You know, I'm a builder. I like to build things. But a business isn't about building things, it's about selling things. You can build a real business with a terrible to mediocre product if you are great at selling it. You can't build a real business if you can't sell your product, no matter how good your product is.
The thing that will determine your success is sales and marketing, especially early in the business life.
That's why all successful business have 2 founders: the builder and the seller. Look at Apple, Woz built it, Jobs sold it. Microsoft: Gates built it, Ballmer sold it. etc.
There's also people who can extrapolate value by themselves. The most common examples being patio11, bdunn, nathanbarry, and crew. It's no secret they're going to delegate or outsource parts of their work that might not be immediately relevant, but that's just part of knowing how to delegate. That doesn't require a permanent cofounder.
I think there's something to be said about building something simple of value and selling the crap out of one idea.(Assuming you know the idea brings in some kind of value for customers)
This kind of thing is easier to do than people give themselves credit for. Half of the problem is just getting yourself to practice it. You'll fail a few times, it comes with the territory. You might be more comfortable doing freelancing and transitioning to product, but both can be done.
That being said: business is of course significantly easier with help. It can be hard to bring someone on board without at least putting in the initial effort if you were going to do it by yourself anyway though. So it's a really good thing to attempt regardless.
But if you embrace that you like to build things... you can sell and market - they are different aspects of what you want to build... to say you're a builder therefore you can't sell is incorrect... perhaps you're a programmer who only likes to program or mechanic that only likes to work on engines... but if you like to build... then it doesn't matter what it is you're building... websites, databases, markets, or sales... it's all building.
Half of the battle is picking up the phone. I think the main problem is coming up with a problem you're both passionate about and that provides value to customers. You can learn sales as you go.
The best salesman are the ones who don't know how to say no. I think the self defeatist mentality of "I'm not a salesman" is the core problem. You're a salesman if you call yourself one. The main reason being: You're the first person who said yes. Your next job is to do what every other sales person has to do: stomach a no answer, learn from your mistakes, and iterate on your idea within reason of making sales.
Validation is apart of the sales process as well.
I had the same experience when I graduated and worked as an engineer. Ended up deciding that I'd learn the business side myself and do an MBA. Now I see the other side of the page, lots of business students who want to start something up but can't make a product.
If you want to commercialize go find someone who's as passionate about business as you are about the engineering and you'll have a much better chance
I am looking for an RC that I can control through WIFI. In other words, I want to be able to control an RC remotely through the internet (with a webcam, of course). Is this what you offer?
The biggest problem here is your product. Why would anyone want a self driving RC car? The whole point/fun of an RC car is driving it yourself. Why do you think a market actually exists here? I don't quite get it.
Oh you mean like arduino? The very thing that he is using to create this? He has so far achieved less than I did in a high school tech class 20 years ago (and kids do far better in high schools today) and he wants some kind of funding? are you kidding? Forget the piss poor presentation. There is no product. Not even a virtual prototype of what he hopes to accomplish. I sure hope that he doesn't quit his day job over this.
Whenever I see these slideshare links, I never get anything out of them. Without hearing the actual audio or text that goes along with the slides, they're not really useful to me. Anyone else have this issue?
Not really. Even this deck (which is clearly one that suffers from not having the full material) I still found it easy to get the general gist of the presentation in just a few minutes from clicking through the slides. Obviously I'd be able to get a lot more out of them if they were annotated with the full content, but I still found them useful on their own.
Just a bit of warning for anyone on a data-limited mobile plan: that's one spare hour and the better part of a GB (for the not-so-HD version of the video). You may want to watch this one wired.
(This is not a flame or anything just my subjective impression. I know the people who built this (well 2 of them) personally. So forgive me guys)
I was asking a few times how things were going and that I could need something that sounds like what they were building -- granted on a very informal level but still I asked and expressed my interested.
Problem was: They never came back to me and told me: Hey here's the stuff! Wanna try?
I can make up reasons why, maybe because I moved to another country to take a job, or after all they don't like me or whatever. To me it boils down to: I (as in "the potential customer") was asking how far the product was and never got a real answer.
My team has about 2000 Boxes to "operate"[1] and I manage only a single team. Totaling to about 100K servers with different DCs spread over the world.
I'd think anybody who gets this kind of offer should try to get a foot in the door. Even if the deal doesn't close people have heard about the stuff.
So the essence is to me: This one little slide where you see that sales/marketing was way under represented in the team. Hell guys I know! you can build stuff, but don't expect me (the customer) to keep asking and asking and asking for wether or not it suits you to send me something I can work with...
[1]: I currently live in an enterprise environment where DevOps or agile is still something new and not to be trusted!
Author here - thanks for the comment (and please don't worry about sharing stories, its true after all!)
This was a big problem/mistake we made back then (and which isn't obvious from the slides) - we just didn't let people try the product, since we didn't want to be a hosting company ourselves.
We did show demos to people and did pilots in a few cases, but it would have benefited us a lot to have a public installation where people could have tried out the product.
I'm sorry we didn't get to work together then - there was certainly a lot of interest that we managed (and filtered through) poorly.
Here is my take after reading the slides from a student perspective. If we put more resource on marketing would it mean at some point we will oversell our service? In other words, we can only handle 100 users but now 120 users because of the good marketing? Then we have to hire more people (but that takes time too) to make the system more robust (from both deops and software engineering). That's a problem, isn't it?
Would it be okay to say a startup should have a good estimate of how many users they can handle at each cycle?
Capacity planning is a good exercise, but the brutal truth of the matter is that the most common scaling problem of startups is to have no scaling problems at all.
Especially with B2B startups. I could point to a client or two which had "We're having trouble holding on to the rocket ship" at some points along their growth curve. The far more common outcome, though, is to be rate limited on customer acquisition.
If you ever are in the position where you have 120 people champing at the bit to buy your stuff but can only service 100, great, there exist easy solutions to that.
The easiest is a variant on Raise Prices. For example, back in the day when Slicehost was rate-limited on the number of boxes Dell would let them put on their personal credit cards per month, and they had a substantial waiting list, they let people bid their way to the top of the waiting list by using non-refundable pre-pay for service. If you pre-paid for 6 months, you leapt ahead on the queue in front of those only willing to pre-pay for 3. This let them convert pre-paid cash into boxes, allowing them to onboard the entire wait list within 2 months of instituting the policy.
That's the very definition of a good problem to have.
It's much easier to over-estimate your potential success (and worry about it) than to under-estimate it and find you've done a bunch of work that was a waste of time. I've worked on features where I've over-thought them and designed them to limit the negative effects of being over-used, only to find that the real challenge is getting anyone to try them at all.
Fear of overselling could kill your company - it puts a brake on everything you do. Even worse, it gives you the perfect excuse not to market your product to the max, and human nature means you'll actually market it close to the minimum.
My philosophy is to ask "will it scale?" for every part of your business. EVERY step - including sales, support and things like invoicing too. This adds surprisingly little overhead, but if Jon Stewart mentions your product on The Daily Show, you'll be popping champagne corks instead of blood vessels.
On the platform side, services like Appengine make this easy. But you need to have plans in place to scale support, sales and everything else.
Rather than asking "will it scale?", I suggest asking "could it scale?". There's no point in doing up-front work to make something scalable if you don't know if it will be needed, but it's also important not to design features that absolutely could not scale under any circumstances. If you can think to yourself "if I need to scale this, I've got a rough idea of how I would do it" you'll probably be fine. And if not... once again, not being able to scale fast enough is a great problem to have (telling an investor "I don't have time to talk to you, our server's can't keep up with all of our new signups" is a great pitch).
Yeah - I'm not 100% happy with it either. Initially I had Exploration, which is really what I mean (you open up the floodgates and look quickly at a lot of different ideas, before zooming in on one).
But that sounded kind of quirky/confusing when used for comparing it with Execution, as in Execution vs Exploration.
And after all, Ideation is also a valid word to use in this context.
The thing that will determine your success is sales and marketing, especially early in the business life.