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My app failed: lessons learned

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Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#161

Post by henvic »

rorykoehler wrote: post #64
henvic wrote: post #14

I know this pain. In my case, I spent most of my life around 18-23 years old living in my parents' working about 100% of my time on something of my own I had a lot of negative support from friends, colleagues, and extended family as many don't see entrepreneurship with good eyes in Brazil. The last project I worked ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dML0FQIUcTY , I spent 2013-2014 on it), was heading to the right dire…

>as many don't see entrepreneurship with good eyes in Brazil. How do they think the companies that offer salaried work started?

Here is the issue: pursuing a - so called - stable career as a public servant is, unfortunately i what many consider success.go to a coffeshop and you'll hear many discussing about the admission process, what friends and relatives are trying, salaries for all sorts of random positions, and so on. Barely anyone will be talking about opening a company. Even less if we aren't talking about tech related ones.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#162

Post by henvic »

rorykoehler wrote: post #129
sergiomattei wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sense snark in this comment, but I'll answer anyways. In Latin America, our culture is extremely conservative about taking risks. We're expected to get a job, settle down, live a nice life. Generally entrepreneurship is frowned upon by our families and friends.

What does society think of successful entrepreneurs?

There's a huge lack of admiration for entrepreneurs. In special, for the successful ones. Some people just hate them.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#163

Post by nreece »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #21

Here's my take on selling: 1) Sell to people who can write the check, and have a budget to spend That's my entire advice. It seems obvious. If you're selling to an individual, choose a demographic with money to spend. And charge a price to fit into their budget. If you're selling to a team, don't. Sell to the person buying products/tools for the team, the one with signing authority. They make the ultimate decision. A…

>> If you're selling to a team, don't. Sell to the person buying products/tools for the team, the one with signing authority.

While buying decisions are made on top, initial usage/trial decisions are often made by expert team members. I'll say, first soft-sell and get expert team members to try out your product, and soon-after ask them to connect you to the manager or decision-maker for further discussion.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#164

Post by zem »

kylebolt wrote: post #160
zem wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've seen one - my workplace briefly experimented with a chatbot for taking vacation time. you would say something like "i'm on vacation from tuesday to friday" and it would parse it, extract or convert the input to a date range, and submit a vacation request through the official tool. it would then ask if you also wanted to display your vacation status on your calendar and set up an email autoresponder, and do them…

This sounds interesting. Although this use case is very infrequent. If this had a wider use case, like something used daily, that just might be be a viable product!

it was infrequent but it was really pleasant to use. it was just a frontend to the internal websites that did the same thing though, so it was more of a feature than a product.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#165

Post by inter_netuser »

bromuro wrote: post #132
zem wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it means a bad market will make even a good product unsuccesful, and a good market will make even a mediocre product successful. the quality of the market wins out over the quality of the product.

Does this mean the market works by manipulating consumers?

why manipulating?

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#166

Post by cortesoft »

mdorazio wrote: post #71
cortesoft wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand your definition of need. You define a 'need' as anything that people find valuable, but I would classify 'nice to have' as also being things someone finds valuable. How do you distinguish something that is a 'nice to have' and a 'need'?

Nice to have is a luxury - it doesn't solve any actual problem people have, it just make life a little bit nicer. Need is an actual value proposition - people are already spending time or money to do a thing that you can do better. I think you're using the rigid definition of "need" like the bottom of the Maslow hierarchy, but in the business world "need" is more value driven, or in the B2C side closer to the top of…

That makes sense, but the examples the person I responded to used examples that don't fit with what you said.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#167

Post by cortesoft »

brianwawok wrote: post #83
cortesoft wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand your definition of need. You define a 'need' as anything that people find valuable, but I would classify 'nice to have' as also being things someone finds valuable. How do you distinguish something that is a 'nice to have' and a 'need'?

If you sell to a business, your software makes a job go from needing 3 employees to 1 employee to do. You saved the business say $6000 per month. As long as your software cost less than $6000 per month, it helps the business be more profitable. Selling to a person, to learn a new habit.. what is the dollar value to that? If a user cannot learn something on their own, that shows low commitment to that task. What then…

But the person I responded to used personal entertainment as an example of need.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#168

Post by bambax »

jmcphers wrote: post #152
bambax wrote: post #58

Slightly OT: I built myself a journaling app that sends one email every day to remind me to write about that day; I respond to that email and the response gets stored in a db as an entry for that day. The system doesn't try to be clever in any way, it just sends and receives emails; it's proven quite effective. It's been running for about two years now and there are only a couple of days missing, if that. It's very i…

This is almost exactly the feature set of OhLife, which tried and failed to make this experience (replying to a daily email as a form of journaling) into a product. It's a great idea but kind of hard to make money on. https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/ohlife-personal-journal-em... http://ohlife.com/index.php

Ha, interesting. Yeah it kind of rings a bell. It's amazing the domain still responds.

That confirms there isn't a big market for this... Still happy to use it for myself though.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#169

Post by sergiomattei »

henvic wrote: post #162
rorykoehler wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does society think of successful entrepreneurs?

There's a huge lack of admiration for entrepreneurs. In special, for the successful ones. Some people just hate them.

I wouldn't say there isn't admiration, at least where I grew up.

It's just a general lack of role models. It's not often massive, inspiring companies emerge from Latin American countries.

Entrepreneurship is really hard in LatAm: bureaucracy, lack of venture capital, grounded business thinking (investors down here are likelier to invest in more grounded, less technological companies over bigger moonshots).

We just have no frame of reference to dream big. Add to that the fact that most LatAm countries are exceedingly poor, there isn't much room to take the kind of financial risk entrepreneurship entails.

There is hope: things are changing. Governments are investing in startup communities and the last decade brought us the first Latino tech unicorns. But we're a long way to go still.

TLDR: LatAm is generally poor, risk-averse due to culture and has problems generating the feel-good success stories first-world countries mass produce.

Re: My app failed: lessons learned

#170

Post by [deleted] »

henvic wrote: post #161
rorykoehler wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>as many don't see entrepreneurship with good eyes in Brazil. How do they think the companies that offer salaried work started?

Here is the issue: pursuing a - so called - stable career as a public servant is, unfortunately i what many consider success.go to a coffeshop and you'll hear many discussing about the admission process, what friends and relatives are trying, salaries for all sorts of random positions, and so on. Barely anyone will be talking about opening a company. Even less if we aren't talking about tech related ones.

[deleted]
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