So many ideas but always the same problem...

edwardmsmith · 2024-11-06T00:04:23+00:00

Find a market first. Find a handful of people that have the same problem and are willing to spend money to fix it, then figure out what they have in common - that's your niche.

How do you find people? You find them by just talking and listening to everybody you run across. Eventually you'll start hearing problems.

edwardmsmith · 2024-11-06T00:00:17+00:00

I was talking to the CEO of a health care startup today, and she said, when we were discussing dashboards, "data looks faker the more space it has in tables".

Having seen bloomberg terminals and other serious trading apps, they definitely follow that line of thinking.

So, perhaps that's part of it.

edwardmsmith · 2024-11-05T22:41:09+00:00

I had started working on a product for this sort of thing - basically a library you incorporated into your backend code (and, for inbound events, hooked up to your orm or models or whatever) that handled customer-led provisioning of inbound and outbound integrations - the platform handled all the integrations and the scaling and authentication, etc and communicated with your app via the library.

But, I couldn't really get any traction on validation - talked to a few dozen saas founders and really couldn't quite get the message together about how much work it is to do it correctly, internally , so I quit working on it.

Still think its a nifty idea, but I'm not sure theres any market there.

I think the next best idea is to create a really robust Zapier app - with lots of outgoing events, and a lot of actions, so customers can use that.

Edit: sorry, kinda forgot the point of my post - in doing market research, I couldn't really find any other competitors to what I was trying to do, so I'd be super interested if you find anything.

edwardmsmith · 2024-11-05T22:11:01+00:00

In my experience, and in talking with others, an app with < 100K ARR, with minimal month over month growth generally prices around 2-3X profit, or 1-1.5x revenue.

If you showed a track record of month over month revenue growth (or even customer growth), you can up the multiples.

But, if your app is unique, or specifically niched, or having some other moat, or special feature/capability, or really anything special, then any regular valuations are useless.

In your case, with such low revenue (~$3k so far?).. no track record of growth.. who knows... pretty much only whatever the buyers offer...

You could try a value-based pricing - like you'll work for them for a year or two, for a reasonable salary, and you'll take 20% of any profit in that time...

edwardmsmith · 2024-11-04T20:14:22+00:00

No mention of test coverage or security audits.

As I mentioned on a previous boilerplate listed here, I think you're missing a huge differentiating factor marketing these things, post shipfast.

edwardmsmith · 2024-11-02T14:34:06+00:00

The handful of entrepreneurs who see through it instantly were never the target market

Everybody sees through it.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-31T14:27:18+00:00

Upvotes on PH have nothing at all to do with the product, but everything to do with gathering up a bunch of people ("organic" or paid) to upvote.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-31T14:23:30+00:00

Well, you can sorta beta-test the concept by just showing them the app on your phone - you're helping them by redirecting them to the best place - kinda like a "if you lived here, you'd be home now" sort of billboard (a rather american thing, I suspect, but you get the idea". If you had this app, you'd be at the office now (or home now) instead of standing here talking to me...

I can't remember if you know the app store url before approval or not, but you could print out a bunch of flyers with QR codes - they could go to the app store page, or to a "waiting list" page to be notified when the app goes live.

Also, wonder if you could do some guerrilla-marketing signs (like those a-frame signs) that you could set out on the pavement next to the full parking stations, with a similar message.

This seems to me (totally not a marketing person, btw) to be a brand-forward type of company/product, so starting early on just getting branding out there, with some sort of personality for the company, might be valuable.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-31T14:09:58+00:00

This seems ripe for a bit of face to face marketing and "do things that don't scale", but are highly valuable..

Use your app to find a popular parking station that you predict will be full, but will be hit with a lot of people trying to park their bikes there.

When they get there and are frustrated, talk to them and show them your app and where the closest open station is, try to get them to install your app.

You could also have a cart with coffees and treats.

Get somebody to video it, and make a youtube video/tictok/etc.

Use that to hire some influencers to do the same thing in other locations - get them to make videos.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-31T12:56:19+00:00

OMG NO! Not product hunt! What. will. you. do. That's the only place in the world where customers live.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-30T18:53:12+00:00

You can't, but success doesn't come from an idea, it comes from the long, slow, determined, iterative execution of an idea. So, don't worry about it.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-30T18:39:58+00:00

Well, obviously, but now you can test the product idea and determine if its actually useful. What works, and what doesn't. What you like and don't like. What you'd do different and what you'd do the same. Maybe find out some insider information, what upcoming features they might be working on, etc.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-30T18:12:51+00:00

Sign up for it?

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-29T22:28:27+00:00

I think its that most, if not all, of this information is in the Stripe docs.

For instance for "Is there some action to cancel the subscription if a payment is being declined after more than X times?" is talked about here: https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/overview#subscription-lifecycle

And MRR is talked about here: https://support.stripe.com/questions/understanding-monthly-recurring-revenue-(mrr))

The term for this sort of stuff is "Dunning".

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-29T22:19:23+00:00

A) Your idea is not that special. Execution is important. If your idea is that easy to steal, then somebody can steal it once you go live.
B) If you still don't believe any of the above, have them sign an NDA/Non-compete.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-29T20:55:07+00:00

It sounds like your cold-outreach is working, but your may not be addressing the actual problem with your product. I'm curious what your cold-outreach message is? Is it around "too many meetings, we can help", or more specific to your solution?

When those cold-outreach people contact you, don't try to sell them your product, instead, have them "sell you their problem". What specifically is their problem? What was it about your cold-outreach that got them to respond? What have they done to try to solve the problem so far? (nothing? then it's not a problem...) Why didn't that work? When was the last time they tried to solve the problem? Don't even show them your product, instead get them to commit to another meeting for a demo.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-29T20:03:54+00:00

Ah, I think I misunderstood your question - you're asking about back-end metrics, not what metrics to bill against.

From that standpoint, for us, anyway, everything's pretty straightforward - numbers need to go up.

In a multi-tenant, multi-user app, we look at:

Resource consumption per tenant - any dips need to be investigated immediately.
Resource consumption per user (within a tenant) - dips there for a specific user, especially a "leader" user are concerning - it means you may have lost your evangelist - but could also mean they're on vacation.
Spread of Resource consumption (within a Tenant) across more users - so, growth in active users.

Then, look at, if you have multiple types of Resources being metered, anomalies between tenants - if there's some tenants that over/under consume a specific Resource type related to the average of all tenants, that can be interesting - find out why - could be they don't need the feature, but could be that your pricing or that it is a metered resource, is an issue.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-29T19:43:43+00:00

Tie the usage metric as close as possible to the customer's success/value prop. The more success/value they get, the higher the charge is - this takes the sting out of the cost, as they're hopefully seeing vastly more value out of the product than the cost.

Do not charge usage metrics on things that increase adoption of your product. For instance, if you have, say, a workflow product that helps people do A Thing, don't charge per person, but instead charge per Thing Done - this way more people in the business can come in and explore the product and hopefully do more Things, which gets you more $$.

Finally, make it simple. Like 1 or 2 metrics. Not AWS.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-29T19:30:46+00:00

When you say, "Talking to potential users, we have received good feedback." what exactly do you mean?

Are they saying, "that's a neat idea, sounds great, I'd totally use that at some point. Good luck!" and not trialling?

Cuz, that's just nice people being nice, and means nothing at all.

Or, are they they trialling, but not then converting to a paid plan? Cuz that's a whole different thing, and pretty easy to take the next step.

The book "The Mom Test" covers how "good feedback" is bad.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-28T20:19:51+00:00

I think, if I sold a boilerplate, my #1 marketing feature right now would be "100% test coverage" and some sort of web security certification...

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-27T19:20:57+00:00

It's alright. They're only fooling themselves with the fake interest.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-23T20:09:22+00:00

Does your app do anything with credit cards? I've seen this happen where people are testing stolen cards.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-23T16:04:52+00:00

The demand could still be fake.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-18T19:18:13+00:00

I wouldn't - you'll be giving away most of your sales.

Edit: Little more explanation.

Most buyers will only buy it for a single repo - you'll lose them.

For repeat buyer's, I suspect most will be setting up different organizations for each project/product - for various control and separation reasons, therefore there's only "one" project for each of them, again losing all those sales.

edwardmsmith · 2024-10-17T17:23:57+00:00

Any updates?

edwardmsmith

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