As with most things - it depends. Hard to give you a clear cut answer without knowing a lot more.
For us, multi-country added a lot of complexities because we expanded from the UK to Australia. So we needed to staff and integrate different teams (which is where most of the complexity was).
If you're a pure SaaS with no sales GTM, I think it would be a lot simpler if you can stay centrally operated.
The main learning I took away from growing from 20 to 250ish employees, 1 product to multi-product and 1 geo to multi-country:
As a startup, your speed of execution is a function of your simplicity.
It's about your only advantage over the big players.
Adding employees, adding products, and adding new markets increase your complexity non-linearly. ie. Going to 1 product to 2 products doesn't increase complexity by 2x, it increases it by 4x.
Avoid this complexity if you can: it makes you slow, makes you hire middle management, and makes what could/should be simple decisions, multi-dimensional.
So the lesson: stay as simple as you can for as long as you can.
If you can't stay simple, don't underestimate the exponential drag of complexity.
- Clerk: ok for small scale applications but they're a small company 'moving fast and breaking things'. It's not stable enough for a enterprise grade product that needs robustness.
- Auth0: Good but can get expensive
- WorkOS: Good for B2B, especially if 'directory syncing' is important for your usecase
Try and reframe those 8 hours of "wasted time investigating" as an opportunity to:
- learn something
- explore different parts of the codebase
- think about new/different problems to solve
...and try and enjoy the ride.
Small companies do tend to thrash around, but it's pretty unavoidable and often can be a small companies competitive advantage. Doesn't make it any easier, I appreciate.
That's a pretty cynical view....besides, big companies would take months/years to to copy an idea - even if it's a good one - and by then the market has moved.
Thank you for those kind words - I'm really glad it was helpful advice.
> It's targeted towards lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, etc. Do you think LinkedIn is a good channel to reach them?
For lawyers and accounts - yes - LinkedIn should be pretty great.
For Real Estate you may want to try your luck at walking around estate agents at quiet periods in the day. Some may be kind enough to hear you out and what you'll learn from f2f will be even more impactful.
> Do you also use LinkedIn premium?
I actually use Sales Navigator - it's $80/month, but by no means is it necessary - I wouldn't use the lack of Premium/Sales Nav as a reason not to start the process.
> Have you tried cold emails?
Yes - we sent a bunch using Instantly but got such a crappy response that we stopped. Cold email is dead, IMO.
> Sorry to bombard you with so many questions. Do you have a way to reach you besides HN?
No problem - very happy to help! I don't really do twitter or anything, but happy to chat here as much as you like. Does HN have DM? (sorry, new here)
Joking aside, I really think you need a unique angle and a solid distribution strategy: there are 1,000 PH clones but they don't stick because they're the same as PH, just with less users/traction/eyeballs.
It sounds like you’re describing a Merchant of Record (MoR). This is where customers pay a third-party service, which then handles payments, compliance, and then pays you.
Check out gumroad, lemon squeezy and maybe Paypal.
If you have enough budget you could use a PPC Agency, who may run your Google ads through their ad account.
PPC agencies often also have an Account Manager at Google (who will be able to unblock you, or at least give you more insight into why you were blocked).
We've been reaching potential customers on LinkedIn, asking them for 15 mins to give feedback on our 'product idea' (at this point is just a sales deck).
Some tactical advice is to include in the connection request message:
1) a little explainer about the problem space that you're looking to tackle
2) the fact that you're an engineer (that why they'll know this isn't a sale call)
Normally we do about 5 mins talking about their business, problems and context then dive into a slide deck that pitches our idea.
At the end of the 'pitch' we get feedback from the customer. We also explain that we're launching a pilot, and give them an opportunity to join the pilot.
The pilot is paid (but cheaper than the public pricing will be), and it involves signing a v.simple 1 page contract/agreement which allows us to invoice them ahead of the 'launch'.
For us, this has been incredibly effective at:
- Understanding if this product hits a pain-point that customers are actually willing to spend budget on
- Weeding out the 'weak' signals like 'I quite like it' (people who 'like' it but may never buy)
- Giving us financial/commercial confidence, since we have invoiceable revenue guaranteed
Sometimes, when you find somebody that really gets it, their body language and attitude is entirely different....they literally PULL the product from your hands (vs. you pushing it on them). They're asking questions like "when can we launch/try it", and "can I introduce you to X Y Z people, who are going to love this?". And they say things like "We're budget constrained, but there are tons of things I'd rather get rid of, to make budget for this"....that's the feeling we're looking for, that tells us we're thinking about the right problem in the right way.
For us, multi-country added a lot of complexities because we expanded from the UK to Australia. So we needed to staff and integrate different teams (which is where most of the complexity was).
If you're a pure SaaS with no sales GTM, I think it would be a lot simpler if you can stay centrally operated.