...the harvard drivel review continues it's churn
439 karma · joined July 27, 2011
you take risks. you build something. you learn to build and manage a company. you learn to raise capital. you learn to negotiate a buyout. you learn to ship products and support customers.
for business, personal or any variety of reasons, the founders decide that being acqui-hired is their best option, and have an entirely new set of skills to apply to their next business iteration.
but you're labeled as "failures" by this jacques mattheij.
i don't agree with him. not at all.
teddy roosevelt said:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
please. this is gold. i need more.
"In a market where speed is critical, venture-capital funding allows young companies to move faster than they could if they had to rely only on revenues to fund product development. Entrepreneurs who understand that tend to stick around to make plenty of money later"
really? do they really stick around to make plenty of money? sentence 1 may be true, but that doesn't make sentence 2 true.
i couldn't finish the article. here are a few more choice phrases:
"Many promising tech companies place too much emphasis too soon on the business rather than the product"
"Most entrepreneurs are creative and impatient, an often fatal combination—trying to do too many things, they spread their tiny companies too thin"
it's just not my style of writing. at all.
now allow me to overstep my bounds: your trypair.com site is nearly impossible to read.
here, i made a few changes: http://i.imgur.com/REGrI.jpg
i'll send the psd if you want. it's just 10 minutes of mods without much effort, but i think this should be easier to read.
He talked about how entrepreneurs need to own the vision of the company and learn to delegate
you speak to high-IQ crowds and you discuss complex ideas. you don't have to be a JFK public speaker, but having a "beginner's attitude" and spending a few hours with a public speaking coach could probably work wonders for you and your audiences.
but check out other directory listings. www.capterra.com is HUGE for us. our conversion rates there are about 12% (!!!!). organic conversion rates are about 2.5%. which is much more reasonable. but we spend a lot of $$$$ with them.
edit: a conversion for us is a lead.
in my case, my father and family friend approached me and asked if i could build something. our co-founder said "all the software in this (hr technology) industry sucked". can i build xyz? over a long period of time, i did.
so my general trick would be - find people who are in completely opposite industries as you are right now. doing totally different, non-technical work. often times they're consultants that are reselling other companies products. and they know - since they've been implementing products and speaking to customers on a daily basis - where the customer pain points are.
hope that helps. it only happened for me once, so it's hard to replicate, but i hope you get the chance.
but...i was in college and my salary requirements were low. the sales guy? my dad who had another job at the time (sales at: apple, sun microsystems, hitachi datasystems, etc).
i think that's not a bad bootstrapping model though. if you're both employed, you can both take commission and built it part time until you can jump ship and do it full time.
but the question i hear you saying is - "where am i gonna find a sales guy?" you and i are techies at heart and probably have mostly techie (non sales type) friends.
like everything else, sales isn't a great mystery but it's good to find an experienced person. couple ways to find people, and i had a recruiter recently give me some advice that i'll pass on to you.
linkedin is the new recruitment tool. start looking for some sales guys that already work for companies that have the kind of sales guys you want, and get a hold of them (not sure if you need a premium linkedin for that or not). there's also professional networking events around, but i find that those tend to be about measure whose dick is bigger versus making meaningful relationships.
which city are you in? look up startup networking stuff. i hear all the time about people who want to find a technical co-founder. annoyingly large amounts. and on projects i usually wouldn't invest any time in.
i think the single biggest contributor to our success has been the fact that we are in close contact with our customers.
if we lose a sale, we have the opportunity to learn why we lost. during a webinar, we hear the reactions of customers. with RFP's we get a list of the features they want.
when we win, we stay close to them during implementation. we learn what works/what doesn't work with our products.
based upon this feedback, we're able to constantly refine our products and messaging to what our customers want.
we started with a product guy who could pump out code (me), and a phenomenal sales guy. the two of us essentially built the initial business.
we never took any funding.
the most surprising thing is how long it takes to build a solid product. how long it takes to get momentum. everything just takes a lot longer than you'd expect. it's also a funny thing. once you've achieved a small amount of success (and mine is small), people start thinking you actually know what you're talking about. in my experience - apart from geniuses like jobs, gates, musk, etc - there's nothing that separates you from me. it just takes time, dedication and hard work.
edit: most people find us. we also have business associates who resell to their customer base and customers sometimes give us nice referrals.
advice: b2b is great because people actually pay for shit. lots of b2b software is just awful, i think you can differentiate by providing an excellent product. it'll stand out and give you a solid niche.
i'd also say that you should not give your software away for free in b2b. but you should give it to a trial set of customers initially who can help you work out the kinks. stay close to the customers, they can help guide you and tell you where they look for software like what you're selling.
online advertising works great. use landing pages, a/b test them. all the things that you probably already know, just put them into practice. they exist because they work.
our current sales cycle includes a lot of the negatives that you point out. however, we're up front with our pricing while our competitors aren't.
we actually created a product that did nearly exactly what you said. we didn't get nearly as many customers with that method. people would sign up (sometimes) and when they did, they tended not to pay once their 30 day free trial was up. our conversion rates sucked. we ended up canceling that product and removing it from our site after 8 months.
when we have a webinar with a sales call, our closure rates increase dramatically. customers tend not to pay by credit card even when given the option.
i actually think you're 100% right for many, many products. but i don't think it'd work in my boring b2b industry.
edit: we probably didn't do enough experimentation on the small product as we should have, so i take some of the blame for that.
from his 2007 iphone keynote intro: 26m game consoles sold, 94m digital cameras, 135m MP3 players, 209m PCs, 957m phones... 1% market share is 10 million phones. "Exactly what we're trying to do, 1% market share in 2008, 10 million units and we'll go from there."
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/01/dsc_02...
they were thinking about profit. rest assured.
either way, they don't have an options of another place to build the devices because of capacity reasons.
Btw which passion do you think steve jobs has? Seems like it worked out for him. Hmmmm.