[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How to learn marketing and sales as a solo e...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: How to learn marketing and sales as a solo entrepreneur?
Hello, I failed with a several products that I built (easy part for
devs like us) and then I didn't know how to get the product in
front of customers, how to commercialize it, how to increase amount
of users, etc. Many of you succeed in this field, so I'm genuinely
curious how to learn it? What are decent learning resources out
there? Thanks in advance
Author : yu3zhou4
Score : 410 points
Date : 2024-12-31 11:01 UTC (3 days ago)
| tikkun wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693844
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316653
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316653
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37021837
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36922114
|
| Some good recs in the above threads. You'll be able to learn and
| thrive with those, IMO.
| yu3zhou4 wrote:
| Thanks! I used Algolia to search stuff like this but didn't
| stumbled on those
| arrowsmith wrote:
| FYI, your second and third links are the same.
| spzb wrote:
| Rob Walling's books are pretty good and his first one "Start
| Marketing The Day You Start Coding" is a free download from his
| website https://robwalling.com/#books
| neom wrote:
| I've been doing go to market for technology businesses to some
| degree for the better part of 20 years now and I still learn more
| every day. I don't really see it as something you can easily
| learn by reading about, mostly because there is a lot of nuance.
|
| That said, it basically boils down to 3 things:
|
| Personas Channels Messages
|
| You have an archetype of someone in your head that would like
| your tool, you want to test if that archetype exists. That
| persona likely consumes content, your job then is to understand
| the channels that persona typically likes to consume their
| content, and try to serve them a message they can understand in
| the time you have to serve it. There are thousands of personas in
| millions of channels consuming billions of messages, that is why
| it's hard.
|
| I'm happy to give you an hour of my time for free to do a deep
| dive on your particular problems. https://calendly.com/ipconfig /
| je at h4x.club
| metalman wrote:
| your gooooood! humble intro that segues into a this is so, so
| hard.... awsome lay it all out for free, WOW! personas channels
| messages
|
| smooooth finnish with a free puppy
|
| nuance indeed
|
| call that? the keys to the palace and a free puppy sale!, who
| could say no?
|
| for the parent: hire this guy!
|
| If you cant, then get a jobby job selling retail to the masses,
| and just sell sell sell, get a thicker hide, and be able to
| summon a smile for the worst person you are ever going to meet
| neom wrote:
| I can't tell if this is a backhanded compliment or just the
| backhand, but it made me laugh never the less.
| yu3zhou4 wrote:
| I think that was genuine, maybe a bit overemotional, and
| I'm unsure why they're getting downvoted
| econ wrote:
| It makes people angry because it is true.
|
| When I got the job selling an insanely inferior version
| of the product I couldn't sell the formula was this, sit
| down and listen...
|
| They had 40 different registered businesses all selling
| the same software but with a different name to protect
| the guilty. A modest size call center divided into 40
| groups. Each prospect would get at least 40 calls but
| more often something towards 120. Pricing started high
| then gradually lowered with a few "errors" so that the
| prospect could say they got a call 2 days ago and they
| only charged x. "Ohh, that cheap???" Etc
|
| It worked, people got really angry 30 to 80 calls in and
| they purchased from the "other" company.
| ayewo wrote:
| That formula is definitely hilarious
| notpushkin wrote:
| I can't even decipher it tbh
| yu3zhou4 wrote:
| Much appreciated John, I'd be happy to discuss stuff with you
| once I'm ready
| cpfohl wrote:
| "Once I'm ready" is a trap.
|
| It's a free hour of consulting with someone that has
| experience in exactly what you're struggling with...worst
| case scenario (no offense neom) you walk away with an hour
| less to binge Netflix and a hilarious story; best case they
| point something out that moves you to profitable months or
| years sooner.
|
| My instinct tells me that you posted this here because you
| wanted something like this.
| lazyeye wrote:
| Nice summary thankyou.
| throwaway519 wrote:
| Book recommendation: Philip Kotler, Marketing Management.
|
| It's both easy and deep reading. Long but worth it. It changed
| marketing for me from smoke and mirrors to a systematic, fun,
| creative analytical process.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Spending money makes things easier to do and easier to fail at.
| Ads targeted at customers is the simplest way.
|
| The ideal thing to do is become your customer, hang out with
| them, learn from them. Shape your product around them. They will
| tell you what they will buy for how much.
|
| Only a few products are so innovate that everyone understands
| what it is and the value it brings and they demand it and only
| you can give it to them : think ChatGPT. Those products market
| themselves once word gets out. Is that your product? If not you
| have to tell people or show people.
| wallstprog wrote:
| Michael Porter's books on marketing (esp. "Competitive Strategy")
| are well-regarded.
| bitbasher wrote:
| I built and run a saas product solo (> $500k/year). Honestly, I
| have never found any advice useful. I've been to saas founder
| meetups (like microconf), I've read the books, etc.
|
| Any advice I give may not apply to you and your business. My
| business is b2b and it's a platform for certain kinds of
| professionals as well as an API that powers many well known
| businesses.
|
| I've only had success through two general strategies:
|
| 1. Networking (friend of friends, friend of customers, etc).
| Leverage your network to find more customers.
|
| 2. The "Long Game" (SEO, word of mouth, etc). This is where I get
| most of my customers.
|
| I'd say focus on the long game from day one (blog posts, good
| marketing pages, etc). Use networking to determine how valuable
| the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one
| wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want to pay for
| it.
| braden-lk wrote:
| Similar experience. I've never received much good advice, or
| found anything that feels like it "works", just small,
| accumulating long-game actions that drive up
| traffic/conversions a hundredth of a percent at a time. Blog
| posts, paid ads, sponsorships, emails, affiliates, product
| improvements, etc. I'm B2C so most advice given to me by
| "thought leaders" is "stop doing B2c" which isn't super helpful
| when I have a functioning, profitable B2C business.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| Same.
|
| I think much of the stuff that you need to do is common sense
| (put word out, write about it, encourage word of mouth). And
| it's usually obvious what will definitely kill your project
| (don't talk about it to anyone, don't listen to customer
| feedback etc.) so do the opposite of those.
|
| My general experience has been that word of mouth is slow but
| very reliable and the customers you get from there are
| usually high value.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| > Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and
| if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you
| about it, no one is going to want to pay for it.
|
| This is a key thing. A lot of developers operate in the belief
| that "if you build it they will come".
|
| A small amount of market validation would prevent a lot of
| wasted time.
|
| - Do people have the problem you are solving?
|
| - Are they willing to pay a sufficient amount to solve it?
|
| - Are there enough of them to make it worthwhile?
|
| The real danger is that we often don't want to hear the answers
| to these questions. So we either don't ask or we dismiss the
| answers that we get. Wishful thinking is a dangerous thing.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| This is all true. But it isn't as easy as it sounds.
|
| When you start out, you probably only have a vague idea of
| what the product will be.
|
| The sort of people you want to talk to might not want to talk
| to you. They are busy people and you don't even have a
| product!
|
| People saying they will give you money is worthless, in my
| experience. Only people _actually_ giving you money counts
| for anything.
|
| Estimating the market size is hard and not all that relevant.
| See also:
| https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-
| fall...
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| I think that is part of the problem. Starting out with only
| a vague idea of what the product will be sounds very
| unwise.
|
| Successful businesses I have worked at have started out
| solving a real problem for someone (in a business) - with
| that person telling us that they know other businesses have
| the same problem.
|
| If someone in an industry comes to you with a problem - and
| they have worked in the industry sufficiently long enough
| to have been in multiple companies - they can give you a
| pretty good idea of what size the prize might be.
|
| The difficulty a lot of us have working in software is that
| we don't really get enough exposure to these people.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| This is whats _perfect_ about web3 that most pundits miss
|
| It takes the looooong web 2.0 funnels and flips it to a
| single step:
|
| Your customers pay to interact with your app at all and
| there is insatiable demand at the beginning, unless you do
| some boomer-level system design that is based on pretending
| that a 3 trillion dollar crypto native audience doesnt
| exist already and you need to onboard a bunch of
| technophobes.
|
| In comparison, the entire web 2.0 ethos basically sums up
| to getting a customer to put their credit card into your
| website for a small charge, as a funnel for a bigger
| recurring charge later
|
| in web3 all of your users are at the last step at the very
| beginning. they are even paying for all your hosting costs.
| they are paying to update your database! and your actual
| business model of being some form of plumbing with a
| transaction fee, if you didnt just sell a token collection,
| is fine and has low overhead costs
|
| this will continue attracting developers and their entire
| audience in perpetuity because the entire web 2.0 ecosystem
| cannot compete with that
| lokimedes wrote:
| This must be how it sounds when I preach nuclear power as
| the be-all, end-all solution to our climate and energy
| crises.
|
| Thank you for the insights.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| As it happens, the people you disparagingly refer to as
| boomers are often the ones holding the purse strings.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| Your elders designed and built the system of boxes,
| chips, wires, cables and tubes this thing runs on.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| that doesn't matter here and it wasn't really disparaging
|
| the only people that have an issue with web3 have a
| characteristic and typically describe an irrelevant
| system design that doesn't factor in the simple reality
| that users are paying in web3 and wouldn't in web2.0, the
| only people having an issue creating web3 apps have a
| characteristic, for example I just got off a call with
| someone trying to jump on the web3 bandwagon for hotel
| reservations - a technophobic audience that should be
| ignored for web3 ux fictions - and the only people
| funding broken web2 apps that are supposed to use web3
| rails have a characteristic
|
| reclaim the term like every marginalized group does
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| Have you personally launched and made money with any web2
| or web3 apps?
|
| How much did you make?
|
| > reclaim the term like every marginalized group does
|
| I'm 34.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| 8 figures from web3 apps, 6 figures from web2.0 saas apps
|
| aiming to do more of both this cycle
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| That's impressive. Care to share any more?
|
| I'm assuming this is USD?
|
| It's curious, because some of your other posts[0] would
| suggest someone who is a little more price sensitive than
| someone who has made more than 10 million dollars from
| their own website. But I'm probably reading this
| incorrectly or something.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33415595
| yieldcrv wrote:
| yes, USD
|
| also out of curiosity, in your world why does me saying a
| third party charge _other people_ money, over two years
| ago or at any point in time, suggest what you said it
| would suggest. it would be a matter if other people are
| price sensitive, for reference
|
| if one were looking for something to invalidate or
| grasping for an ad hominem, doesnt it require
| interpreting the posting accurately as well at a bare
| minimum?
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| Not sure why you're being defensive.
|
| In my experience, people who are less price sensitive
| tend to not think about inconsequential sums. So it was
| surprising to me to read that someone who has made over
| $10,000,000 would care about whether or not Calendly
| would charge for no-shows.
|
| Just curious about the thought process. That's all.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > Just curious about the thought process. That's all.
|
| the answer is that calendly does not charge for no-shows
| and my time is valuable, which would match the worldview
| you're looking for, and on the defensive perception, I'm
| not sure if you really understand the interaction
| proposed.
|
| but if we were on the same page all along, then we also
| have a different definition of defensive since clarifying
| whether you are perceiving the same concept is not
| defensive to wonder about.
|
| Like, isn't there another comment somewhere else in my
| post history that would be better to question what you
| think an 8-figure HN user would be doing with their time?
| since you don't know the value of the intended
| conversations on the calendly schedule, that requesting
| they charge wouldn't be factor in supporting your
| validity or not of price sensitivity or inconsequential
| sums, and the other party would be charged either way,
| not me. I would define this whole line of reasoning to be
| a non-sequitur.
|
| in any case, if you would like to talk more about web3
| user acquisition funnels and how it compresses web2.0
| ones, removing a magic based marketing industry and
| replacing them with paying customers, I'm available for
| that.
| cpursley wrote:
| What did I even just read? Is this an AI response? I'm
| lost...
| justmarc wrote:
| No. That's just how "web3" folks talk. I never managed to
| understand them yet. And I have to wonder if they
| understand themselves.
| dboreham wrote:
| I think it means "if the whole point of your application
| is that customers pay to do anything, then you short
| circuit all the typical process of acquiring and
| monetizing customers". Of course you can still have zero
| customers nevertheless.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| that web3 apps are just optimized web2.0 apps especially
| with regards to how marketing funnels work to get paid
| users, further goes on to explain why and how
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| you'd have to be crazy to think the onboarding funnel in
| web3 is easier than web2
| yieldcrv wrote:
| if you reduce frictions that existing web3 users actually
| have then yeah its way easier, have to pay some
| influencers though and infiltrate a couple discords and
| get people's attention onchain as well
| mdorazio wrote:
| If you only have a vague idea of what the product will be
| (or at least what the real problem to solve is) and you
| don't have any potential buyers to talk to then you really
| shouldn't be writing a single line of code at all. You
| should be building your network and experience so that you
| _do_ understand those things, _then_ you go and build an
| MVP. So many developers fall into this trap.
|
| I always recommend the book The Mom Test to would-be
| entrepreneurs. It goes into more detail on why asking
| people if they will buy something is worthless (as you
| mentioned), and how you can ask much better questions to
| find and validate problems worth solving.
| kevin_nisbet wrote:
| +1 on recommending the Mom Test, it's one of the most
| important books I've read.
|
| I'd say in addition to entrepreneurs, it's an important
| book for product teams / product engineers to understand
| what the Mom Test teaches, and tune the filter on asking
| the right questions to get the highest signal, and ensure
| the solution closely matches the value prop for the
| customer. Then sales and marketing get a whole lot easier
| when you've asked the right questions and solved the
| right problems.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| 2 and 3 apply to this case study.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30831688
| kingofheroes wrote:
| One thing I've always stumbled on is finding the people to
| even ask the questions to. How do you contact people in the
| domain you're interested in and how do you convince them to
| give you the time of day?
| avgDev wrote:
| I'm the polar opposite.
|
| I don't waste anytime and never felt like I stumbled on a
| product idea that warrants me building something.
|
| Therefore, I haven't built anything but the projects at work.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| My question is how do you get businesses to trust the
| continuity of a business operating by one person?
|
| As a rule, I wouldn't trust building anything depending on a
| small company - "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM".
|
| (I also wouldn't trust building a project on top of a Google
| product. But that's a different story)
|
| Not as a solo entrepreneur, but I have been on both sides of a
| similar situation. I was working for a struggling startup where
| our largest customer who made up 70% of our revenue insisted on
| the code being put in escrow that they would get access to
| under certain conditions.
|
| The condition happened - company was sold for scraps - and then
| they hired me as a contractor for them using the code they now
| had access to them. Yes everything was above board, they worked
| with the acquiring company to allow me to keep my work laptop
| and in my severance agreement the acquirer released me from non
| competes, etc.
|
| Two companies later I was on the opposite side where I was one
| of the decision makers where we were going to extend the
| contract with a solo entrepreneur for a SaaS. We were going to
| be 70% of his revenue. I suggested we also get his code put in
| escrow and I was responsible for actually watching his build
| process once per quarter where he pulled his escrowed code out
| and built and ran from scratch.
| justmarc wrote:
| You literally answered your own question.
|
| Trust no one, and it doesn't matter if it's a Fortune
| whatever, a small enterprise, a small company or an
| individual.
|
| A company or business of any size can axe a product they own
| at any time, unless they contractually promised you support.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes. The difference is that if one employee at a large
| company gets hit by the "lottery bus" or loses interest,
| the business doesn't go under.
|
| Also some companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS etc are
| more trusted by "the enterprise" than Google.
|
| Is there an easy process for your customers to move their
| data over to a similar service if they don't want to renew
| the contract?
| hellcow wrote:
| The combo of data exports and open-sourcing your code is
| a great solution to this problem. If you vanished
| tomorrow customers could easily migrate to a different
| vendor or even self-host. That carries much less risk
| than betting on any early stage VC startup that might
| vanish overnight, even with more people involved.
| dboreham wrote:
| As you've noted, there are solutions to this problem.
| r_singh wrote:
| > 1. Networking (friend of friends, friend of customers, etc).
| Leverage your network to find more customers.
|
| For those located in India (I would argue anywhere outside US
| really), in my opinion, trying to find customers in your
| network is a waste of time, even if you're wealthy. Most
| societies outside US aren't as abundant in their mind nor value
| driven the same way people in the US are
|
| Instead focus on the long game, keep filling in the blanks on
| your ICP and what their pushes and pulls are by trying to
| figure out who is the right segment to serve so you can save
| time and energy
| staunton wrote:
| > abundant in their mind
|
| Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?
| halamadrid wrote:
| I think he meant any or all of - generous, helpful, willing
| to do something for nothing in return
| TypingOutBugs wrote:
| How did you iterate through product ideas go find one that
| worked?
|
| And what tech stack did you use?
| bitbasher wrote:
| I kept things stupidly simple. I didn't invent a new product
| or idea. I seen a number of companies doing it and I thought,
| "I can do that..."
|
| The initial product was built with Ruby on Rails. It stayed
| in Rails for three years. At that point I had enough API
| traffic the memory on the server was getting out of control
| and Ruby just couldn't handle the concurrent traffic (with a
| reasonable budget).
|
| I re-wrote the entire product in Go on the third year mark
| (converted ERB to Go templates, re-wrote all backend logic
| with Go, etc).
|
| The Go version worked wonderfully and reduced my server costs
| substantially (from $600/month to $88/month). I had the Go
| version running for four years and I re-wrote it again in
| Rust (actixweb, askama, htmx).
|
| For funsies, I re-wrote a portion in Rust and noticed the
| amount of code used was substantially lower (about 50% less
| code in Rust). I was surprised by that (I figured it would
| use more being lower level). At that same time I was growing
| frustrated with maintaining the Go monolith (it had a lot of
| legacy cruft from the Rails port and spaghetti code). I
| decided to re-write the whole thing in Rust and cull the
| cruft in the process.
| luxpir wrote:
| That's really interesting. Any further cost savings going
| from Go to Rust?
| bitbasher wrote:
| There were no financial savings from the transition, but
| there were certainly overall resource savings (cpu,
| memory). I think I could cut the financial cost in half,
| but I am currently stuck where I am due to the (postgres)
| database size and memory requirements. It's on my list of
| things to improve some day, but I'm not I'm not too
| worried about it right now :)
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I quite like this framing. You can think of network as a medium
| term thing which has to be developed and worked as opposed to
| just getting bootstrapped.
|
| Did you purposely leave out outbound sales? Cold emails, trade
| shows, working the phones?
| bitbasher wrote:
| I've tried cold emails, LinkedIn outreach and so on. It
| works, but I found the success rate to be horrible (< 1%
| ???). Believe me, I've tried. I read all of the sales and
| outreach books (predictable revenue, predictable prospecting,
| founding sales, etc). I've implemented the ideas, I've done
| it manually, automated, etc.
| aristofun wrote:
| Can you share a link?
| bruce511 wrote:
| Firstly, it's worth understanding that building a software
| business today is hard.
|
| There's lots of competition, and most customers are already using
| something to help with their problem.
|
| What worked for me 25 years ago is not going to work as well
| today. Well it will, but its much harder to stand out from the
| crowd.
|
| Some things don't change though. You need to find customers
| before you find (ie build) product. Ideally you get a deposit
| before you start writing. Getting customers is harder than
| writing code, so do that first.
|
| Finding customers is hard. You need to get close enough to see
| their pain. You need to make that pain go away. It's seldom as
| easy as you expect to make pain go away (the devil is in the
| details.)
|
| The good news is that it is possible. And it's hard enough that
| it keeps the competition away. Do it well, carve out a niche, and
| you can build something good.
|
| And always remember- customer service is what you are really
| selling, not software.
| fakedang wrote:
| > Some things don't change though. You need to find customers
| before you find (ie build) product. Ideally you get a deposit
| before you start writing. Getting customers is harder than
| writing code, so do that first.
|
| To add to this, there's always a catch 22 problem - how can I
| show something to customers to sell to, when I don't even have
| a product to sell? It's expected in a sales meeting or often
| any meeting, that you have a demo that would show your product
| concept for them.
|
| I can't state this enough, but literally build on the shoulders
| of giants. Build on existing tools, and I don't mean open
| source, but existing products. Best advice I got from watching
| one of those AI fad-chasing YouTubers. Is it an online store
| idea? Build on Shopify first. Is it a chatbot? Use KoreAI or
| DialogCX. Is it a CRUD app? Use Glide + Google Sheets. Customer
| Service? Maybe they just need a Hubspot/Zendesk with some
| custom integrations.
|
| Most customers are looking to buy a functionality, not a
| "product" . Oftentimes your MVP will be enough to carry them
| for a long time. You wouldn't even need to write a single line
| of code yourself for quite a bit of time.
|
| Like you said, the hard part is actually meeting the potential
| prospect and ensuring that they will pay you for the product.
| In my (very limited) experience, I've had 60k-employee billion
| dollar companies outright refuse to buy (instead hiring 2000
| underpaid fresh graduates in India to build a worse product),
| while a 250-employee million dollar company being super-
| enthusiastic about paying a premium price for it (even though
| they have their own dev team). If I had gone by the views of
| the billion dollar company, I wouldn't have found a market
| niche for my product, but fortunately I stubbed my toe
| (literally!) and found the actual customer instead.
| justmarc wrote:
| I agree. The only thing is that 250 employees can't be a
| million dollar company, as then each employee would be making
| $333 a month.
| ozim wrote:
| Maybe a million in profit not revenue:)
| creer wrote:
| See also YC Startup School and other videos in the YC channel
| https://www.youtube.com/@ycombinator/videos
|
| Lots of great experiences retold - from the startup world rather
| than some Coca Cola exec.
| purple-leafy wrote:
| I've been trying for about 2 years now. I've had 1 commercial
| success, but it was pure luck really. I had a post about my
| project go viral, and it gained many users. It was a free
| product, but a group of people wanted to buy it off me.
|
| I think its - right market - right time
| - right product - right attitude
|
| Consider though that selling to other developers is really,
| really hard. There is no low hanging fruit anymore.
|
| Rather than building web projects, I'm not shifting my attention
| to overlooked areas (C, CLI, other low level areas)
| mud_dauber wrote:
| I'm hesitant to simply say "read this", but please consider The
| Mom Test. It's a quick read & teaches how to structure
| conversations with potential customers.
| ornornor wrote:
| Second that. It's an easy read and provides a lot of good
| advice. And if you read between the lines it can also be
| applied to sale and networking, not only purely customer
| research (teaches you how to write less cringey
| messages/intros)
| pandog wrote:
| Came here to post this - this was a great (and short!) read to
| help validate if your idea could be something somebody wants to
| pay for.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I used to work as a stock broker and it helped tremendously with
| my soft skills.
| jparishy wrote:
| (opinions) picked up from doing enterprise/gov sales as a startup
| founder, relevant to early days of a saas mostly
|
| - you can't outsource sales before pmf, and you probably don't
| have pmf yet
|
| - talk to (at least) a potential customer every day, keep track
| of what you said and how they responded
|
| - make and give your leads materials they can use to sell
| internally, figure out who makes decisions (probably not who you
| talked to first) and make sure it's relevant to them; you may
| need multiple versions
|
| - aggressively think about pmf, don't worry too much about
| official definitions here. just ask yourself: "if i took a month
| long vacation, could sales ostensibly be on autopilot?" if no,
| you don't have it yet. if yes, take the vacation you're doing
| great
|
| - look for pmf by making your idea smaller, not bigger, or you
| will waste money and time
|
| - when you can make a product idea really tiny in scope, and
| someone will still pay for it, you've identified a strong pain
| point you can exploit (aka charge for). Build the
| product/platform around that, not the other way around. Never
| convince yourself you have to build a huge thing before you can
| sell it, you're most likely wrong. optimize for finding that tiny
| scope early on
|
| - when i say look for or find or think about pmf i mean come up
| with a way to pitch your product, and then pitch it to someone
| new. then compare that to the last times you did it. you have to
| talk to a lot of people for this to work, way more than you
| think. your product will not sell itself, you will have to talk
| to a lot of people. as many as physically possible to get the
| feedback you need to create a sales cycle that runs without you
| i.e. pmf. this is something that took me multiple years to
| internalize. you're just never talking to enough potential
| customers
|
| - don't ignore seo, and pick names that are easy to say and read;
| figure out where your customers consume media and get your
| content there. every business will be different here, and you
| gotta get creative
|
| - something i saw on reddit that stuck with me: first time
| founders think about product, second time founders think about
| distribution. i operationalize this as: do not begin engineering
| a product until you're clear on how it will be marketed and sold,
| bonus points if you can convince someone to sign a contract
| saying they want it-- and remember in B2B/gov this can (should?)
| be a sales channel partner not just an end-user
| alistairjallan wrote:
| I've not taken the course but follow the author on LinkedIn where
| he distills typical B2B content approach with clarity.
| https://www.pierreherubel.com/course
| samanthasu wrote:
| That's quite tricky to describe because it's just always
| different in everyone's experience. I would say it's a good start
| if you can get your first deal from your network or friends. And
| then you need some pilot cases to support your product success.
| And you need a long run in building your product reputation, your
| SEO ranking, etc. Then it seems that it can be a bit easier to
| get customers...
|
| still on this way as well :)
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Just listen and help people with your expertise. Be a good
| advisor. Focus your efforts on finding a good fit for their
| needs, not selling them something. Talk positively about all the
| options on the market and the pros / cons. Why you're a good fit
| or not for them. Make referrals to the "competition". It's not a
| zero sum game.
|
| The trust you earn by trying to genuinely be of service to the
| market pays back dividends. Not in an easily quantifiable RoI.
| But eventually it will.
|
| The other bit of advice is you need to set some boundaries and
| expectations for working together. This includes closing the sale
| (we need contract back by X date or we can't work together) and
| when executing / serving them (we can't exceed this limit, we
| need payment by Y or service will be paused). Hold yourself to
| being disciplined and not people pleasing. You'll regret the
| latter usually. Sometimes the best thing you can do is NOT close
| the deal.
|
| Don't undersell yourself. Set a price point where half of your
| inbound is unable to work with you. Eliminate bad fits early.
|
| As a solo entrepreneur your time is extremely limited. So
| boundaries and setting a good price point are very important so
| people don't waste your time.
|
| And because you're probably still looking for PmF these trusting
| relationships turn your potential customers into advisors. Treat
| your best customers advice as sacrosanct. You'll find a niche in
| partnership with them.
| jainvivek wrote:
| I was looking for the same a while ago on HN. Below is the
| thread. Not specific to solopreneurs, but a lot of relevant
| advice, including top comment by a solopreneur with 3 successful
| businesses.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41862332
| mleonhard wrote:
| The Founding Sales book is a good resource. It's written by a
| startup founder who built startup sales teams from zero to
| hundreds of ppl. It explains how sales is different at each stage
| of a company. It teaches what is important at each stage.
|
| https://www.foundingsales.com
| stevenicr wrote:
| I've posted many resources for people to take a dip into
| different paths and different teachers for marketing on this
| page: https://steveiscritical.com/smma-info/
|
| I should clean it up and organize it better at some point, but
| there is a big variety these days.
| Frummy wrote:
| It might not help directly with digital, but if you get on the
| phone to sell something that gives a sort of fundamental
| understanding of sales that can inspire plans for other avenues
| of sales and marketing
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| I've built successful products (https://chatgptwriter.ai and
| more) and here's what works for me:
|
| Step 1: Offer your product for free. Free (and useful) products
| spread organically on internet. If people aren't using your
| product even when it's free, no amount of marketing will make it
| successful.
|
| Step 2: If people are "consistently" using your free product over
| time, you can then offer additional value at a price or try any
| other pricing strategy.
|
| Not all products can be offered for free, and that's okay. It's
| worth spending some money initially (if you can) because your
| primary goal is to reach Step 2.
| cpursley wrote:
| Step 1 is useless for b2b products, and actually, a huge time
| waster. It will attract the very worst "customers" with near 0
| chance of converting. Can work for b2c, however.
| thekevan wrote:
| I've been in sales for a while and in my opinion, speaking to
| experienced sales people about the things you want to sell is an
| amazing eye opener. I don't know how many times I've explained a
| person's product to them and they have a mini epiphany as they
| never saw it that way before.
|
| In my experience, many product makers who describe themselves as
| being bad at sales just can't get their head out of their own
| view point. So even speaking to a person who is just marginally
| above average at sales and describes it as an outsider can really
| shift their way of thinking. The customer may not use the product
| in the exact way you think they will when you made it. Having the
| benefit of seeing how others see your product will put you on the
| same footing when you pitch it to them.
|
| Also, find a way of presenting that fits your personality. I'm
| pretty mater of fact and my sales pitch has always been sort like
| "we have some cool stuff for sale, you use some of the exact kind
| of stuff we sell, let's talk about whether our stuff would be
| good for you." Then I just ask them questions. Sales people have
| the (deserved) stereotype of blathering on about their product or
| service and being tone deaf to whether it's a good fit or not. I
| ask and I ask. People will talk about themselves quite a bit and
| in my mind, I am taking notes on what may be a good fit for them
| and what might not be.
|
| Eventually, they've run out of things to talk about and I'll
| start talking about what I think they should look at and why.
| That brings me around to another thing--fitting in. I have no
| problem telling people if one of our offerings is not something
| they should consider. I don't want to force something on someone,
| when they are smart enough to know it isn't right for them.
| Cajoling someone into a sale that isn't a great fit just leads to
| problems after the sale, then I'm putting out fire with them when
| I should be selling to others. Not only does it build trust with
| the customer to pass on things, but it's just the right thing to
| do.
|
| Think of yourself not as a salesperson, but as a problem solver.
| If they have a business problem your product can solve, tell
| them.
|
| Good luck and I hope this helps!
| iancmceachern wrote:
| "The Futur" is a great youtube channel and broader resource I've
| found helpful.
| chrisvalleybay wrote:
| Three years ago I started consulting as an interim CTO for a
| company doing sales and marketing on behalf of other B2B SaaS. I
| had to onboard myself into this domain and it was quite hard as
| there are many snake oil sales men selling snake oil.
|
| The first book I would read is Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey
| Moore. After this, in no particular order you could have a look
| at:
|
| - This is Marketing by Seth Godin
|
| - Positioning by Al Ries
|
| - The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
|
| - Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
|
| - Traversing The TRaction Gap by Bruce Cleveland
|
| - From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin
|
| I would also have a look at the models created by Winning By
| Design [1]. But be sceptical! These models do however hold some
| value in terms of visually presenting the sales funnel and
| gaining understanding of land and expand.
|
| Best of luck to you!
|
| [1]: https://winningbydesign.com/resources/blueprints/
| jongjong wrote:
| I find this to be an impossible problem because everything that
| any consumer could possibly want already exists. In fact, there
| are too many things and wealthy people are literally going insane
| trying to absorb the enormous supply and range of goods and
| services that are available to them. Sales is basically a zero-
| sum game of one useless product or service stealing market share
| from another useless product or service.
|
| The only real problem which exists in society is the problem that
| the system itself prevents us from solving. The problem of
| allowing people to obtain money to buy the damn stuff that is
| being produced and whose production could be easily scaled up at
| will and there is nothing save climate change and other doom
| narratives getting in the way of massively scaling up production
| and automating everything. Letting the pie grow as big as is
| required to satisfy everyone. Ask just about anyone on the street
| what they need and if they're honest, 99% of them will tell you
| that they need more money to buy the stuff that already exists.
| The government could essentially give free land and free money
| (UBI) to everyone, new cities would be built and the system would
| expand and decentralize outward, creating an abundance of
| opportunities.
|
| How do you solve the problem of helping people to get more money
| when the entire monetary system is designed to concentrate
| wealth, to take away opportunities and wealth from the masses.
| The only solutions to the most important problem in society are
| political. There are no business solutions for this problem
| within the current political framework.
|
| There is no incentive to actually automate anything (beyond the
| point when it satisfies only the elite) when the masses are
| systematically broke and desperate for money. People will always
| be as cheap as machines. Slavery exists on the periphery and will
| grow in the current system. It will come down to the cost of food
| for a slave or electricity for a machine... However, the slave
| can produce their own food in the same way that an intelligent
| machine could produce its own electricity. The net cost is 0 in
| both cases. Slavery is more achievable, even today.
|
| Now if you're interested in ways to make money without solving
| the only problem that matters, then you need to basically come up
| with a solution to make the problem worse; which helps
| concentrate the money faster, more surveillance, more control,
| more plausible deniability, more dulling of the senses, more
| inequality, more suffering... Basically anything that helps to
| prevent political change. Nothing else pays in the current
| political framework besides protecting the current political
| framework.
| la_fayette wrote:
| Ok, but if you look into physical products. There were many
| successful car manufacturers since decades, still new companies
| like Tesla or Chinese ones enter the market... And seemingly
| there is money to buy these products.
| jongjong wrote:
| I wouldn't say many because we can probably count them on our
| fingers. I personally don't feel so concerned about that
| sector though because it's a capital intensive industry. My
| take is that monopolies in such industries are not as harmful
| as monopolies in other industries which have naturally low
| capital barriers where the anti-competitive forces are felt
| far more strongly by more market participants.
|
| When capital barriers are low and you are able to build a
| product which solves a problem 10x better than the
| competition within a specific niche, it comes as quite a
| shock when you cannot even find a single user willing to try
| your product for free. A product which is low capital to
| build can be very high capital to sell because you need an
| enormous marketing budget to even get one real user to try
| your product long enough to realize that it's 10x more
| efficient than what they're using now. Then there might be a
| ton of additional regulatory barriers standing in the way of
| a sale (esp. B2B). Massive chicken and egg problem. These
| kinds of situations where sale becomes a total bottleneck and
| stands in the way of delivering economic efficiency can make
| one feel that the economic pie must be shrinking fast.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| Yeah, I feel this! There"s so much of everything -- the central
| challenge (of software anyway) is not actually creating
| something new, it"s standing out from all the noise and the
| thousands of others doing the exact same thing.
|
| And increasingly all economic activity revolves around a
| handful of megacorps siphoning up all available money, with
| everyone else trying to insert themselves somehow into the
| siphoning process. Ideally "as a Service", ie by creating their
| own little siphon and attaching it onto their
| hos^H^H^Hcustomer.
|
| Not just software businesses either, but because everyone has
| been conditioned into spending half their waking time staring
| at their little screens, traditional businesses too are
| expected to have an online presence and so carry their share.
| dataf3l wrote:
| Perhaps offering people education, is a way to allow them to
| access those jobs you describe, perhaps education in robotics?
| idk, I think this take is kinda gloomy.
| vtashkov wrote:
| Oh, clever, you went for the most successful marketing in the
| history of mankind - selling socialism.
| jongjong wrote:
| It may sound like it but I didn't name a specific political
| solution. I believe that what we have now is a horrible form
| of crony corporate socialism-capitalism hybrid; it literally
| borrows the worst parts of all systems.
|
| I think capitalism based on a hard-money system with a small
| government with 0% income and sales taxes would be better
| than what we have now. Private moneys and cryptocurrencies
| would be allowed and encouraged (not having income or sales
| tax would greatly aid adoption IMO as it would remove the
| need for accounting for tax purposes). Import tariffs would
| be the only acceptable taxes.
|
| Given the current state of technology, I also think a
| communist or socialist system with some limited ownership
| rights (e.g. a family would be allowed to own the house they
| live in and a single small business) could work too.
| Corporations would be state-owned, passive shareholding would
| be outlawed.
|
| I think either approach would be way better than what we have
| now.
| cookiemonsieur wrote:
| People will tell you about product market fit but honestly, just
| enter a space that's already proven to generate revenue.
|
| Also don't be afraid to build "boring" software, many times this
| is what will bring the most steady revenue.
| neerajdotname2 wrote:
| 100% agree. That's why I'm building tools in crowded space. I'm
| building NeetoCal which is a calendly alternative and
| NeetoRecord which is a loom alternative. https://neeto.com/cal
| and https://neeto.com/record.
| te_chris wrote:
| Competing against luck by Clayton Christensen, how brands grow by
| Byron Sharp
| macco wrote:
| While I am not somebody who succeeded in the field of running a
| SAAS, I gave myself the same question.
|
| One answer (or better, one idea) I came up with, was to join a
| network marketing organization. While I am reluctant about this
| step, it would definitely pull me out of my comfort zone. And I
| think you can learn a lot sales wise in a network marketing
| organization.
|
| I would love to hear what others think of this.
| neerajdotname2 wrote:
| Market is saturated and it's getting increasingly hard to build
| sustainable software. One good thing is that the price of SaaS
| has gone up. That creates an opening for the folks who are good
| at execution. I'm betting on that.
|
| I'm out of new ideas so I'm competing on price and building tools
| in a crowded space like Calendly and Loom. https://neeto.com/cal
| and https://neeto.com/record.
| whitefang wrote:
| How are you finding customers in a space that is crowded?
|
| We are also in a space that is similarly croweded and having a
| tough time being seen.
| neerajdotname2 wrote:
| I'm finding customers by existing customers recommending
| space. I'm going hard an competing on price. It's not easy
| but I don't see any other way.
|
| The savings are enormous for our customers.
| https://neeto.com/neetocal/pricing-comparison
|
| Hence many folks are switching from Calendly to NeetoCal. And
| same with NeetoRecord. Lots of folks have switched from Loom.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Our SaaS is in a different space but we're attacking the
| problem in a similar way. Our competitive edge in regards
| to pricing is all our competitors are thousand plus member
| orgs that come with all the bloated inefficiencies of an
| enterprise org.
|
| We've identified that if we can produce a product that is
| 90% of what the competitors are doing and then charge at
| 30%, we can still make a killing because there are 10x
| fewer mouths to feed. Our main advantage in our space is
| that our customers "need" our software to run their
| business, so for them it's always going to be the cheapest
| option that gets the job done (ie. us).
| risyachka wrote:
| Market may be saturated, but 99.9% of all software and apps are
| unusable garbage.
|
| So there's a ton of opportunity here.
| neerajdotname2 wrote:
| I'm not sure about them being garbage but I do believe very
| strongly that existing SaaS software is way way wayyyy
| overpriced. So there is an opportunity to build a simple, low
| price software that does less but just works.
| ghaff wrote:
| Overpriced complaints always sets off alarm bells to me if
| it solves some real problem/people like it/etc. There are
| usually migration costs and "way overpriced" may still be a
| small slice of overall budgets.
| neerajdotname2 wrote:
| True. For some companies that price is not enough to move
| the needle. For some companies it will be. Calendly is
| worth 4B at this time. If I could move 1% of their
| customers then that's worth it for me. Executing this
| won't be easy by there are way more than 1% of the people
| who will move to save cost.
| ozim wrote:
| Garbage as they mostly have too many features. You can do
| product with 30% of features and charge half their price.
|
| Maybe you will end up getting like 25% of their customers
| but if you play it well that is going to be worth still a
| lot.
| neerajdotname2 wrote:
| Excellent point. That's exactly what I'm betting on with
| https://neeto.com products.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| SaaS software is cheap already. Try doing those tasks with
| pen and paper, or with inadequate tools.
|
| If you're competing on price, you're usually competing for
| the worst customers. Good for them, but not so nice for
| you.
| conductr wrote:
| This is where I like to operate. My career is implementing
| ERP software. It's expensive and I notice clients really
| value about 10% of what it _can_ do. So I built an
| opinionated version of that, focusing on being the best at
| that 10% and keeping the features limited to just that
| versus the ERP approach which is a platform for all but a
| solution to none.
| neerajdotname2 wrote:
| Good one. I love this approach. Work somewhere. Find
| which part of the big software is most valuable and you
| can make a business out of it and run a small business.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > Market may be saturated, but 99.9% of all software and apps
| are unusable garbage.
|
| in terms of marketing the question is how you reach
| customers, and demonstrate to them that your software is not
| garbage unlike other within 5 sec of their attention span.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| https://www.neeto.com/pricing-philosophy
|
| Rather impressive, I must say.
| neerajdotname2 wrote:
| Thank you.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| The answer to every marketing question is 'it depends'. How to
| best market your product depends on your personality, skills,
| market, product, price point etc. No-one else can really tell you
| what will work for your product (a direct competitor might know,
| but they won't tell you). Try to learn some basic principals from
| blogs, videos, books, peer etc and then experiment.
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| impossible without a budget of $2-300/month
| cal85 wrote:
| I think the main battle is mindset. The willingness to be seen
| attempting to persuade others to buy your product or invest in
| you or whatever. A lot of people, including engineer types, have
| a deep aversion to this, which may remain unexamined even after
| they've consciously recognised they need to 'learn marketing and
| sales'.
|
| I suspect success in this area might be only 20% about learning
| practical methodology. The other 80% would be some kind of self-
| examination, then analysing and resolving whatever aversions you
| discover - or deciding on a different strategy such as teaming up
| with someone who is already comfortable with marketing/selling.
| jboggan wrote:
| I can agree with the self-examination as a major issue,
| speaking as a technical person trying to learn sales. I think
| the thing that attracts a lot of people to CS and tech is the
| idea of a right answer and that we don't have to socially
| appeal to anyone to be correct. You do the hard work and you
| get the right answer, the right number, the correct math proof,
| the code runs and the tests verify it, etc. It either works or
| it doesn't and you know when you're done.
|
| This attitude has served me poorly working inside of larger
| tech companies because I focused too much on doing excellent
| work and not enough time advertising my work to others,
| partially out of a revulsion towards being perceived as the
| type who self-advertises bad work to non-technical decision
| makers. It's the "build it and they will come" mindset and it's
| a hard thing to break.
| gsuuon wrote:
| I wonder if "build it and they will come" is just flat out
| wrong, or only correct for certain products? Is there
| anything one can "just build" now and expect some market
| adoption?
| dustingetz wrote:
| you need a coach, for both knowledge and accountability. Sales is
| hard, you're going to fuck up important calls and need to
| postmortem them correctly in order to improve and succeed. In the
| US a coach starts at about $300/hour (3-5 hours per month) for
| someone who is successful but not too successful. Which implies -
| I will state up front - you need to have some money. Otherwise,
| without a viable team in place with all the necessary skills to
| succeed, and/or a credible plan to rapidly acquire the skills you
| are missing, you are _gambling_ not investing and you will pay a
| much higher cost: failure, liquidation of your personal assets,
| and liquidation of multiple years of your life, with little to
| show for it at the end. Ask me how I know this. My company is
| working now but it took two tries, i.e. i liquidated myself
| _twice_ before beginning to see success. The first was the price
| of education. The second was the cost of identifying the right
| team. I was able to raise some money at this point.
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| Free advice: Be active on social media, build your online
| presence and expand your networking knots.
| treprinum wrote:
| Get admitted to online UIUC iMBA or BU OMBA, take the
| marketing/sales/entrepreneurship courses, quit.
| anonu wrote:
| Hire someone who knows and learn from them. Seriously.
| 0xEF wrote:
| There's a lot of great (and some remarkably bad) advice in the
| replies here, but one thing I can share from my two decades of
| having my hands in sales, engineering and service is that
| customers, regardless of they are B2B or private, are going to
| weigh your product on two things;
|
| 1. Does this solve a problem we have?
|
| 2. Can we afford it?
|
| That's it. There's no magic tricks or dark patterns to be
| exploited, contrary to what a variety of sales/marketing books
| might tell you (those books are selling you the books, nothing
| more).
|
| Here's a few easy things to remember:
|
| 1. Your customer has needs. Meet them or walk away before you
| waste valuable time and create resentment.
|
| 2. Your customer is a human that values honesty and wants to make
| an informed decision, so be prepared to give them the information
| they need to do so.
|
| If you go into a presentation knowing your product and knowing
| your customer's needs, there's really no other controls you can
| account for that will sway that deal one way or the other. So, do
| your homework. Use OSINT techniques to gather info on your
| customer, build a profile of what they already use, what their
| pain points are, etc and don't forget to just talk to them. Not
| every interaction has to result in a sale, in fact, most are
| fact-finding/info-gathering sessions for both parties, in my
| experience.
|
| Despite doing well for myself when I was operating in a sales
| capacity, I do not do sales much these days mostly because I
| prefer the troubleshooting and development side of the industry
| I'm in, but if you approach it with a Troubleshooting Mindset,
| you're better off. It sets you up to offer the right solution for
| the right problem if you think of your customer's
| workflow/processes as something to be studied so that it can be
| improved.
|
| I say this because I have met countless salesmen in my day that
| think they can human-hack their way to a deal because they
| watched Glengarry Glen Ross too many times, or read a Malcolm
| Gladwell book. They're the reason why we have a used car salesman
| stereotype and why movies like Wolf of Wall Street are made (that
| movie is not about a hero). Approach with caution any advice that
| a behavioral economist or anyone claiming to be a market expert
| offers; none of these people have crystal balls or mind-reading
| capabilities and they make money by convincing people they do.
| You're in a position where a lot of that might seem attractive
| and I was there once myself, going so far as to paying real money
| to attend a Tony Robbins seminar more than once when I was first
| starting out. It's all nonsense in the end, boiling down to
| getting yourself out there, building relationships with people,
| spiced with a bit of luck and privilege.
| acrooks wrote:
| I have a lot of experience with this. Happy to have a call to
| give you some tips - my email address is in my profile.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Can you give examples of things you've tried and failed?
|
| One thing I see often is that people forget that marketing begins
| before you even start building a product.
|
| Before you begin building anything you should know, who the
| product is for, and where those people hang out. Then as you're
| building you need to go to where those people hang out and start
| talking to them. That should be step one most of the time at
| least.
| jptoor wrote:
| Only things that have made a measurable impact for me - marketing
| is sales: 1. Mom Test - https://www.momtestbook.com/ 2. Do more
| sales calls + customer interviews. Then rewatch the call and
| debug what you're doing, saying. What is landing and not landing.
| I miss the majority of the signal while I'm on the call - I don't
| actually get anything from it until I rewatch/see how people
| react to different things I say. 3. Rinse, iterate, and repeat.
| Your goal is to solve a customer problem. How you describe it,
| market it, etc. depends on how a customer describes the problem,
| where they spend their time, when and how they find solutions to
| their problem.
| justmarc wrote:
| I really like the way you put it. It's a serious task that's
| often neglected, and certainly rarely practiced with such
| rigor.
| fosterfriends wrote:
| I strong second the Mom Test book. Was invaluable for me at
| Graphite ramping up to sales/marketing/validation
| flarion wrote:
| Hey! Team up w a PM or find a (paid) sales/BD mentor. Listen,
| Copy and Adapt. Talk 24/7 with customers and work on
| positioning/messaging.
| ulrischa wrote:
| I'm a solo founder myself, and here's what's worked for me so
| far:
|
| Start with the Basics: I spent some time wrapping my head around
| the fundamentals. Books like "Influence" by Cialdini, "Crossing
| the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore, and "The 22 Immutable Laws of
| Marketing" by Ries & Trout helped me get a grip on core concepts
| like positioning, target audiences, and the psychology behind
| persuasion.
|
| Focus on One Channel and Iterate: I learned the hard way that
| it's tempting to try every platform, but that's overwhelming--
| especially when you're solo. So I picked one channel that made
| sense for my audience (initially, email outreach and LinkedIn). I
| ran small experiments with subject lines, tone, calls-to-action,
| and watched what worked.
|
| Engage in Conversations, Not Sales Pitches: A big part of sales,
| I realized, is listening. I started hanging out in niche forums
| and Slack/Discord channels where my potential users might be,
| answering questions, and offering help. When people realize
| you're there to support them, not just push a product, it builds
| trust.
|
| Use Low-Cost Tools and Communities: Hacker News, indie hacker
| communities, and entrepreneur subreddits are goldmines for
| getting feedback on landing pages, pitch decks, or just your
| general marketing approach. I regularly post progress updates or
| ask for opinions--sometimes the feedback can sting, but it's
| invaluable.
|
| Document Everything: Whenever I tried a new marketing tactic--be
| it a cold outreach email or a small Twitter ad campaign--I noted
| my assumptions, what I did, and the results. Over time, I built
| up a playbook of what actually moves the needle for my audience.
|
| Build Real Relationships: Early on, I put a lot of effort into
| meaningful relationships--both with early customers and other
| solo founders. A quick Zoom call or a coffee chat can lead to
| referrals, partnerships, or just great insight. Honestly, it's
| usually more about genuine curiosity and a willingness to help
| than any formal pitch.
|
| Adopt a Continuous Learning Mindset: Marketing and sales tactics
| change quickly--algorithms, consumer behavior, best practices,
| all of it. I keep reading, trying, and asking questions. And I
| keep telling myself that every "No" is actually a "Not yet"--it's
| just data to improve my approach.
|
| That's how I've been tackling marketing and sales as a solo
| entrepreneur. Keep things simple, learn by doing, and stay
| genuinely curious about your customers. It's an ongoing process,
| but one that becomes more intuitive with each experiment. Good
| luck!
| screye wrote:
| How big is your targetable market ? How many customers would you
| have if you had a 100% monopoly. If the number is in the
| thousands or more, then you're best off trying and failing than
| getting it right from the start.
|
| Every company is unique. But at your scale, you can throw blind
| darts until something sticks. Most tiny companies do not require
| a principled approach to sales or marketing. You want to try
| proposing different price points, contract terms, outreach
| methods & channels. Keep each experiment small, fail fast and
| pivot.
|
| Once you gain a few customers, feedback & recommendation based
| organic growth is a good 2nd step. But, your first few wins can
| totally feel like a crap shoot.
|
| All that being said, the best products market themselves. A
| problem is only worth solving if it is immediately painful to
| company bottom line. Sales & marketing only works if the product
| alleviates such pain.
| pplonski86 wrote:
| I'm creating a desktop app, a Python editor designed for beginner
| data scientists. The biggest shift for me was changing how I talk
| about it. Instead of focusing on the app's features, I started
| talking about the benefits it gives users. For example, the app
| automatically installs Python and all the needed packages. I now
| describe this as: "Painless Python setup--install everything you
| need automatically." Thinking more about users and their problems
| has made a big difference in both marketing and sales.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| Getting it in front of the customer after it's built is too late.
|
| First find qualified PROSPECTS and ASK them what they want. In
| person.
| filiusmarcus wrote:
| I would imagine you would need to learn how to be a "Sales
| Engineer" on top of being a solopreneur. I've been one for a long
| time and put together an ebook that I would be more than happy to
| provide you with. All I ask is you give me your feedback on the
| content I put together. I'm working towards something else but
| created the ebook to see if it resonates.
| desmondwillow wrote:
| I'm feeling sales-curious myself as a currently rather
| technically-focused student. Find me at
| https://github.com/kartva/ and my email at sendtokartavya at
| gmail dot com.
|
| (I didn't see an email in your about so this is the best way I
| know to contact you)
| raintrees wrote:
| Richard Grove offers an online course called Autonomy that
| teaches these skills and more. Good course, I took it a few years
| ago. One of the topics is how to sell without being cringy, in my
| words.
| artembugara wrote:
| I'm a YC founder who did 0 to 2M ARR in founder led sales with
| absolutely 0 sales background. I'm basically a self-learned coder
| who had to take CEO role, therefore doing sales.
|
| I find this video about enterprise sales from Pete Koomen (YC
| Partner) to be the best summary:
|
| https://youtu.be/0fKYVl12VTA?si=mkP3SIWHiv2Ha3iT
| neom wrote:
| If you don't mind me asking, over what timeframe?
| artembugara wrote:
| About 18 months after very modest Seed round. We were first
| bootstrapped and it took a year to go to 300r ARR after we
| started working full time
| neom wrote:
| ~6.5X in ~18 months put you pretty near, getting into hyper
| growth, in my book (~350ish%>) - very good work. Keep it
| up, and good luck!
| cmdtab wrote:
| How did you reach out to your initial customers? Did you
| use any advertisement platform? Cold email? LinkedIn?
| Olshansky wrote:
| This is who I'm learning everything from right now: John Rush.
| 1. X account: https://x.com/johnrushx 2. Directory
| guide: https://johnrushx.substack.com/p/directory-playbook-build-
| grow-and
|
| I've been following him since 3K followers and his free X account
| is an absolute treasure trove of knowledge.
|
| I would start by going back and studying all of his threads.
| SeattleAltruist wrote:
| Here is a very practical, well-reviewed book for founders to get
| their first sale and then keep going:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/STARTUP-SALES-FIELD-NOTES-Methodology...
| higgins wrote:
| First off: you've got this! I'm sure lots of people on HN have
| felt this way (:hand-raised:)
|
| My approach is roughly: "getting out of my comfort zone" + repeat
| what worked and drop what doesn't.
|
| With a BIG caveat that this is all running off my own money, not
| investors. I get tempted by marketing/sales tools (eg: apollo.io,
| za-zu), vendor exhibitions, paid ads, etc but if I'm not fairly
| certain I'll get the $-spent back, I do the free/harder way first
| until I understand that system more. Dollars can give leverage,
| but aren't certain to.
|
| Also, publicly track the experiments you run as an accountability
| system (and doubles as a bit of marketing for your product)
|
| EG: Scroll down on 24HourHomepage.com to see a history of how
| I've thought about growing it roughly week over week
| mlboss wrote:
| Some tactical advice:
|
| - Search for online app directories like product hunt/indie
| hackers and put your app entry.
|
| - Search for relevant reddit forums, become a member, start
| answering questions related to your product and add a link at the
| end.
|
| - Same a last one. Add a post with lot of content of how to solve
| a problem that community faces and then add your product link.
|
| - On Twitter join the indiehackers/build in public community.
| Regularly post your updates/screenshots. Engage in community.
|
| - Write a ebook related to you domain. Create a landing page to
| collect email to deliver ebook. Mention how users can solve the
| problem by just using your app. Create ads to market the free
| ebook.
|
| - Split ebook into smaller tweets/reddit post and regularly post
| them.
|
| - Cold outreach to member on reddit community and ask for app
| review.
| pembrook wrote:
| This is advice for how to never build a big company and and
| just do the indiehacker thing building indiehacker tools for
| other indiehackers (which is fine!).
|
| But if you have bigger ambitions -- you might actually have to
| talk to humans and look into this weird thing called "sales"
| and this other weird thing called "human relationships."
|
| Remember, a vast vast majority of money paid for software and
| value to be created solving problems with software comes from
| organizations (businesses, governments, etc). Not consumers or
| other indiehackers, which are the folks you'll find using the
| playbook OP mentioned above. Indiehackers might sound like a
| fun customer base, but be aware they are also the people who
| will loudly complain "THREE DOLLARS A MONTH FOR THIS??" when
| you do your show HN post.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > But if you have bigger ambitions -- you might actually have
| to talk to humans and look into this weird thing called
| "sales."
|
| that's the step after sufficient revenue generated or funding
| received to hire ans scale sales team probably. But the
| question is for solo hacker at the beginning of the journey.
| pembrook wrote:
| It might amaze you to know there are thousands of $million
| revenue software companies that never posted on Reddit and
| never wasted months trying to pump a fake-successful launch
| on product hunt.
| riku_iki wrote:
| so, what is your suggested trajectory for solo hacker? Do
| cold "sales" calls?
|
| > there are thousands of $million revenue software
| companies that never posted on Reddit and never wasted
| months trying to pump a fake-successful launch on product
| hunt.
|
| do you have a chance to give some ideas how did you
| collect such insights? How did you find there are
| thousands companies which never posted, etc, and how they
| found first customers?
| mlboss wrote:
| You need to crawl, walk and then run. I would argue that
| talking to users on reddit/twitter is also selling. If you
| cannot sell a $3 dollar widget then selling a $1000 widget is
| even more difficult. Enterprise sales has a long sales cycle
| which is very difficult to do without significant runway.
| pembrook wrote:
| In fact it's far easier to sell ten $1000/m subscriptions
| than it is to sell 3,333 $3/m subscriptions (the
| equivalent).
|
| But you don't learn this until after you've tried the
| latter.
| jsk2600 wrote:
| Also, it's usually far easier to support ten customers vs
| 3,333.
| aimanbenbaha wrote:
| I would like to add Programmatic SEO and doing Organic TikTok /
| Reels if you're in the B2C space. These things compound fast
| and don't take as much time as long term SEO and can be as
| effective as paid media with luck and persistence.
|
| Of course it'll not be easy so expect to put in effort and
| reps.
| levocardia wrote:
| >- Search for relevant reddit forums, become a member, start
| answering questions related to your product and add a link at
| the end.
|
| Please stop doing this, it's painfully obvious and it's ruining
| the internet.
| bluGill wrote:
| That depends. If you are just saying "use my product" that
| ruins the internet. However if you give detailed helpful
| responses to questions in general that can be helpful.
| theendisney4 wrote:
| You can be as dishonest or helpful as you want. Back when
| google did organic ranking a lot of communities thrived on
| forum signatures. If you have thousands of helpful posts
| others know your level of expertise.
| collin128 wrote:
| Sales is hard because it's less about building and more about
| listening. You need to figure out what customers actually need
| and that starts with talking to them directly. Here's a framework
| I use, based on the Customer Development Ladder I wrote about in
| my upcoming book. It breaks down the process of learning about
| customers into four kinds of interviews. Each interview takes you
| one step closer to a sales call and the last step invites them
| into a sales process.
|
| 1. Exploratory Customer Development - Start with broad
| conversations. Reach out to potential customers and ask them
| about their world: their challenges, goals, and frustrations.
| Don't pitch your idea, just listen. The goal is to uncover
| problems worth solving.
|
| 2. Focused Customer Development - Once you notice a pattern in
| the problems people describe, you want to make sure it's shared
| by a wide subset of customers.
|
| 3. Paper Feedback Demo - Before building anything new, create a
| low-fidelity prototype (mock-ups, sketches, or slides) of how you
| might solve the problem. Share it with prospects and get their
| feedback.
|
| 4. Real Feedback Demo - When you have a working version of your
| product, test it with those same prospects and ask for feedback.
| The goal is to see if the thing actually solves their pain. If it
| does, you can invite them into a sales process. "Looks like it
| might help, can we set up some time to explore what it would look
| like to implement at your company?"
|
| This approach isn't magic but it works. The best part is that it
| teaches you how to find customers and what messaging will
| resonate with them. Resources like The Mom Test by Rob
| Fitzpatrick are great for learning how to have these
| conversations without bias.
| coreyrab wrote:
| Opposite side of the same question, but how can I better approach
| solo devs to help with marketing? I have led marketing at several
| startups/companies (3 acquisitions, 1 current unicorn, and 1
| public company). Most developers are rightfully cautious bc of
| being either burned by marketing types in the past or just don't
| like the overall vibe (I don't blame them). I work best 1-on-1
| with a builders and would like to do this more to get out of the
| bureaucracy of larger companies, but have mostly spun my wheels.
| EGreg wrote:
| For sales you do yourself, I highly recommend just listening in
| on the free stuff by Jeremy Miner and other "new sales gurus"
| that talk about "building the gap" as the main thing to focus on,
| rather than selling your product. I just like Jeremy Miner for
| his additional emphasis on the "tonality" over the phone.
|
| Having said that, consider just getting salespeople who would
| work on commission. The good ones would do it, if you have a
| high-ticket item.
|
| Now, when it comes to sales at scale, through webinars and
| courses etc, there's a whole other science to _group psychology_.
| As someone who built the "Groups" app for the app stores, and
| working on CRMs and building community platforms with my open-
| source platform, I can write a whole book about it. I'm going to
| make a course, actually. But the basics are:
|
| 1) Whenever you are at events, focus on effortless and fun
| communication, showing off the unique things your stuff can do,
| but never overtly selling it. The best is if you could make a
| _group activity_ facilitated by your app, by involving everyone
| scanning the QR code and getting into your demo thing on your
| webpage. Just make the onboarding easy (e.g. scan QR code)
|
| Anything that involves friction, do 1 on 1 (e.g. private chat)
| and put all the structural stress on a third party (e.g. some
| onboarding process, or your app, or someone who gave you the
| questions to ask, or whatever)
|
| 2) Once people have made a commitment or purchase, invite them in
| a group chat (social proof)
|
| ... make it exclusive and valuable access, for both networking
| opportunities and content, and access to celebrities you bring,
| access to recordings, and ability to show off the access by
| bringing a +2 to events
|
| 3) Use social proof (e.g. when asking them to do an action, show
| actions others like them have taken, with their faces / results)
|
| 4) Control the messaging (e.g. if they leave a positive
| testimonial, make it easy for them to spread it, but if they
| leave a bad review, route it to a support team internally and
| don't make it easy to share it publicly)
|
| 5) Economics: reward them with credits every time someone follows
| their link / comes through their video etc. The credits can even
| be something like 10% of whatever the people they bring in spend
|
| Don't think in terms of money only. For example, if someone
| brings a Twitter celebrity, you can have the celebrity auth with
| twitter and get their follower count. And then that is a valuable
| thing in and of itself, so you should scale the rewards both the
| celebrity and the person who brought them. Make this clear to
| your community. But it's only valuable if your app has
| integration with at least Twitter intents, allowing this
| celebrity to keep posting stuff on their channel, which links
| back to the app. Make every invite link unique so you can track
| and reward the one who posted it when people who come through the
| link make a purchase.
|
| Group psychology opens up a whole set of interesting
| possibilities, up to an including starting an entire movement or
| viral brand. Look up the video "leadership lessons from the
| dancing guy" to get an idea of what's possible.
|
| I could go on and on, but "group psychology" is a huge subject
| and a lot more fun, in my opinion, than trying to hack the sales
| with 1 on 1 prospects. But having said that, current state of the
| art in sales is the 1 on 1 thing. So just have salespeople who do
| that on commission, and their goal is to get prospects to buy
| something or book something (setters) and then you verify it and
| put them into a larger group... and do the group psychology.
|
| You can have recurring memberships and much more.
|
| You can train AI agents to essentially do the "sales calls" but
| they won't be very good at the "tonality" part.
|
| In terms of what you offer:
|
| 1) you should have what's called a value ladder, which is that
| you keep delivering things to them of increasing value, while
| they keep increasing the amount of money. ideally have a way to
| deliver free and customized value first ... but them using that
| thing gets them invested (entering data, spending time, inviting
| friends, are all forms of non-monetary investment)
|
| During the initial call you can also have them authorize $1 for
| some small demo, make sure to explain to them that's all you're
| going to charge, until they actively indicate that they want to
| start. Then the goal is to get them to invest so much "non-
| monetary" stuff above, that they don't want to "lose all that
| investment" and they'll actively agree to a recurring
| subscription to "maintain it". Just like you'd pay to continue
| your hosting or email service.
|
| 2) do "consultative sales", in that you walk through what your
| customers need, and then produce a "statement of work" for them.
| Whenever you set up the next call, always ask "same time next
| week?" and "until then, I will have the team prepare the
| proposal" and ask for their email.
|
| Encourage them to bring other decision makers on the call (this
| is a form of investment and preventing objections from people
| behind the scenes).
|
| The "same time next week?" is a good default question if you
| don't have their calendly, and also allows your prospects to fill
| a certain "weekly time slot" until they are closed and become
| customers, and are handed off to a case manager etc. It also
| allows your sales team to manage their calendars better. If
| people correct you and change the time to another that's fine
| too.
|
| The key in sales is to keep the conversation going and either
| anticipate or address all objections. Including the ones of
| "hidden decision makers". You can sort of get a sense of how
| important someone is by how much time they take to talk. If they
| don't talk very much they have a lot going on.
|
| 3) As long as you deliver something customized that "took a lot
| of effort", they will appreciate your text 24 hours before the
| next call, and they will make sure to get on the call (it's the
| "least they could do" after you did 90% of the work for free).
|
| 4) When discussing the cost, designing your statement of work,
| give people a choice of A, B or A+B in same time frame, so this
| way they can choose to pay the large A+B amount if they want it
| "fast" for the same price it would take doing it piecemeal.
|
| Meaning, never put them to a "yes" or a "no", but always a
| continuous trade-off, so they are likely to choose something on
| that curve. That is somewhere in your value ladder and once you
| get a foothold, the relationship grows, the trust and dependency
| grows, their stakeholders will be telling them to keep going with
| you.
|
| 5) my favorite hack: open a company specifically for the new
| product, and if your product still has bugs, offer your customers
| shares in your company in addition to the product (legally
| allowed under Rule 506b if there is a substantial pre-existing
| relationship, or through Test the Waters leading up to an
| upcoming crowdfund through Reg CF, e.g.
| https://wefunder.com/Qbix).
| sixhobbits wrote:
| There's a bunch of good advice and resources here but in the end
| sales and marketing is not that different from coding.
|
| To do it well, you have to do it a lot. And you're going to suck
| at it in the beginning.
|
| The good news is that if you're good at coding then you already
| know how to be persistent and self-critical and disciplined.
| You'll see what is working and what isn't and do more of the
| former and less of the latter until you get good.
|
| I know that's not particularly useful in terms of "how do I speed
| run this" but I think it's something that most devs don't want to
| fully grok.
| dboreham wrote:
| Interesting thread. Here's a story: long ago when I found myself
| running a bootstrapped startup, I worried that I didn't know what
| I was doing, business-wise. I had worked for, and knew, a guy who
| had become something of a business guru and VC and wealthy and
| successful. Everyone here has heard of him. I called him up and
| set out my situation and asked him how he recommended I should
| approach things. He listened and said something like "Oh dude,
| I'm out there on the ledge with you, I don't really know what to
| do most of the time." So I never worried about it again.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-03 23:00 UTC)