"Ideating"? Really? Yes I know it's not a new word, but really?
He's young, and needs the money.
We Built It, And They Didn't Come
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: We Built It, And They Didn't Come
#32You know, I'm a builder. I like to build things. But a business isn't about building things, it's about selling things. You can build a real business with a terrible to mediocre product if you are great at selling it. You can't build a real business if you can't sell your product, no matter how good your product is. The thing that will determine your success is sales and marketing, especially early in the business li…
This is why my self-driving RC-car platform is withering on the vine - I can't get funding because I'm an engineer, not a salesman.
I am looking for an RC that I can control through WIFI. In other words, I want to be able to control an RC remotely through the internet (with a webcam, of course). Is this what you offer?
Re: We Built It, And They Didn't Come
#33Here is my take after reading the slides from a student perspective. If we put more resource on marketing would it mean at some point we will oversell our service? In other words, we can only handle 100 users but now 120 users because of the good marketing? Then we have to hire more people (but that takes time too) to make the system more robust (from both deops and software engineering). That's a problem, isn't it?…
Capacity planning is a good exercise, but the brutal truth of the matter is that the most common scaling problem of startups is to have no scaling problems at all.
Especially with B2B startups. I could point to a client or two which had "We're having trouble holding on to the rocket ship" at some points along their growth curve. The far more common outcome, though, is to be rate limited on customer acquisition.
If you ever are in the position where you have 120 people champing at the bit to buy your stuff but can only service 100, great, there exist easy solutions to that.
The easiest is a variant on Raise Prices. For example, back in the day when Slicehost was rate-limited on the number of boxes Dell would let them put on their personal credit cards per month, and they had a substantial waiting list, they let people bid their way to the top of the waiting list by using non-refundable pre-pay for service. If you pre-paid for 6 months, you leapt ahead on the queue in front of those only willing to pre-pay for 3. This let them convert pre-paid cash into boxes, allowing them to onboard the entire wait list within 2 months of instituting the policy.
It was genius.
Re: We Built It, And They Didn't Come
#34Re: We Built It, And They Didn't Come
#35Re: We Built It, And They Didn't Come
#36You know, I'm a builder. I like to build things. But a business isn't about building things, it's about selling things. You can build a real business with a terrible to mediocre product if you are great at selling it. You can't build a real business if you can't sell your product, no matter how good your product is. The thing that will determine your success is sales and marketing, especially early in the business li…
This is why my self-driving RC-car platform is withering on the vine - I can't get funding because I'm an engineer, not a salesman.
The biggest problem here is your product. Why would anyone want a self driving RC car? The whole point/fun of an RC car is driving it yourself. Why do you think a market actually exists here? I don't quite get it.
Re: We Built It, And They Didn't Come
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why my self-driving RC-car platform is withering on the vine - I can't get funding because I'm an engineer, not a salesman.
The biggest problem here is your product. Why would anyone want a self driving RC car? The whole point/fun of an RC car is driving it yourself. Why do you think a market actually exists here? I don't quite get it.
I think the key word is "platform". Robotics hobbyists would enjoy writing software and design sensors for it to drive itself.
Re: We Built It, And They Didn't Come
#38(This is not a flame or anything just my subjective impression. I know the people who built this (well 2 of them) personally. So forgive me guys)
I was asking a few times how things were going and that I could need something that sounds like what they were building -- granted on a very informal level but still I asked and expressed my interested.
Problem was: They never came back to me and told me: Hey here's the stuff! Wanna try?
I can make up reasons why, maybe because I moved to another country to take a job, or after all they don't like me or whatever. To me it boils down to: I (as in "the potential customer") was asking how far the product was and never got a real answer.
My team has about 2000 Boxes to "operate"[1] and I manage only a single team. Totaling to about 100K servers with different DCs spread over the world.
I'd think anybody who gets this kind of offer should try to get a foot in the door. Even if the deal doesn't close people have heard about the stuff.
So the essence is to me: This one little slide where you see that sales/marketing was way under represented in the team. Hell guys I know! you can build stuff, but don't expect me (the customer) to keep asking and asking and asking for wether or not it suits you to send me something I can work with...
[1]: I currently live in an enterprise environment where DevOps or agile is still something new and not to be trusted!
Re: We Built It, And They Didn't Come
#39"Ideating"? Really? Yes I know it's not a new word, but really?
Coursera mooc on innovation specifically talks about various aspects of ideation as a process so yeah, it a legit word.
Re: We Built It, And They Didn't Come
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
After the IBM commercial, "Ideating" became code for "I'm going to take a nap" where I worked at the time.
Which commercial?