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Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

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.

After work, you can check-in and see if anyone got back to you.

Track it all in a Trello board or spreadsheet.

I highly recommend reading Predictable Revenue and putting as many of its practices in place as you can.

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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 as a nail for the hammer that we master. The ROI on automating everything from the outset is not worth it, and if the business flops, it's just wasted effort. Worse yet, it's a missed opportunity for learning about the customers and about the domain.

So yes, do things that don't scale. If and when you get in the air, profile the business processes and only then automate the bottlenecks. It's the only sane way when you think about it.

Not only is he absolutely right, interaction is a selling point.

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.

Yes. We've arrived at a place where engineers/devs are now first-class citizens in a company. They are also founders and remain as CEO much longer. These are all good things.

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.

(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 invoices online. That stuff takes a little more work.

Some of this is dependent on OP's actual product, target market, and pricing. I think its better to start with a high-touch approach. Act as their account manager, hand-hold them through the onboarding process, let them know they can contact you for anything from billing to tech support.

Very interesting. I think you've made some great points there.

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.

Agreed, automation can take far more time than it saves. Especially in very early stages, when you don't even know which features are used often. Something like payment is a given, but not other things.

In code: make it work, make it good, make it fast

In business: make it, make it better, make it better again, ..repeat until it's popular enough that it's painful to operate, automate it

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