Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales.

No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product.

In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever way to 10x, or make it go viral. A big motivator was Paul Graham's "do things that don't scale" post [1]. So we just sat down and talked to people.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

"The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people are still waiting for customers."

Let's say I've have been having kicked my ass more than I can count on some beliefs I've had, but I yet have to regret working with him.

A - Always

C - Selling

That is, seize the opportunities of presenting your work and your company.

I worked for a small startup that won a HUGE contract because the big guy stopped supporting them to their satisfaction. We twisted over backwards to support their needs and they liked that.

I find hard c marketing is still more effective in US post/pandemic economy.

I'm sure there are dozens of people who agree.

It's still an MVP, but the goalposts have shifted as more folks put up "drop your email here if you're interested in uber for dogs!" type pages.

Still needs a few more features to be a viable product.

Anyway, I think any service now that shows up offering something used by many that is now paid for free will become popular on its own.

In 2004 that was pretty amazing

1. Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition. I'd say they ate the costs of storage as marketing investment.

2. Viral invitation format -> exclusively perception

That in itself is marketing.

I think it just comes down to fear of rejection in the end. Making a product, adding features, working on things and even showing your "cool" demo to friends isn't same as asking strangers for money.. because people can say a million nice things about what you have to offer until you ask them to put in their credit card number. Then the you get to know what they really think.

Some of it may be "morality" component, for lack of a better word. Some people want the world to be one where people and ideas advance on merit rather than via popularity or "knowing the right people", and act upon that hope subconsciously or as a justification for avoiding unfamiliar risk.

I'd wager it's also a bit more common among software developers.

My biggest struggle so far is: How do I find those people to "sit and talk" to? Any advice on that?

So, you should go ahead and subscribe to my newsletter. It's pretty good:

https://www.shoto.io

What did one AAA battery say to the other?? Always be celling.

Crystal Pepsi was another example. Budgets couldn’t overcome the fact it tasted like nutmeg.

Modern era, I worked for a startup that got national media coverage before it was ready. I’m not convinced it was the right product and I know the founder could have spent way more time talking to customers in the ideation stage. But national media coverage created some bad months. I remember a several week stretch with more than 100 support requests in queue.

Fun times, in the Dwarf Fortress sense of the term.

Maybe the first 10 will leave while you figure out where to go. That sucks, but it’s fine.

How can you push too hard too soon, if people were turned off by the product?

Unless you're burning budget in an unsustainable manner... but that's not what OP said.

If so, how can the founding team save the relationship? If someone is motivated enough to tell you your product sucks, they’re potentially great beta users!!

If you’d have mentioned marketing a couple of years ago, someone would have shared the Bill Hicks post by now.

Marketing (not just advertising) really is an essential part of building product as it forces you to confront who might actually want the product and how you best go about talking to them and finding them.

He did a routine with a joke that worried Letterman, so Letterman made sure the segment didn’t air. In response, Bill Hicks went on public access television - there’s a really good show from Austin on YouTube - and used that as part of his own pitch.

A number of years later, after Bill Hicks died, David Letterman had Bill Hicks’ mom on his show. They talked about Bill Hicks and aired the routine. Bill Hicks’ impression of his parents was remarkably good.

I’ll share links then make my overwhelming point:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbHYqfYnhg

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B1NTmnG0hmA

When I watch Bill Hicks on marketing, I take it as being about ethics. We don’t have to monetize every little thing. And we don’t have to do awful things for pay.

I was actually overwhelmed last year (my first as a freelancer on the side) and will scale back a bit to strengthen the foundations a bit better this year - but actually talking to people and when doing so always trying to create a little bit of value for them (and be it by 'oh now you mention that you need x, Paul over there is great and is actually looking for a way to sell x).

I am part of a business network and currently am working on providing a free short workshop for the people with online shops in basics about usability and conversion optimization. It will already provide them with the tools to make their shops better and also act as a marketing tool for deeper work on that topic with them (or a few of them).

And in parallel, as I am compiling the materials nonetheless I also will create additional ways to use the content in blog posts, Instagram and by creating checklists for others as a way to build an email list.

So this next to a day job and client work will probably be enough for me this year in marketing and business development work.

Let's see what comes of it.

[Edit typo]

One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed and improving SEO. A couple of years later, the site is now earning $10k+ a month .

Edit: I see the ad sidebar now. FYI on my first visit I played for several minutes and this never opened

1. Focus: Adopting management by objectives and concentration exclusively on them

2. Hiring: Spending more time finding top talent through referrals and being more prepared for interviews

I had hosting issues in many of my companies and consulting projects, running from "WTF is this AWS bill $10k???" to "WTF did our 10gbit/s download just kick Heroku offline?"

But people can only appreciate the things I build for them if they are hosted well. So I took the obvious next step and purchased a small struggling hosting company. We then introduced nicer tooling that imitates the AWS and Heroku APIs if possible, to make using their servers as easy as possible for me. And now I can offer managed hosting to all of my consulting clients. For them, it's slightly cheaper prices and (in contrast with AWS and Heroku) they can just call me when things don't work. And for me, it's reliable high-margin revenue.

Great tip - thanks for reminding me about this.

For those of you that are interested, here's Joel Spolsky's really good analysis of this:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

One big trade-off is that I only have one datacenter so in cloud lingo, I only offer one availability zone with offsite backups. But then again, when AWS us-east went offline, so went most companies, because the proudly advertised multi-AZ failover didn't work that well in practice.

As for the APIs, I just limit the subset of APIs that I offer. Since this is used only for my consulting clients, my cloud only needs to support those APIs that they require. In effect, that means CEPH+PostgreSQL do most of the heavy lifting.

I've seen Cloud APIs explode in funny ways when customers actually arrive with Petabyte-scale datasets. In that sense, my customers are pre-qualified because all of them have had horrible experiences with Cloud providers over-promising and under-delivering. So once they are on my platform, dissuading them from wanting more APIs is very easy. "Would you like to continue to use my cloud at the current price? Or would you like to pay 3x the monthly spend just to use the Amazon cloud and gain API call XY? And please remember the last time they crashed badly and you could not reach any Amazon support by phone. Didn't they even bill you for EC2 while it was unreachable?"

And if they insist, I can always point them towards the Open Source project that Amazon/Heroku use under the hood. But in my opinion, most Cloud APIs don't add business value anyway. "Keep it simple" always wins out in the long run.

My customers want API compatibility with AWS and convenient deployments like on Heroku. So I needed a software layer to convert bare metal boxes into Cloud VMs and to imitate necessary APIs. And of course base images, buildpacks, etc. to convert a git link into a runnable docker image, like what Heroku does.

So basically I purchased them for all the scripts, tools, and stuff that happens between "Customer does a git push" and "Docker images are running on the correct bare-metal servers with the correct configuration"

Before, we had many situations where they asked me to take a look because something could have been a software issue but then turned out to be an AWS issue instead. That's always nasty if I need to tell my client "sorry you're offline, try calling Amazon". Even if they understand that there's nothing I can do, emotionally they still feel disappointed in me. When I use my own infrastructure, I can avoid these situations because it's in my power to make the necessary hosting repairs, too.

Then I read the "Host your blog right here on PretzelBox." and clicked the Blog link on top. "https://pretzelbox.notion.site/8d8ba84f16ea456984020cc15efad..."

And I thought to myself "So it's a well-marketed notion whitelabel reseller." You're probably good at marketing, but I'm not sure what Cloud back-end infrastructure IP you would have for sale...

So in effect I provide cloud services and cloud APIs on top of physical bare-metal servers that are maintained and housed by someone else.

I'm the founder of Scrimba.com, an interactive code-learning platform. We went almost two years from when we launched our very first free course until we launched our very first paid course. In the meanwhile, we planned the "perfect" business model and also pivoted to a Teams-based product for a while.

Had I just dared to put up a pricing wall in front of our second course instead, we'd have gotten the signal we needed from the market much earlier. Once we started getting revenue, everything else became a lot easier (what to invest more in, which courses to prioritise, what to do in general).

A lot of businesses do this as a growing strategy so don't fully discount the backlinks, leads, social media it gave you.

For bootstrappers and small ventures, I'd rather spend the free subsidy in ads. If you do it right, it just works.

I hate ads, but they work.

2. launch before its ready

3. getting our value proposition down to one sentence for each user type

4. seo instead of vanity marketing

5. freemium model instead of free or paid

6. listening to customer feedback

7. deliver tangible results to paid customers before fundraising

8. "do things that don't scale" to compete with large competitors who are focused on IRR and monetization

[1] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

I'm asking, because every time I read up on these topics, or interact with an "expert", I get the feeling, that it is one of the more snake-oiley fields around.

Also, make sure that your page loads fast - especially the content that you are trying to index. Low hanging fruit like optimising image size or cleaning up your imports can have a big effect. When just starting out with little backlinks, good page speed loads can be the differentiator that will put you ahead. Use https://pagespeed.web.dev to check how fast your website loads.

To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?

That's not what I meant. With optimising page speed, there is a diminishing curve of returns from the perspective of time invested and the improvement that you make.

My idea, adding to the top comment mentioning the SEO, was to make sure that you don't slow down your landing pages / content unnecessarily which might lead to less organic growth and discovery.

While I wouldn't argue that this is the most important thing that will take your business off, a fast website and good content with keywords might provide you nice boost long term.

Some things I'd start with:

  - Minimize images (tinypng/tinyjpg)
  - Deactivate/Remove what you don't need (Plugins (!!!), RPC, Emojis, stuff like that which is ON by default in WP -> will strip down the code)
  - Strip down & combine scripts
  - Reduce third-party dependencies, try making them first-party (fonts, analytics)
  - Minify scripts and CSS
  - Use caching on the client-side through htaccess rules

But it's not what matters (at least, until you have hundreds of pages ranking).

Google Search is very similar to LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in the sense that the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited, return visitors, etc) the more visibility Google will give you in the SERPs.

For most SaaS, there aren't a few valuable keywords, there are hundreds of valuable pages representing thousands of keywords to drive a qualified audience.

This means after you learn how to create highly valuable content, the next step is to scale your publishing velocity to increase your footprint in the SERPs.

I've brought 4 websites from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month by focusing on creating more reader value than any other page of content Google could show for the keywords I want to rank for, and publishing hundreds of pages of content.

Also both Angular and React are not as heavy as one might expect, but 3rd-party components might bring tons of unnecessary deps.

Turns out there is still a lot of money in selling technology to large enterprises that they can host and run themselves on an annual licensing model.

We were initially afraid of the long and high-touch enterprise sales cycles, complex procurement processes and enterprise integration requirements (complex permissions, LDAP auth, audit trails etc.) and thus wanted to do a simpler SaaS version with a monthly plan.

But I learned that if you start on the enterprise angle early, you can get some incredibly sticky customers with five, six or even seven figure annual license payments and very predictable cashflows you can raise or borrow against.

One thing I feel is really important is to have an actual person with an email address receive these and reply to them - rather than a ticketing system. This personal connection does wonders in maintaining a good relationship with the customer, especially if things go wrong.

A few accelerants:

1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the US.

2) Started replacing myself by hiring multiple managers, which helped when I sold the business as it was no longer just about me.

3) Converted long-term clients to pre-paid retainer billing with helped create predictable workloads and revenue streams.

My main takeaway: first ensure the company is optimised for sellability.

And your question is answered too: agents. There are people and companies specialized in selling companies. Just like there are people specialized in buying companies.

there are a lot of things you can do easily early on but become very hard later:

  - ensure the culture of the company doesn't require you to be there for it to function
  - make sure your incorporation structure is amenable to selling easily
  - separate out the accounts (both bank account and SaaS/PaaS/Iaas accounts) from day one, separate from any of your other projects

Just want to second this.

I've read several books on this topic. Warrillow's is easily the best.

edit: https://microacquire.com/

It sounds planned in hindsight but it was pure luck. None of us had any idea how to do it. The reason luck was in our favor was because it wasn't a 1-man show, our location, aiming our communications not just at customers but always keep in mind our competitors and potential investors will (and should) hear us too.

We started eating our competitors lunch so they did have no choice but to take an interest. First we were an annoyance a few years later we had offers to discuss, then it became once or twice a year. We took every opportunity to engage but only for getting to know them but didn't take it further.

We were very visible because there were 3 of us in 3 different countries "making lot of noise" about our product.

Also timing wasn't good yet (why sell today when you know you'll be worth 5x in 2 years).

We went for ~5 years without considering selling and always positioned ourselves to eventually sell from the day we founded the business. If you think about selling when you're just starting, you end up constantly thinking if the company can be easily understood by an auditor and explained to an interested party.

We (3 partners) were already present in 3 countries/sites from the beginning so there was potential of messy "organic growth". And the only way to fix this do this was with a holding company.

- holding company to keep things simple and easy to explain and audit, e.g.:

- No difference in the contracts with our individual CEO's / sites that have to be negotiated individually when the company is acquired/sold

- an investor that takes over the holding has the keys to the kingdom

- all important negotiations done in the holding

The holding also made sense because it allowed us a presence in a 4th jurisdiction that is known to have a high density of investors and none of us would feel the main site is in one of the 3 jurisdictions that the partners were. So it kept things neutral.

Another thing we did right was never touch things we weren't experts in at least not until we had the first hire to move this forward internally, so we hired one of the big 4 to help with controlling & finance.

We had lots of internal bickering, I hated the idea of all this complexity with the holding, and the whole thing almost went tits-up before we even started. But implementing a holding within the first few months was the single most important decision for us. We might have gotten lucky without but not for the same returns.

I have only looked around in guest mode/logged out and haven't paid or anything to actually speak to the seller and get a fuller picture.

Are you happy with your purchases so far? What advice can you give me as a person that has a similar plan?

Lots of people simply like to jump from project to project so being able to exit a business is great for them. Other people are retiring or get sick. Sometimes the business plateaus and they have owned it for several years and are tired of planning more articles for that niche. Some built it recently for the purpose of selling and it has terribly quality content and will likely tank in traffic in the next 12 months.

You also can't trust the seller when they say how many hours they work or believe they account for all their expenses (which is sort of a joke for content businesses anyways because almost all the expenses are added back in when accounting for the sale price anyways).

But for the type of businesses on there it doesn't really matter what the seller says, most of it is noise.

You can get all the insight you need into a content business using Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and manually looking at it.

I built a content site from scratch for ~1 year before buying any and was looking at ones for sale during that time so by the time I went to pull the trigger I was "relatively sophisticated". Actually I only bought them in the last few months but so far so good, everything has been as expected. I'm strategically merging them into a single larger site and that is going well (one already successfully merged but waiting for ad network approval for the second)

There's a few of these sites. Just search for them.

Also there was a lot of promotion on Twitter: https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1396904507871793154

These days the secret is you have to hire the good South Americans.

Exploit the fact corporate America hasn't caught on to routing contracts through Upwork et al. Then don't get greedy, keep the TCE delta below 20%, so they stay more than 9 months.

You can take your pick of the finest FOSS contributors Guinea and Paraguay have to offer.

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Startup engineering management is so simple.

Buy a copy of Mythical Man Month.

Read it, read it again. Then re-read chapter 3.

Get two of the best, your Captain and your Copilot.

Encourage them to hire a pimply faced minion to edit the config files so they feel important, and so you avoid single point of dependency.

These days, get someone else who lives in Estonia/Ukraine/Sri Lanka for follow the sun support.

If you need more than two engineers + 2 assistants, you should have hired smarter engineers.

-------------------------------------------------------

Your secret path to success with international hiring is to avoid any country you know the name of.

Don't think you're thinking out of the box hiring from Brazil/Israel. Hunt down a decent dev from Ghana or Georgia.

If my Slack/Discord buddies are anything to go by, there's an extraordinary amount of gems out there who've made the choice to raise their kids in their home countries.

There's good talent in Thailand as well. RIP my friend the Thai data/cloud principal eng banking 14k USD.

Don't know from when this is but tech salaries in Thailand are much higher and it's hard to find people.

This would be fresh grad level at most.

Edit: I reread my comment and I can see how I wasn't clear. I was actually replying to the parent of the comment I actually replied to, my mistake. I am glad the Thai wages increased, but GP was straight up flexing about paying people nearly nothing because they came from a poor country.

As a person they're very opinionated about not working for a "product company." And have worked at the same company their entire tech career after bailing out of some traditional engineering discipline (I think 6 yoe?).

Sweetest person ever. Never really followed up that conversation when I asked them if they were considering remote.

Oh, I half thought you were serious until this point. I still don't get the joke though.

In fact if you take any of this offhand advice as gospel, well I wouldn't.

Maybe I should have scattered "probably" and "often" about the place.

1: ------------------------------------------------------------

When you read the book, ole Fred is not a fan of large engineering units. Forget two pizzas (Bezos is from New York, two pizzas for him is ~10 people).

Fred's view is actually:

1x captain/tech lead,

1x co-pilot,

1x ops guy equivalent,

1x business analyst equivalent who can be sent to meetings (he worked for IBM).

(And then two secretaries. And an copy editor for the documentation, because no internet.

No internet! The documentation must be written!

The lead developer needs to follow my favorite advice of all time:

Can't write? Imitate Hemingway.

And a full-time librarian for the punch cards. And a full-time employee just to maintain the minicomputer that was your debugger.

Because hey, the book was written in 1975.

The internet doesn't exist, email doesn't exist, the engineers almost certainly can't touch type. And anyone without an attractive female secretary was nobody.

The pimply faced youth's job as config wunderkid and unofficial court jester fills most of those roles these days)

2: ------------------------------------------------------------

If you think of all the amazing software that has been made by one person...

How many people do you need to make amazing software?

What are you even making?

I wasn't taking it as gospel and I agree some engineering outfits are (or at least appear to be) overstaffed or inefficient, and a small number of very driven and talented people can produce some incredible things. But when it comes to making a product it can take a radically larger amount of engineering effort than it would appear.

PS Semi is an example of an ARM-beating company which was founded by a visionary engineer who almost certainly had the big ideas himself or within a small group of technical leadership. It still took a hundred engineers 4 years to bring out their first product.

That said, Palo Alto Semiconductor was hardware, which has a far higher barrier to entry than software engineering does/can.

There's more details to it, but a single person could write a very small CPU and put it on an FPGA (or ASIC if they have the tools) in a few months.

That's just one example though. There's lots of software examples. Compilers, browsers, OS kernels, database servers, hypervisors. A single person can write any of those, but to make a competitive product it's often a very different story.

I sympathize with the argument that one engineer can be sufficient but am doubtful about them being an employee as opposed to founder.

But yes, I think you can have two high quality employees make good software? I mean they're employees, you're going to give them marching orders to do something presumably.

The assistants aren't assistants - you hire them with minimum pressure, but try still to find the most talented junior you can find.

2 juniors in a startup is a bit, probably not the right thing. You'll run out of junior work surely?

The "two good ones plus exactly one junior to make them feel important, and to keep the show on the road for 2 weeks in case they both quit simultaneously" formula is pretty solid.

I would consider "junior" here not as a person in non-critical role who cannot function as an individual contributor, but as a solid candidate that lacks industry experience but can be at the moment hiring be expected to quite fast grow into the role of a solid IC. I.e to use a bit too stereotypical characterization - not a "stablehand" but a "journeyman apprentice".

At the moment of hiring you don't count on it that they can deliver (but guess and hope), whereas the seniors will have shipped products under their belt.

Surely it never happens?

Warning, they might need increased PTOs starting tomorrow.

1. Often times the product is a leaky bucket, and you experience a massive spike in traffic and very quickly see your growth asymptotically approach zero. 2. These platforms often times also are filled with people waiting to abuse your platform. For flurly, all of my original fraud problems originated from my product hunt launch.

Thus for GraphJSON, I went with a different approach. I shared my progress on my twitter account and mostly had my builder friends use the product. Over the past 6 months, the product has continually improved due to the constant feedback of this community. Word naturally spreads and so does the growth.

Looks quite interesting - nice to see someone else thinking (and realizing) that you could go a long way with clickhouse + search/filter/visualization.

Be super focused. It is easy to chase the money in similar but different directions and then you lack a coherent business strategy or brand. We burned time building a hardware-based version of our product, which we didn't want long-term, because a customer had money. Took about 3 months of the entire company's time and we never saw any of that money.

Honestly evaluate your product/service constantly, but especially in the early days. Is it really something that can be sold or is it low-value and low-volume? Do people want it or need it?

You need to believe in your product enough to charge the right amount (usually more than you are charging) otherwise you send the wrong message to customers and possibly cannot afford to support it if it becomes popular. Think in terms of what you are saving your customer rather than how much it seems like it should cost for a e.g. piece of software.

I would disagree with some of the comments below. Marketing is important but not necessarily early on and not necesarily involving hiring someone. Same with SEO. Can be useful but very market segment dependent. Instead, the one skill of the CEO is to see what is working and what isn't and to deal with it. If you can see a funnel with nothing coming in the top, maybe you do need marketing. On the other hand, if you get the leads but can't close anything, you either have a product or a sales problem.

Reach out to customers with the MVP and just incorporate the feedback until the feedback changes from “we can’t use it because…” to “we need this integration” to “we need this pricing”

Our latest learning that we retrospectively should have seen earlier is to get rid of our fear of becoming consultants. We come from a consultancy background and have seen to many startups around us wanting to build products, but taking on consultancy assignments leaving them no time to build their product. We have been so determined not to fall into that trap, realizing now that we have missed out on some great opportunities when selling to enterprises.

To the point where I legitimately don't know who or in what situation all these businesses are that are spending so much money on 'consultancy'. When do these businesses seek consultants and what for? I know that might be a far reaching question, so any examples would be appreciated.

Also the contracts and my product don’t have anything related to each other :(

I know a handful of people who started with creating websites, then took some consultancy work and now have an entire different software company. They used those two things as a bootstrap to get going with opportunities that presented.

But we chose to forego the "consultancy" jobs. Reason is that we optimize for learning (we're at that stage). And while consultancy may look like a good opportunity for learning, that it allows you to get paid for investigating the real problem domain of your customers it is not optimised for that.

Far from it. My decades of consultancy and freelancing experience has told me that it always takes longer to implement the solution than to identify the problem. Implementing is a great opportunity for learning the details of the problem, sure. But Implementing also eats vast amounts of time to "Horizontally center that Div on the Dashboard": any non-trivial, time-consuming but utterly uninteresting for our startup.

I really don't want to spend two weeks implementing another authz/authn integration and login flow for a consulting customer. When in those two weeks I can interview at least three other customers. Esp. because authn/authz is but a detail to our startup, and has nothing to do with our domain.

I've worked at a startup which, bootstrapped, was struggling with income flow. So off-and-on we, the programmers, would be outsourced to gigs that would generate some income. I've always found this the worst of all options and decided to never get into this with my own startup.

It takes away the most valuable resources. It's a negative investment. It advertises the "panic-mode" you are in, to all stakeholders and most to the engineers involved. It lands your engineers (me, in that case) in crappy jobs, which they did not sign up to at all (a few engineers left because of this). It creates misaligned relations in the team.

The last was for me the most frustrating. At one point, I was bringing in ~60% of all revenue, alone, by doing crap work, in stressfull projects, and commuting for hours a day. While at least two of my co-workers, whose wages I was subsidising, turned up at 11:30 to drink coffee and play some FIFA on the company x-box.

What I learned from this, is that hiring too early is a thing too. That, especially when bootstrapping, the income stream must be certain enough to warrant paying another wage for years.

The only alternative to consultancy should be to close. If you can let go of 1-2 unproductive employees, that should happen before taking on consultancy work. It should happen in any circumstance anyway, but taking on work to pay for other peoples wage and not getting value for that is a recipe for failure. If on the other hand it was high performance developers that really made progress on the core focus on the business it's probably okay.

My approach has mostly been to get out of the way of what I don't know and hold on whilst having blind trust.

Like riding a horse, hold on and give direction of the course with balance of freedom to run. Give more freedom and get more trust and enjoy the exhilaration, however hold the reins too tight and you will be fighting all the way.

Walk the tightrope so to speak. Know if you give too much freedom it will buck you off and run for the hills, however, if you can maintain the balance of direction and trust, good things will come.

One go I had was a communications service provider in the naughties that went from zero to 20 mill revenue in one year and it did alright in the end, but with hindsight, I can see so many better ways that almost everything could have been handled.

In my opinion, the main problem that most businesses experience is TRUST. (On every level)

Without it there is no business. Business by definition is about more that one person so trust is imperative.

Is trust equally mutual within your business? Can you quantify that trust? Can other staff in the business? And the customers? The board? The shareholders?

If it is there with all parties than the world will be you oyster!

If not, well that is just business. (But you should mitigate it to take care of your own future)

Wicked growth makes the green eyes shine... Greed comes through the cracks everywhere. Not sure what can be done about this. Company Constitution? Culture?

These are just ramblings of a semi-serial pseudo-successful entrepreneur. I apologise. I don't know any answers but I do know that 'trust' is one of the crucial key elements of a successful business. Trust between every party.

Find the balance of trust between ALL steak-holders and get it ALL in writing. +2cents.

Set your goals as to what will make you happy. Idle ideas like "I want a house and a happy family" become flexible and then you will chase that flexibility.

Make sure that when you realise, truly, your goals of "business", only then, you will be happy, accept, and at that point, if you desire, set a new goal. ( I <3 , )

Do not shift YOUR goalpost of what you define that "Take Off" moment is. 9.. 8.. 7..

Our business was initially built on analysing data from a commercial provider and selling those insights to customers. The provider required that both we and each of our customers paid a high license fee. It became pretty clear that the provider was moving towards lots of tools and value added features on top of their data that would directly compete with us. At that point we had the choice to either work hard to keep differentiating our stuff, or do the crazy thing and attack their moat by collecting our own data. I will admit I was somewhat doubtful that we could pull it off, it was insanely ambitious for a company that was four people at the time against an incumbent that had been around for more than a decade. Ultimately we worked with another small provider to create a data spec, acquired them and all their human collectors, and now we sell our tools on top of our own data, with its own unique selling points. We went from a fun hobby to a fairly prominent player in our industry. Our competitors have gone on to consolidate and do some exciting stuff too so I hope we were a bit of a kick up the bum there.

I think we could easily have chickened out or waited until we were bigger and the outcome would not have been nearly as positive. So I guess the lesson is sometimes that you have to picture the endgame right from the start, and pursue it as aggressively as possible, instead of with baby steps that might feel safer or more natural.

When I chose to specialize, not compete with the general consultants, but make all of them clients, that’s when business took off.

Historically speaking, building your practice as a specialist consultant is difficult. It works for certain niches only.

Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will start eating your lunch unless you take that leap.

It doesn't matter how smart your engineers are and how fully featured and bug free your product is. Unless you have a stellar sales team with the right leads who are pushing it on people with all their might, it is going nowhere.

My experience here: https://twitter.com/paulstovell/status/1389881033470869504

This talk by Paul Kenny is a really good talk here about the value of the sales function even if you don't want the revenue:

Paul Kenny: Selling Sales to Techies (2010): https://vimeo.com/96703844

Depending on your product you can control it with comp as well. For example, for an enterprise product, especially one that renews annually and/or has milestone payments, comp the sales person as the cash comes in (and pay out for the renewals same as you would for the initial deal). Unhappy customers don’t pay. I have also paid out commission on time (when customer should have paid, when the delay was due to engineering, and not manageable by salesperson. Sometimes engineering delays are due to sales people though :-(.

Have engineering work out the milestones and deliverables with the customer. Have the CEO sign contracts, nobody else. Count as sales only deals that have both customer P.O. and signed contract (so common to have only one and have the sales person argue that the deal should be booked anyway. Amazing how they could get both in on the last day of the quarter though).

Etc. When I was about 20 my dad told me he’d fired half the sales people he’d ever hired. I shook my head and thought, “what an idiot”. A couple of decades later I looked back and it was about the same for me. I mean table stakes for a sales person is selling themselves. And getting canned isn’t always a bad mark against a sales person. So it’s hard to judge up front, but if they don’t sell “right away”* shove them out the door. It’s not like an engineer for whom you want to invest extra time to help them get into the groove; that’s part of the sales person’s way of life and the good ones are proud of it.

Pay the good sales people well. At your annual sales shindig have the CEO show up for a day, or half a day, to give a pep talk, enthuse about the VP of sales and the top sellers (who made it by following the rules) and then bow out. Maybe have the CFO talk about how many commission checks they had to cut. And have them mention that the top sellers make more than the CEO.

Another tip: have every member of the exec team, yes even CFO, VP of Manufacturing or whomever, go on a customer sales call every quarter. Sometimes a first visit, sometimes a sales person “check in” call or or whatever. It will make the execs understand how the customer views your product, not what marketing and the sales folk think the product is.

* right away depends on your sales cycle. Could be the end of the second month (but you’re already breathing down their next after two weeks), or first quarter, or six months (ugh). And if you sell semiconductor manufacturing gear with a sales cycle of 48 months, good luck.

Second is to join sales calls or watch the recordings (Chorus.ai is great for this). Put yourself in the buyer's shoes and coach based on those recordings - I always listen from the point of view of "If I was the customer, do I think they really care about my problem, and is it credible that they will help me solve it?". Right now I watch 1-2 recordings a week and then chat with the team about what they think went well and where we might improve, and we are figuring it out together. That continuous process is what reinforces the culture. When the CEO is focussed on helping customers, and revenue as a secondary concern, it becomes the culture.

Third is probably for the sales team not to be an island. So get the engineering and product leaders to join the calls or watch the recordings too, so that the tiny features or friction points make their way onto the roadmap eventually.

Welcome to being a founder. If you don't want to do it, you need a co-founder who will, but they must have the same values you do.

It is easier as a tech person to do the sales yourself than to find a good sales co-founder that mimics your customer-centric values. Both are of course very hard, but relatively speaking doing it yourself initially is easier between the two.

And those who don't want to do that should work for a company where those functions are handled by other people, but if you start a company, expect to do sales.

edit: why am I getting downvotes...

Funny that you mention this. Because I remember it as the exact opposite of organic growth. So much, that I consider pets.com the first public example of how millions of marketing budget are far more important¹ than engineering.

> A high-profile marketing campaign gave it a widely recognized public presence, including an appearance in the 1999 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and an advertisement in the 2000 Super Bowl. Its popular sock puppet advertising mascot was interviewed by People magazine and appeared on Good Morning America. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com

¹ Edit: for growth. I don't like this and I'm still not convinced marketing is worth more than engineering; I hope to believe the opposite turns true in the end. But alas, I'm afraid I'm wrong, as can be seen in any new tech-field. Crypto being the latest: don't build actual cryptography, just set up a multi-million marketing scheme and run off with the money, if you want to make money there in 2022.

Are you selling basically an as-is product? Is there customization required (preloading data, training, etc) to 'make the sale'?

I'm asking because I'm in an interesting position where I have a very nice platform, but it requires solutions specialists paired with salespeople, so outstripping specialists with sales growth isn't as productive.

I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.

In a sense it's the perfect advertising (by both being 'free' and 'covert'), supporting the perfect industry, perfect only in the sense of a feedback mechanism ostensibly designed to stamp it out, only ends up perpetuating its profitability, by squeezing the product between its free advertising and its illegality, inflating prices and profits.

I know this is a potential flamewar topic--I'm sorry. I tried to just state what I think about it here. If you downvote/flag I'll delete it...I don't want to start another flamewar.

I do agree that virtually every product needs marketing, and many need salespeople as well. But for plenty of products, salespeople don’t make sense - for example high volume, low price SaaS.

So it was third party selling instead of first party selling.

https://youtu.be/7SKUw3w2FEg

Fits the MS culture perfectly.

“Hi I’m thinking of upgrading my Apple Watch 1 but the 7 is quite expensive”

“Can I speak to your daughter for 30 seconds”

(Yes there’s a salesperson in the story but in my case there wasn’t and I know I’ll need another one of these things one day. For her.)

Fiat currency.

Similarly Ruby on Rails was great brand awareness for 37 Signal's Basecamp who AFAIK doesn't believe in advertising, and has made a point to pay for a "non Ad" against companies selling ads against their Basecamp trademark

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016

If you want to sell into enterprise then you are going to need sales people and hence an expensive product that covers that cost. Those big deals need a lot of hand holding to go through.

There are plenty of counter examples though, where marketing is doing most of the work and the offering is mostly self service. Signing up for a $25/month Saas is never going to warrant a visit from a salesperson.

Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world.

Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work. Google has a long term channel based sales model, and a newer but rapidly growing direct enterprise sales team. They're constantly trying to get GApps in against the aforementioned behemoth MS team.

You’re confusing google for work or whatever it’s called now with Gmail.

Microsoft absolutely has sales people for the B2B side of Microsoft Office constantly shilling Office 365. This absolutely doesn't sell itself.

I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I received every bloody week from Microsoft and Google trying to sell me their enterprise office subscriptions.

What do you think putting a Tesla on a rocket and launching it towards Mars is?

What do you think PR pieces talking about the latest Tesla tech are?

Elon tweeting about Tesla is advertisement. It's not because it's not a pretty picture in a magazine page that it isn't.

They have an enormous B2B sales team.

Sales reps are for B2B, not B2C.

Generally speaking, business to business customers expect a certain amount of investment from your company into integrating with them when they offer you a contract.

Sales is part of this.

You of course need people to sign contracts & complete the purchase, that's irrelevant to how well the product is able to raise awareness without advertising, i.e. people interested in buying Tesla's didn't hear about it through any of their advertising.

Example product of mine: https://damonverial.com/the-gap-gameplan/

I implemented that over a weekend and it took off dramatically after that.

2. For some reason or the other, we have always had delays in announcing our fundraising rounds: both Seed and Series A announcements were delayed by 3-6 months. The moment we announced, we got a step magnitude more inbound customers. Lesson here is to not be a perfectionist and be willing to share the company/product publicly earlier, so you can incorporate customer feedback early.

PS: If it helps provide context for (1) above, our domain is fraud prevention; and we focused on payment fraud for Fintechs/Crypto instead of going after generalized fraud prevention across all categories like ecommerce.

For us it was Show HN. But can be anything - Product Hunt, Redit, etc.

After all this, if I have a weekly user retention hovering around 30%, I can't be more happy. Then it's time to grow.

So, I can't help but think you missing the most important changes if your not actually talking to the end users about what they are thinking or why they are doing particular actions that aren't always what you expect.

When we develop products we (all the team) tend to get used to knowing where is each functionality and how to use them, but someone unfamiliar might just not find what we "simply" find.

SOC2 is one of those non-functional requirements that can open up markets for you but you're going to pay for in time and energy. If enterprise-y is on your horizon I suggest at least understanding it so you don't make decisions that are counterproductive. But wait until you start to hear the music before you get up to dance with that one...it can be a pain.

I'm also working on a solution to make part of this easier, specifically audit logs (https://apptrail.com).

I would think everyone with a legitimate need for an audit trail is a paying customer, in fact would prefer to pay so there is a contract around the audit trail, and “free tier” would just be a drain on your support resources.

Our free tier can cover low TPS usecases. We offer a free tier because we believe audit logs are too hard to build & consume and would love to see even smaller companies adding audit logs to their products.

We audit a lot of things but it'd be a good idea to improve that if we can.

Thanks enterprise-y person. :)

AWS CloudTrail is far from perfect but it has been battle tested as much as any SaaS audit log out there.

Who: userIdentity.arn

What: requestParameters.*, responseElements.*

When: eventTime

Where: sourceIPAddress, sourceVpce, userAgent

Why: userIdentity.issuer/rolesession

How: eventName, eventSource

Baller move is to include internal ops actions in your log.

Main thing is to think of it as a product rather than an a feature. People don't want 10 different audit logs...everything should flow through it. With CloudTrail this extensibility comes through the requestParameters/responseElements sections. Most of the schema is fixed but in these sections its service-specific.

In terms of integration, push audit via webhook or various cloud event/message brokers is ideal, but at bare minimum the customer needs to be able to ingest that data wholesale to integrate with their security stack.

I less than 40% percent of potential customers balk at your rate, it's time to give yourself a raise.

start your marketing sprint when you already have a s##tload of work. otherwise you will always have a cycle of "too much work <> no work" + lots of stress because of that.

you need to start hussling way before the "no work" phase. and that timespan always overlaps with the "too much work" phase.

Can't outsource this or even hire for it in the early days

Has to be the founders