Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

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One thing this article doesn't point out is how beneficial it is to have a decently large highly engaged audience beforehand.

ConvertKit is an example of this.

The founder started by selling books and then made a course on how to sell books, got a pretty big audience around that and then started to build ConvertKit. Eventually he figured out who he wanted to market ConvertKit to and his prior audience of people wanting to sell things online was a great match. Naturally a lot of people who bought his books and courses are a great fit for his email service because the whole premise of his course on selling books is around building an email list. The books ended up being a lead generator for his SAAS app.

That's not to take anything away from Nathan's work. At the end of the day he made a very successful and well deserved business but the specific circumstances around it are a bit different than what this blog post makes it out to be. It was a 10 year journey with multiple good ideas at the right time to get to that point. All of it is documented on Nathan's site. I remember reading some of his posts many years ago.

This is extremely true. I've read many blog posts about how someone started a side project and bootstrapped it to 10k mrr etc.

Invariably when you read closer it goes something like this: "So I had this widely successful blog about X and decided to make a product. I posted about it on my blog and got 1000 sign-ups overnight etc".

I think this gets overblown in the sense that followers often do no equal customers, especially when it's a subscription. obviously yes, having an audience is helpful, but it can also give you false confidence too. They'll tell you your product is amazing, sign up for an early access waitlist, and then often very few of them actually buy because what brought them there was a desire to emotionally support you, not a need for your product. It does help you get the word out though.

Yes of course I'm not implying it's a panacea. However from my experience getting product market fit is one of the hardest parts of the whole process, and having a ready made audience relevant to your topic is a very nice head start.

Absolutely. my reply was aimed more at the unseen other readers looking to use your comment to confirm their bias that regular people can't do this without a huge audience and dismiss it altogether.

It doesn't have to be your traffic tho. One of my projects initially hugely benefited from a single comment on digital oceans blog with a weird solution to a problem my Project easily solved.

It’s silly not to include this in the article. The majority of these “one man shows” are the result of years of work building an online audience, and then launching a business around that audience.

Roam is another example. Without Conor having the Twitter audience he had and the hype around Roam, specifically on Twitter, they don’t hit $2m+ in rev their first month of turning on pricing.

That's because this article was written by a company that ghost writes articles for tech companies for content marketing purposes. Paddle.com is the beneficiary of this content, and HSG is the marketing company that wrote this article. So, yeah, of course it's thinly veiled product marketing and misses quite a bit of detail while gently pushing a SaaS solution for revenue growth that happens to be tailored to the small B2B or B2C SaaS company. I guess the content writers do a good job because this sort of advertorial is quite subtle and looks genuine. Indeed the website that this is hosted on is just a means to gather email subscriptions for product promotion as well as content marketing SEO juju.

That sounds like the main lessons from the course 30x500: https://30x500.com.

1. Identify an audience

2. Find them where they are (Reddit, Facebook group, etc) and learn their jargon and actual, real pains

3. Create content to help that audience and build an email list of people who trust you

4. Create a product to solve an identified pain

5. Sell it to your audience

I simplify of course, and did not take the course yet, but from what I gathered that's the gist.

Same can probably be said for ClickFunnels.

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