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After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

dylanhuang.com

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Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#101

Post by stunt »

He is young. At that age, I tried multiple times and failed each time. I did manage to sell one and it earned me good money.

At that age you have plenty of time to pursue many things but you often lack the experience needed to succeed in the B2B market.

You definitely need support from someone with sufficient B2B experience, or you might have better luck focusing on something in the B2C space.

My only advice if he really wants to continue pursuing B2B is to find a partner who can sell the product. Selling is a full-time job on its own.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#102

Post by k0ns0l »

gkoberger wrote: post #49

Oh, it looks like we were competitors! I'm the founder of ReadMe.com, and we do API docs (as well as SDKs and more). I don't really know why, specifically, we ended up being successful. I know I also had a lot of false starts – slightly iterating on the core idea until I hit something people were visibly excited about. I also knew it was a hard market, so I put a lot of my time and effort into non-engineering things.…

:-)

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#103

Post by tonyedgecombe »

spullara wrote: post #52
gortok wrote: post #25

> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. >"We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product because we felt we could use the breakthroughs in Gen AI to solve previously unsolvable problems, but after going through user interviews and the sales cycle for many different ideas, we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us beli…

It just doesn't make any sense when you can go to work for a big company and get that kind of outcome without all the risk.

It does if you aren't a big company person.

I suspect the majority of entrepreneurs aren't doing it for the money, they are doing it because they don't fit the traditional corporate mould. The people the media loves to focus on are the outliers.

Schumpeter had some interesting insights on this: https://reactionwheel.net/2019/01/schumpeter-on-strategy.htm...

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#104

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Sytten wrote: post #69
notforviewingit wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I have been wondering this myself as well. I'm one of 3 co-founders in a bootstrapped company doing consultancy for a few years in a LCOL area. We have been paying founders 50k/year salaries for the life of the company. We haven't been especially lucky and we haven't been super brilliant in our business decisions. Yet we are doing fairly well. This year we made 400k revenue, 150k profit and 40% growth. Our sales…

Product and service businesses are very very very different things. Service you get immediate cashflow but the thing doesn't scale past the humans. Software scales infinitely in theory, but it takes a lot of time to build before you even get 1$ out of it.

I've know quite a few businesses that started with services then transitioned into product. Once you have enough domain knowledge it is the obvious next step.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#105

Post by VagabundoP »

x0x0 wrote: post #82
CoastalCoder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you just had a "whoosh" moment.

That's what I get for reading literally. sigh.

You can take solace from the fact that you've made quite a few people sensibly chuckle in cafes around the world.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#107

Post by presentation »

ianpurton wrote: post #106

The developer tools market is REALLY difficult. Nearly every architecture decision is "which open source tool can I use to solve [problem]". No one wants to pay for anything and that's ok.

That said most developers don’t have any awareness of problems outside of those they experience… which tend to be developer tooling issues. So you get a ton of companies building dev tools startups despite an incredible amount of need elsewhere.

I feel like a lot of value could be unlocked if there were some way besides random chance and networking for skilled developers looking to start something to discover people with problems, domain expertise and entrepreneurial ambition.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#108

Post by fsndz »

cj wrote: post #47
mediaman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people even think about selling $10/mo licenses. Just go sell $2-4k/mo SaaS to a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software with a target customer employee size of 50 - 1,000 people. Customer problem discovery is easier, you get reputation network effects within the vertical, you gain trust because you learn the industry lingo, you can actually solve peoples' problems b…

> Just go sell $2-4k/mo SaaS to a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software with a target customer employee size of 50 - 1,000 people. I’ve successfully done exactly this. Except in order to get there, we had to spend 3-4 years selling cheap $29/mo self-serve plans at volume to iron out all of the kinks in the product and UX. Only after that were we able to go upmarket selling $40-90k/yr con…

True and what I find funny is that the same companies are often willing to pay a lot of money to consultants that will deliver a shitty streamlit POC. Like they will literally pay consultants the equivalent of 4 years of new SaaS cost to get a POC instead of using a product with rough edges and grow with it. Expectations can be really dumb and confusing.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#110

Post by fsndz »

VagabundoP wrote: post #105
x0x0 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I get for reading literally. sigh.

You can take solace from the fact that you've made quite a few people sensibly chuckle in cafes around the world.

haha this is why I love HN
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