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Comment by jampa | Hacker News Reader

Nice writeup!

Speaking as someone that tried to be a founder from Brazil: I imagine that making it on Silicon Valley must be hard task on itself but making in an underdeveloped country makes odds stacked against you.

We compete with companies founded with people that have access to clients with way more purchasing power and better supply pipeline.

I'm a bit curious on how the team got overcame this issues, and would suggest you to repost this on a time that gets more traffic in americas, since is 3AM here.

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We were a little bit lucky in this regard, because we had some authority in the niche (2 members of our original team had spoken at security conferences internationally for the previous 10 years).

I have lots of thoughts on this though. I think with a low enough burn rate, you can overcome this with a great product, and taking just one bite at a time. ie. one happy customer, then another. Actual customer happiness is so low, that you just have to do a little better to have people talk about you, and over time it compounds nicely.

I've previously pondered how we would have approached our early steps if we were completely unknown, and the best option i can think of is a kind of sincere, influencer marketing approach.

i.e. if you dont have the voice in the industry that people will listen to, find people who do, and get them to see your product. Most industry leaders are constantly looking to up their game, so you should be able to catch their eye, and if your product is awesome, they will say so

How would you recommend approaching them?

I think it would depend on how those experts roll.

For infosec for example, i think if your product did "X amazing thing", then you'd definitely get a seasoned experts attention if you tweeted "hey, we built a thing that does X amazing thing, give me 5 minutes and i'll show it to you"

I think theres a part of this that means your products has to convince them in the 5 minutes they give you (or at least has to convince them to give you 5 minutes more)

> We compete with companies founded with people that have access to clients with way more purchasing power and better supply pipeline.

Your wording flipped a bit in my head. That exact wording could be said of Europe. There's a whole show and dance to make it seem like it's not, but when everything is about government grants and consortiums, it is.

> Your wording flipped a bit in my head. That exact wording could be said of Europe. There's a whole show and dance to make it seem like it's not, but when everything is about government grants and consortiums, it is.

Sounds very much like Australia, too.

Hey, I'm originally from Australia. My take is that Australia is ever so slightly better off since you don't have all the EU state support regulations to comply with. It's unbelievable how good the EU is at wasting people's time. You're also slightly higher on the VC dollars per capita.

Just curious, where in Europe is doing a SaaS business "about government grants and consortiums"?

Depends on the SaaS business.

We are building waste management IoT devices that are deployed to the public, and making a sale easily takes 2 years and thousands of hours in compliance testing and validation.

And would that be different in, say, the US?

Even if you have a profitable SaaS business, it's common to use public funding to cover R&D, i.e. most of your software engineer salaries.

Usually this will involve identifying features, getting documentation from your customers they would use the features, inventing a story about how these features will save CO2 and create export oriented jobs, and magically forgetting that you have all the inhouse competencies needed while simultaneously identifying a knowledge partner (preferably in another EU country) who can provide you with the missing knowledge.

It's hard to believe it unless you've seen it. Many companies have full-time employees who do nothing but write and manage funding applications. And don't think it stops at startups. Consortiums mixing startups and established SMEs are a huge plus.

Yes, but where?

I mean I run a SaaS in the Netherlands. I know some such subsidies exist but they're also appallingly unattractive (except a general R&D salary tax cut). Shit like "get 25k if you do a project with 2 other companies in 2 other EU countries". I'd rather focus that energy on our product and our customers, thanks.

Your suggestion that "everything is about" getting these grants does not match my experience. Rather, I'd put it as, "there are some companies who'd rather hunt down grants than actually focus on their market, and they're seldomly successful". While I agree that these grants, by virtue of existing, actively discourage good entrepreneurship and thus hurt the market, I strongly disagree that you need them to succeed.

Read about the success of Zoho. An Indian company with no funding that has bootstrapped to billions in revenue. And they are doing development in small towns in India. Talk about overcoming the obstacles of an underdeveloped country!

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