yes. I love this. until you have 10 customers your business is bull (jason cohen said this, not me and I love it). go get some sales. else you and your partner are wasting your time. best to figure out no one wants what you've built in the next 30 days then 8 months from now when you're sunk costs are even larger.
id suggest proceeding with caution. these pilot agreements.....did cash exchange hands? if no cash exchanged hands I'd treat these are essentially worthless.
I dont mean to burst your bubble but: if you're solving a problem that is serious enough businesses will give you money today. Usually (in my experience) these "once you add these features" are things that wont actually move the needle enough and you'll find yourself in continuous development of things that won't actually produce revenue.
If no money has exchanged hands, I'd suggest telling your sales cofounder to go get a pilot with actual money being handed over.
Ive done this a few times. 1 more successful than others. I would strongly push back on presales not being a possibility in your industry.
every single person says that, but the reality is a lot more likely to be the thing you want to build doesnt have enough value to the customer to part with their cash today.
Also agree with everything below. don't worry about this stuff right now. The sole focus should be what problem do people have that I can solve. Once you figure that out, and build an MVP, then you could worry about fancy business design.
"Getting the flywheel moving" is an incredibly hard part. You most likely will never move past this stage, which means all energy spent not trying to solve that singular issue will result in waste.
As far as paying for features, Id also strongly suggest against this. Initially, and for years to come, if your project is successful there will probably only be 1 major reason a customer hands you money to solve their problem.
This might be bc you save them 10 hours a week of manual labor, or ensure no mistakes are made while processing time sheets or guarantee uptime for production (whatever it is). Even though that might sound like very few people want it, if you can find a few you are on to something.
Anytime spent building a feature because a client paid for it will not be time well spent (all things considered).
I work on an enterprise rapidly scaling b2b SaaS app in finance space. We took lump sums early on from customers and now have 5-6 different "features" in our apps that have to be maintained, supported, all unique to 1 financial institution.
It might not sound like a lot, but when you're trying to get developers up to speed, help them understand the code base, and there are things like that, it really costs, and those costs scale exponentially.
Each feature we have to ensure works with this, doesn't break anything. etc. when we only had 2 developers this was something everyone knew. Now that we have multiple teams, its really, really expensive.
Tread lightly. Solve the first problem in front of you fairst (find a problem people will give you money TODAY to solve). If you succeed at that, you will have $$$ to solve your other problems.
My #1 bone to pick with Barnes and Noble was they wouldn’t price match their online price in store.
There is a local store near me and probably once a month I want a new book. I want the new book that day so I look online (Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, borders, etc) and determine Barnes and Noble is only a dollar or two more than Amazon. Fine because I want to read now.
Turns out, that was their online only price. If you want the book in their store it costs more.
I’ve avoided buying at least 12 books from them in the last 2-3 months because of it and went with Amazon.
I did school => work => now going back to school. Granted I didn’t study CS undergrad but taught myself a lot.
Since, I’ve learned and worked on some interesting problems. I want to work in big tech or in consulting. To do so, I need to be a lot better and/or have great grades.
So spending 2 years going back to school and improving seems worth it to me.
I have 0 student loans from undergrad and very minimal commitments as is.
went through a lot of the same stuff. Its tough to be isolated and mental health is a large driver of why I didn't want to continue working alone on a (small) SaaS app.
I've only ever worked in an early stage startup I founded. We initially were in same office and transitioned to remote over a 3 year period. (only 5 of us).
Early in your career (I wrote all of our product and am 25) working in an office is probably helpful. I am actively job searching now and the top thing I care about is a mentor/peer group.
I want to have people to interact with during work. I spent 3 years mainly writing code secluded from the real world (yes, I was going to things like dinners but that isn't the same in my experience).
I worked in finance before and use to complain about being at the office. Looking back, I had a quiet cubicle where I was mostly left alone to do my work but would take a break every hour and play some put putt golf around the office with the other interns.
I made friends, had a break and did a lot of really great work that summer.
Remote work once you're older and have kids + family + roots might make more sense, and I look forward to that! Especially if it allows flexible time so I could drive kids to school.
But, while young, I prefer office first w flexibility if needed.
1% engagement is a good metric to hit on social for real followers. Obviously not a 100% always accurate rule but apply and you’ll see instantly who bought fake followers.
Don’t build anything right now. Put an option somewhere that makes sense that says “like this? Upgrade to get even more features” or something similar. You know the users/audience better than I.
And put some sort of analytics on that button you can track. Once someone clicks it do a simple alert(“we don’t have a pro plan at this point but thanks for showing your interest. We will follow up later when we do”).
Then, let it sit for a week. IF you get some non 0 amount of clicks, reach out to the people who clicked it and ask what they’d like.
That should take you less than an hour to implement and be a great first step.
Yah. And when you do click it’s a lead gen capture form for email. AKA all marketing spam. I actually think it’s a nice service. Just being a little dishonest with this statement.
Read my comment below. The maintenance side is the massive headache and really painful. Happy to advise as I can on learnings from consulting I’ve done in space.
It’s really really hard to coordinate contractors in short time increments. I did a consulting project with a measurement company (measures sqft of homes) and their model is stressed coordinating and moving around in 1 market at near max utilization. I helped them scale into 2 additional markets and it’s just massive headaches. To the point I was thankful I generally work on software and can operate with way higher margins. 15% margin on 3-$100 services a year. Makes it really really hard to grow business, pay well, make mistakes (you’re always going too and with such a small margin they hurt way more). Happy to talk more in private if it’d be helpful. I am watching them hurt bad right now trying to add market 4/5. They’re at about 750k run rate
Is this different than rabbu.com? They just raised a round near me and I have some experience in real estate, and have some concerns about the model scaling. Happy to discuss more if it’d be helpful.
I am happy you all are launching and wish you well. Increasingly seems the companies launching on HN are in search of a problem. Renting a charger because you don't have one at home seems like a backwards way to solve the problem! But, I am only one person and not the market
Great work.