solutions" for the buyers, I knew it was time to start sending out resumes because the product was about to stall and the work climate was about to get insufferable.
Maybe a simple question I didn’t see here: paying yourself a salary?
How true is it you’ll need to persist under extreme duress unable to pay yourself a salary? Relevant for us with kids / families where we provide the family’s income.
Maybe a simple question I didn’t see here: paying yourself a salary? How true is it you’ll need to persist under extreme duress unable to pay yourself a salary? Relevant for us with kids / families where we provide the family’s income.
I will add a section. Pay yourself a salary at the very latest the moment you've raised funding. If a VC objects to you doing that, get a different VC. You're in for the long run, and support from your family etc. is important, and you're already taking on a huge risk by pooling all your risk in one company, vs. the VC who is happily diversified.
Investors who imply you shouldn't take a salary are no bueno.
I see a pattern where companies end up becoming consulting firms with a bit of proprietary tech. Then all their efforts are put into a handful of clients. The companies call them “design partners” but they’re basically clients.
Seems like a particularly risky trap for bootstrapped companies desperate for revenue. At the same time the best companies I see out there are relentlessly customer focused.
How do you draw the line between “design partner” and becoming someone’s consultant.
Maybe a simple question I didn’t see here: paying yourself a salary? How true is it you’ll need to persist under extreme duress unable to pay yourself a salary? Relevant for us with kids / families where we provide the family’s income.
I will add a section. Pay yourself a salary at the very latest the moment you've raised funding. If a VC objects to you doing that, get a different VC. You're in for the long run, and support from your family etc. is important, and you're already taking on a huge risk by pooling all your risk in one company, vs. the VC who is happily diversified. Investors who imply you shouldn't take a salary are no bueno.
I've never once had a VC even ask about my paycheck let alone suggest I don't take one. FWIW the second you run a company you literally have to pay yourself at least minimum age, it's illegal not to. edit: Hm, apparently you can take a literal $0 paycheck. Regardless, it'd be absurd for a VC to tell you to do this imo.
I see a pattern where companies end up becoming consulting firms with a bit of proprietary tech. Then all their efforts are put into a handful of clients. The companies call them “design partners” but they’re basically clients. Seems like a particularly risky trap for bootstrapped companies desperate for revenue. At the same time the best companies I see out there are relentlessly customer focused. How do you draw th…
This rings true. A previous job I had did email analytics for the investment banking industry (from boutique firms up to the largest banks in the world). I kid you not, the single biggest driver of our success was the simple fact that our expertise in email meant that we fixed problems that almost all these firms had with email deliverability (bad IPs, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, broken unsubscribe functions, etc) over the actual product itself. This was in our best interest as our product was useless unless recipients could get email delivered to those that wanted it, but it was eye opening.
Maybe a simple question I didn’t see here: paying yourself a salary? How true is it you’ll need to persist under extreme duress unable to pay yourself a salary? Relevant for us with kids / families where we provide the family’s income.
I will add a section. Pay yourself a salary at the very latest the moment you've raised funding. If a VC objects to you doing that, get a different VC. You're in for the long run, and support from your family etc. is important, and you're already taking on a huge risk by pooling all your risk in one company, vs. the VC who is happily diversified. Investors who imply you shouldn't take a salary are no bueno.
How much of a salary do you pay yourself?
Like equivalent to what your developer salary would be? Less? More because you’re a CEO now?
I basically have minimum $ amount I would accept for “developer job I absolutely love” that I know sustains my family comfortably without much extra fun or savings. Is that a good bar?
I see a pattern where companies end up becoming consulting firms with a bit of proprietary tech. Then all their efforts are put into a handful of clients. The companies call them “design partners” but they’re basically clients. Seems like a particularly risky trap for bootstrapped companies desperate for revenue. At the same time the best companies I see out there are relentlessly customer focused. How do you draw th…
You don't have a product until there's ~3 customers, with perspective to more. Before that you're essentially a consultant. I'll add that to the next version of the doc, too.
The point is: For anything you build, you can find 1 customer. It's only when there's multiple customers that like the product and want to improve it where you move from "consulting" or "custom development" to "product".