41–50 of 58 posts
A classic pivot: "This gold mining thing isn't working out, perhaps we should just sell goods to the other miners".
Still, it fills a need and people are ready to pay for it, which is more than you can say for a lot of startup ideas…
Getting the MVP approach right is hard. Really hard. Either that, or I have just been doing it wrong. We have one line of business that is our bread and butter. It came up the old fashioned way: getting in the trenches, gutting it out, and tweaking the model until we gained traction. Since then, we have launched no less than 3 new businesses. Two were shutdown and one is currently languishing.
The challenge is marketing. It's hard, there is too much noise, and when the product is not refined, conversions can suffer. So, it can be difficult to discern whether your company is failing because of the minimal product (especially in these days of "high design"), because of some other execution element, or just no market fit.
I also think the MVP approach is suitable to businesses with specific characteristics and these may be relatively rare. In this case, the business already had fairly extensive relationships with its target market on both sides of the equation. That was key, I believe, as much of the marketing legwork had been done and the established trust could override any qualms about such a minimalist approach. Also, the nature of the business was such that simple forms and manual processes were sufficient to start. That is frequently not the case with tech businesses.
This is not to disparage their accomplishments in the slightest. It was an astute pivot and their approach was smart. It's just that the mantra of MVP, fast iterations, fail fast, etc. has been the magic hammer lately, and too many companies have been nails.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think these are the only two sites using a big hero image overlaid with white Gotham/Lato/Proxima Nova headers...
It instantly reminded me of simple as well. Both top fixed headers with orange buttons and large BG image with a white background. There are more for sure. The basic app/tool website layout.
How exactly does the money back guarantee work? After a developer does all the work for a project, the project owner can just say he's not happy with it and wants a refund? There must be some safeguards in place to prevent abuse...
Because the projects are vetted as well, this decreases the chances of this happening.
A classic pivot: "This gold mining thing isn't working out, perhaps we should just sell goods to the other miners".
A classic pivot: "This gold mining thing isn't working out, perhaps we should just sell goods to the other miners".
As someone who's working on the exact same concept for another domain (freelance designers), I've come to realize this is one of the least original business models ever (there's about 10 similar services in my space alone). Still, it fills a need and people are ready to pay for it, which is more than you can say for a lot of startup ideas…
Pretty interesting. I wonder if that is 25k per month, in total revenue, gross profit etc.
Funny, this is exactly how I started Folyo ( http://folyo.me ) as well (which is the same thing but for freelance designers). The only difference is that I used Posterous as well to get an online archive of each project (you could post directly form Wufoo to Posterous if I remember correctly). Edit: from reading the post I thought they catered only to app developers. After taking a look at the site, it seems that the…