81–90 of 102 posts
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Forgive me for asking but how is the site making $100/day while it's in the free beta phase?
I charge $100 / sold vehicle. Dealer and private owner. I need to grab market share then flip it to $100 to post an ad. Dealer just uploads XML (SFTP) file then i import and publish using a WP import plug in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I charge $100 / sold vehicle. Dealer and private owner. I need to grab market share then flip it to $100 to post an ad. Dealer just uploads XML (SFTP) file then i import and publish using a WP import plug in.
Is everything manually handled at this point? How do you collect $100 at point of sale? I guess specifically, how do you force the seller to give you $100?
Automate as much as possible. Payments ? Slap a stripe checkout form (unless you happen to be in a country where Stripe is still not supported) or Paypal for others. Onboarding: Make it as easy and smooth as possible for clients to get started after signinup. Show them exactly where and how to start. Documentation & FAQ: Create tons of it. If a client has a question, thy should be able to resolve it through your docu…
Some things B2B require actual phone calls. At my last job, I'd go out to my car in the parking lot to take/make calls.
Now that I'm at a different gig where I take the bus to work, it's more difficult to find a quiet spot to talk. Sometimes I find myself talking to prospective clients in the stairwell :-)
All in all, you'll find that most businesses are quite accommodating as long as they know you will respond. My mantra has become "when in doubt, Communicate."
Contrarian view: don't spend time automating things. Spend any extra time you have selling and building the product people need. If someone needs your product, they'll probably be fine with an invoice. Spend the early mornings before work prospecting and reaching out to potential customers. If you're on the west coast, even better because you can conduct sales calls with east coast people who are already at work. Aft…
As programmers we really like to automate away the mundane stuff, and we're not too fond of human interaction. I'm grossly exaggerating, of course, but for a lot of us, this was the push and pull that originally drove us to hack away at computers. Creating a big and shiny automated processes is almost a no brainer for us. Yet, I believe that you are absolutely right. We should fight our inclination to see everything…
A prospective customer/client is usually more comfortable with someone who keeps up an open line of communication than having it automated away by forms, FAQs, etc. For many industries, they expect the hands-on approach and this can be the way you get business over other competitors.
I'm not kidding when I say that simply being friendly has won me business.
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I agree with the other responses here, but I don't feel like this deserves to be downvoted to death either, so I'm upvoting. I did this, quit my job and ran my startup idea full-time, without enough funding, and I have a family and a mortgage. I loved it, and I regret it, and I don't regret it, all at the same time. I had some savings, but I've used it all. I've been going full-time for a lot longer than I thought I…
I am very close to making the decision to the same path you took (with family and kid of course). I know each case is different but how long did bootstrapping take for you? I already put saving aside for one year (covering insurance and mortgage plus other minimal living cost). I imagine I need earn at least $85K in a year to survive the second year and so on (based on cost of living in my area). I am also thinking a…
I had some blind spots & weaknesses I didn't know about beforehand, and an overly optimistic outlook. The other people on my team admit to the same. We wouldn't have learned those things if we hadn't quit & gone full time, and learning this stuff is super valuable. But I can see now more clearly why so many entrepreneurs say that big mistakes are inevitable and why so many people talk about businesses really taking 10 years to get off the ground, rather than 1 or 2.
I have started doing some consulting, and it's super helpful money-wise, but takes a lot of energy away from the startup idea. I find that consulting for 20 billable hours a week is roughly equivalent to working 40 hours at a full time job. With a family, that doesn't leave a ton of time to work on the startup.
When I do it again, I will look for at least 2 years of runway before I go whole hog, whether that's savings or VC funding. It's also a good idea to find your family's minimum comfortable burn rate (with wiggle room for emergencies). It might be less or more than you think.
Also it's important to have a good sense of how you get customers. I'm still working on that, but I truly had no clue when we started. It's a lot harder to get the word out than I thought, the internet is extremely noisy, attention is extremely scarce, and using the internet for advertising has changed considerably just in the last 5 years. Next time I will probably try to bootstrap to cost-neutral revenue before going full time. We quit our jobs before we were making any money, and just built the product for a while. It has been awesome in many ways, but we'd be in a better spot if we'd started selling sooner and waited until we had revenue to go full time.
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Haha only $100/day Props to you that would be my full time pay. Was going to ask what generates the money but after visiting the site I could probably guess. Did want to point out in mobile the "view more listings" button could use a margin-top. Nice layout. The red for sale tag is catchy.
Thanks! im working on the design update. Will improve mobile nav button. Goal is to make the site stupid fast. Stupid simple.
Contrarian view: don't spend time automating things. Spend any extra time you have selling and building the product people need. If someone needs your product, they'll probably be fine with an invoice. Spend the early mornings before work prospecting and reaching out to potential customers. If you're on the west coast, even better because you can conduct sales calls with east coast people who are already at work. Aft…
As programmers we really like to automate away the mundane stuff, and we're not too fond of human interaction. I'm grossly exaggerating, of course, but for a lot of us, this was the push and pull that originally drove us to hack away at computers. Creating a big and shiny automated processes is almost a no brainer for us. Yet, I believe that you are absolutely right. We should fight our inclination to see everything…
But those things shouldn't (and needn't) come at the expense of not doing real sales.
If you look at recent successful B2B tech companies (I'm talking IPOs or true unicorns), you'll likely find most of them had a strong sales focus early on. Notable exceptions would be very dev-focused products such as GitHub & Twilio.
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(Not OP) Thanks for the book recommendation. It's interesting that you say not to automate everything. I somewhat agree, except for the payment side of things -- isn't Stripe/PayPal really low friction and simply to get in place?
Yes its easy, but ... in my experience, very early customers usually get special pricing, terms, and support. IMO its not worth the time to configure plans, pricing pages, and glue code that you'll probably change later. An invoice tool/service that uses Stripe or PayPal would be fine. Also, if people can sign-up with stripe online they're also going to expect to be able to cancel, view billing history, and print inv…
I like the high touch approach: it keeps you personally connected to the customer until such a time as you wish to automate away that interaction and just chase sales (but obviously still providing a great service.)
Thanks a bunch, mate.