thetrumanshow

Hiring sales teams can be delayed in most cases by simply integrating with every platform that that can generate top-of-funnel traffic for you. There is an upfront engineering cost, but in the long-term it will seriously drive down your CPCA rates.

Obvious, but necessary tidbit for rookies: Integrate with platforms, not in order of most traffic, but BEST (highly-qualified) traffic.

Minor critique of the article. Would have loved to have seen more examples. Thanks!

Wow, Nathan keeps racking up the PR/Buzz wins. Good job Nathan! Nice grab Kyle and Justin!

Edits: context.

Fake it until you make it, as they say. However, this is dishonest (if it isn't a joke).

BUT... On the flip side, my anecdotal evidence suggests that naughty founders are statistically more successful. I think PG has some anecdotes to support this as well. Successful founders I know personally, without naming names, have: spammed inboxes, started automated 'conversations' with business owners as part of a pre-sales-filter, deceived potential employees about outcomes, fired the whole team to save money and pivot when there was still a crap-ton of money in the bank, and generally been willing to sell concepts to investors that are total crap. Then there are the well-known stories, like AirBnB fishing Craigslist for homeowners and renters. All shady, grey-hat, probably unethical to lots of people.

There is a low-bar of naughtiness that, if you're not willing to exceed, will limit your ability to be successful... anecdotally speaking.

I think a lot of us are curious if this is still possible (or whether it is only true if you built apps 3 years ago) and would like to hear from anyone with knowledge as to whether this is still possible simply by playing the numbers game with a 1-man shop.

For example, "met" a guy on Reddit who claimed to have built a bootload of Google Gadgets and made 1/2 mil in the process. I've been in the same market during that same time-frame, so I'm generally aware of what is feasible... and I believe I can vouch for the fact that this may still be possible, but probably 150x harder now.

Never underestimate the value of giving an idea a fresh coat of paint.

Implementations age. They stop getting updates. They are missing little things that new incumbents will add by default. They become boring if they're not constantly being reinvented. And they stop being supported by their makers.

Things that people build and give away for free, if its not a true point of pride, will eventually show their age as the makers lose interest...

That's when its time for the second, less-tired wave of makers to come in and stake a claim.

Your rate looks arbitrary enough that it flipped my "this must be algorithmic!" flag. But, its probably not.

Even if its not, it would be cool to hang a shingle as a consultant and have a variable rate based on how much work is in the pipeline. This would be an awesome visual and may actually help choose the optimum hourly rate over the long term.

Edit: hah, just saw the pattern. Still, interesting idea you piqued there. Surely it must have been done somewhere.

I concur.

There are n-ways to join in a conversation, but the more direct experience you have, the better you will be able to field certain types of discussion. So, experts and expert debaters will dive right in and attack the topic head-on. More timid souls will wait in the wings and hope that someone will say something that they can directly respond to with confidence.

Sometimes you have to be slightly shameless if you want to join in a conversation. Stating an opinion (soap-boxing) does feel a bit like cheating the system. But I would argue its slightly better than standing on the sideline.

Thanks Kulveer. Curious if you're going to have a services directory for people who complete clever integrations with your product?

Boxcar did this, we were a part. Great experience. Would love to do something like that again. http://boxcar.io/provider_list

Once you earn the spot of a visionary with an audience, you have to continue to espouse ideas. Movements require that ideas be constantly re-framed to draw more and more people into the fold. Also, you must reinforce the same ideas for the existing audience.

If you're beyond the need to receive the "milk of the gospel" and are ready for the meat, then its probably time for you to be a producer and not merely a consumer. But, don't blame the minister for continuing to feed the babes.

I worked at a big company with a large warehousing infrastructure, and developed mobile apps to help them work their inventory: cycle-counting, checkin/checkout, etc. They were primarily using barcoding (Motorolla MC9090's, just like the WalMart scanners), because our RFID tags were generally unreliable for most inventory applications.

RFID/NFC just never made it that big in the inventory space.

Programmable "Actions" seem much cooler and bring out the imaginative hacker in me, just like ifttt. But, I'm lacking vision here. Does anyone have a link to a kick-ass example of someone using TagStand?

You should certainly chase things that drive more highly qualified people into your funnel, no doubt. But I would have thought that the Heroku store would have been a much larger step-change. Very interesting.

Although, to your point in the article, Spreedly integration is probably a higher-touch process for most people. I would have been scratching my head as to what I would expect happen if I turned Spreedly on in my Heroku dashboard.

Btw, love that you're being candid with numbers. These kinds of things are interesting to us here. I'd personally like to hear more about the pricing changes you made last year, and what impact it had on your business.

I had wondered about what integrating with Heroku might do. These numbers seem incredibly low and discouraging.

Cash poor, cash-flow rich.

Edit: Strictly speaking, I have a liquidity preference. I tend to think that others do too.

Great obserations.

Let us talk out of our asses here, just for a moment. People like to call these "thought experiments":

There are two mindsets at play that I can see. Lets call them the "analytical" and the "immediate"...

[Aside: If I use my own terms like this, then I can write that book later and have my movement-terminology ready-to-go ] :)

The "analytical" mindset is willing to spend thought-cycles worrying about the fact that an app is expensive at $2.99, since the price is anchored against a million other <$1.40 apps. The level of cognitive dissonance on display here is uncanny, but apparently price-anchoring is a low-level OS service of the human brain that is difficult to kill via the Task Manager (consciousness).

The "immediate" mindset is completely free of the cares of price anchoring. This usually happens when you're playing with other people's money, or when you simply don't have a choice.

If you build for the "immediate" mindset, you win.

Of course, this is just a thought experiment and completely indefensible. However, I am willing to make a bet that contains elements that are correct.

Surprisingly, yes, this is a thing, along with people who are anti-SEO. I speak as a convert from the church of anti-SEO, thanks to our mutual outspoken SaaS comrade in Japan.

All negotiable within reason.

Do you not know the joy of changing socks mid-day? Boom! I just changed your life :).

{A wild potential partner appears} :)

My good sir, you know that retailers strive to maximize dollar-per-square-foot. As such, the inventory changes to squeeze more money from folks like me who come back a year later and can't figure out why the hell the Puritan socks they had last year are no longer on the shelf.

I just want someone to offer me a product that I like and deliver that same great product to me for 20 years. Won't someone take my money?

I had a leg up to begin with. I started with an audience (of sorts) that I was able to poll to gauge interest. I didn't start building until literally 200 people told me they would buy it from me. Turns out most of them were blowing some kind of sunshine (or else they found another solution before I could launch one to meet their needs), and very few converted...

But, just the fact that they said yes to my product and price point gave me the confidence to start.

But, I think you can hijack someone else's product-confidence... by which I mean you should find a 800-pound gorilla competitor in your market and just follow them into battle, and eventually outflank them. Not gonna lie, I did this too, because I got to a place where my market-vision was limited... so I piggybacked on a competitors market vision. :)

Interesting article, but tangentially (heh) ... if anyone wants to get into the "DollarSockClub" business with me, I'm so effing tired of buying packs of expensive socks.

Is it really that hard to source and deliver quality socks at a reasonable price?

Maybe it is.

I would love to see a poll of how many people are in your position. I love being proved wrong by stats! (Edit: yes I get the irony that I made a baseless statement and then required the other side to provide stats to back up their arguments; {sigh} I'll try to do better.)

I previously worked in environments which were very stringent on things. Ex: I formerly worked on simulation software for fighter jets. So, there are definitely places where it makes sense, but it still think its minority. TDD is definitely better for VERY LARGE and SENSITIVE products and have long, ongoing development cycles involving large teams.

In those days, two things:

1) The possiblility of "Oh, crap, I just bumped the decimal to the right, by accident, on 1000 customers."

2) The likelihood that someone would tell me that I was "a joke", to be charging money for my software.

So, fear of rejection and fear of screwing up on the money side. Thankfully, there are billing services which eliminated #1 a few years ago, and that was probably the tipping point for me. #2 is an ongoing concern, and always will be.

Thanks for the question!

Had I opened with "Interesting article, but tangentially..." then we'd still disagree, but maybe we could have avoided the straw-man ding. :)

Or, at least different "flavors". I'd like to try "Busy Airport Terminal" and "Mall Scene".

For working parents, maybe a recording of your kids playing/fighting in the background. :)

TDD is like those best-practices books that everyone pretends to read, but hardly anyone ever really reads them (I'm looking at you Code Complete). The Folks that do read these books know the dirty secret that no one else really reads them either, but they feel that endorsing the books somehow gives them credibility.

TDD has its place, as most all main-stream methodologies do. But, lets just admit that the people that use this methodology are in the minority. The rest of us are working on smallish projects that are struggling to be worthy of the time-budget that they've been granted, and we're more worried about shipping than caring about how not having TDD in place will slow us down in phase III. Assuming phase III ever happens. We're using all the best-practices we can, but TDD doesn't rise above the bar most of the time.

From 2004-2009, I basically built things I could have charged for, but didn't. I was afraid to take money from people.

DHH (et al) to the rescue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

This is where the "Nice little Italian restaurant" SaaS meme was sourced from. He was hilariously spot-on.

I caved and started building things I would charge for. I'm still just part-timing it, but my stuff is growing. And, frankly, I'm not the best Rails/iOS/Java developer out there. Literally if I can do it, you can too.

Great, inspiring article.

I want to take a minute here and say that, by far, Spreedly has been the best SaaS provider I've ever worked with. Granted, it doesn't hurt that they hand me fistfuls of subscription revenue from my products.

But, here I was having misgivings for a brief moment, and it was silly of me. You know, these guys keep doing it right.

Spreedly (non-core) customer here. Curious what these changes mean for existing customers. Your post is a good history lesson to bring everyone up to speed, but it lacks details as to how you're handling existing accounts... is Spreedly being deprecated?

Edit: Nvm, finally read the pricing page. Apparently, you're just switching to a metered billing where one of the meters is a payment gateway token. Also each plan-level now includes a limit to the number of cards on file.

If working at a major DoD contractor taught me any anecdotal lessons about software development for the government, its that you are basically disqualified, by logistical means, from making software for the government if the dollar amount in question is anything more than a drop in the bucket for your budget. That may just be a DoD reality, but I wonder how true it probably is for Federal entities.

I'm with markus2012 here. I have a profitable product already in place that would give me a significant head start on those requirements, but I'm still not at all prepared to head down that thorny trail.

I think you certainly have a solid shot at being successful at this. Heck, that's true even in a down market and/or in places other than SV, but I also think you're lack of interest in the field up until now might suggest that you'll end up hating it.

Build something and launch it in public (by which I mean a product). You'll prove both an aptitude and a willingness to see something to the end, which to many people will be as good as a degree, and you'll find out if you love this field or hate it.

If you start, make sure you finish. Get someone to hold you accountable to this if necessary.

Small software companies often barter with local old-school advertisers and trade custom software products for exposure in the local marketplace. They used to trade for web apps and line-of-business software, but as you might imagine, mobile apps are the currency of the small software companies today.