Regarding the business model: You ever thought of a Franchise model? Perhaps train a few folks (perhaps folks who were incorrectly greasing before) who can then take contracts for the large job sites?
I have seen this practice with diamond coring machines of companies like Hilti in markets like Dubai (building contractors don't need the machine , they just need the holes they cut and they don't need it everyday) where folks but the coring machines and then charge per hole (per Zerk in your case) and Hilti provides training to them.
Regarding the segment: If incorrect greasing leads to machinery failure, then perhaps look at operations where machine failure can be mission critical. Sites like Baffin Island, where large contractors' maintenance plan is "buy 10 of each machine" If one breaks down, they just park it and put the next one into service. OR Offshore Platforms where downtime can mean several millions down the pipe. Example projects offshore in Guyana where replacements are not available onshore too.
We are exploring the franchise model, one of our customers has a contract to manage the greasing for 18k zerks at a number of different sites. They want GreaseBoss to drive their manaul greasing business, they can reduce head count and reduce admin overhead.
I used to go to Papua New Guinean gold mines and the use case of not being able to get a spare part for months is very real. These are the early adoptor operations we are targeting
Modern day [public transport could use this in spaeds for morethan just greasing...
If you have maintenance RFIDs that alert to when action should be tacken BEFORE it has to be taken - you will instill confidence and reliabilaty into whatever system.
It would be wonderful if you open source access to your data regarding the frequency of maint to a vector of injuries/job loss/production downtime etc...
And provide the definitive source for how effective such a product is in whatever market.
The RFID gasket thingy you describe might well revolutionize the automotive market in general - but I would suggest focusing on getting those bitches into the giant CAT mining dumps post haste - heck, they spend $70,000 on a single tyre - so getting that readout on an engine might be bank.
Second that. HaaS is totally a thing in enterprise hardware, and I'd argue it's the one business model in hardware that sort of keeps everyone aligned!
For example, the recurring revenue gives the OEM incentives to continue supporting the platform. Meanwhile, the lower upfront cost for the hardware lowers switching cost for the customer in case there's a better solution out there.
OK, obviously there's a big gap between this theory and reality, but just thought that I'd point it out :)
Can share what we do at our startup. (8 people, 100 - 200 customers). We create a WhatsApp group for every customer and stay with them right from onboarding onwards.
Beauty of it is they sneeze, we know. Everyone in the team kinda knows what's important what's not. we can confidently say things like "nobody cares about that fancy feature". It super valuable for a startup to get immedeate feedback. Especially valuable has been knowing
- the first things the notice when they start using: where is sort? how do i add team members? do i have to prepay?
- feature requests: it's painful to keep closing windows, need the ability to adjust windows, I also want to do this other thing you guys havent thought of.
- Bugs: why am i seeing double messages.
Disadvantages are that some customers expect immedeate answers, unrealistic expectations. and its cringey to lay down the rules and set expectations every time. no matter how many times you do it.
Our take is its 80% good and 20% bad. As we grow the company, the idea is to keep doing this for a "representative sample of customers" . Customer feedback is gold. If you can setup some kind of process like this, its great.
From Businesses - small and large. Using the WhatsApp API. That alone is a multi-billion dollar opportunity.
For example, people like my startup (https://www.zoko.io) provides software that enable folks to run any business on (only) WhatsApp.
WhatsApp would make money by
- charging for certain types of messages sent via the API (already doing it)
- from ads on the WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram Platform that click directly to WhatsApp.(already doing it)
- enabling payments via WhatsApp Pay and then take a cut of the payments. (coming soon)
I am amazed by the things that my customers do with WhatsApp - like Fintech companies who provide loans to Uber drivers via WhatsApp, OR Fertility Clinics that dole out professional advice on how to make babies, via WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is just getting started! Remember when the internet was free, Google showed up and became a toll collector for doing anything on the internet? Just like that, WhatsApp is the internet of the #nextbillion people. WhatsApp, if they play their cards right, could become the "toll collector of the internet for the #nextbillion". I am literally all in, that it will.
That might be the case in your country... but in Latin America, for example, WhatsApp is HUGE. People don't text each other, they use WhatsApp. Mobile carriers provide plans with discounted traffic for WhatsApp, or sometimes even free. Entire family and friend groups constantly keep in touch using WhatsApp.
In fact, Bolsonaro used WhatsApp spam as part of his election campaign strategy[1].
In those United States, you would be right to think so. Yes, there are other chat apps. A flood? No. A (cess)pool, maybe.
Outside of WhatsApp (2 Billion Monthly Active Users), Messenger (1.4 Billion MAU) and WeChat (1.2 Billion MAU) the others stand little chance of building and benefiting from being a platform.
Setting aside WeChat and China, if you now look at the next billion users who are going to be using the internet for the first time, WhatsApp is the lens through which they see the internet - they communicate, consume news and entertainment, buy and sell things, get medical advice, even fall in love via WhatsApp.
In India, where a significant portion of that #nextbillion are gonna come from, Messenger has ~100M users and WhatsApp has ~500M MAU. Similar multiples play out in "WhatsApp first" markets like Latin America, most parts of Asia.
Case in Point: Even though it had nothing to do with our business, we recently helped hack together a solution to conduct two, 20-question, exams for 100K students in an Indian State. Simply because every family had WhatsApp (and nothing else). Messenger simply doesn't have the reach in the emerging world.
:-) Interesting to read many describe that feeling you get when you read Chekhov. A Russian friend once told me it is тоска (toska) - an unbearable, inescapable anguish - "Really you have to be Russian to understand it. toska is rent for being Russian. More Vodka?"
I don’t remember the exact quote, but I think it was Fr Seraphim Rose that said Russian people don’t know what the word “fun” is. They don’t understand “fun” as a general sense or feeling of ease / levity.
I don’t know if this is accurate but I asked some Russians what they like to do for fun and they didn’t actually understand. They asked if I meant hobbies and said they only have fun when they go out to a club or something.
The upshot is that hard people have the best dry humor.
There is a section in 'In the First Circle' by Solzhenitsyn where two prisoners argue about the etymology of 'fun' in Russian. I don't remember the quote off the top of my head right now, but one prisoner posed that'fun is derived from the word for "temporary lack of worry"'. Of course, the other prisoner disagreed with him so I don't know if that etymology is actually correct.
First of all, good job on launching! Hopefully you inspire many others here to take that all-important step.
Not a native english speaker. So take my advice with a grain of salt. Not sure if you actually meant "eccentric". I initially thought you were addressing a niche segment of folks who wanted eccentric (slightly strange) content on their blogs just to spice things up. For example content like this - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/utility-pole-surfaces would fit the description of content I would describe as "eccentric and delightful" content. If that's not what you meant, you can re-evaluate that main tagline.
Maybe put that line "Get Premium content on a budget" front and center. That's a great line!
Don't worry too much about getting the grammar right. Focus on putting it out in front of many people as possible. (like you have done here on Hacker News) Bracket feedback into 2 segments:
1. Feedback from paying customers.
2. Feedback from others.
Address the feedback from group 1 first.
Your's is not "a project that gives context to news through history" @$1.00 per month. If the market wants it, it should work at $1(+$0.30 +2.9%)per month also.
So just charge $1.49 per month and move on. Once you have a 1000 users, you can think about optimizing things.
Yes. not necessarily. Once you are able to observe active users, have paying users or even sizeable traffic to test conversions.
You can experiment to find out what that "right" or "best converting" price point would be.
"Free to start" may very well end up being the answer. Here are 2 examples one from pubilshing and one about starting with a price and using data to uncover insights about the "right" price. You will see the 30 cents is not the biggest problem you are going to have in pricing. :-)
That would be like car dealer asking "should I get a LOI before I let folks drive the new car." For a 7-day trial dont waste your time, or their's, on a LOI. LOI's are not worth the paper its written on.
A no commitment try-before-buy is almost always a great sales strategy for good software. Customers would have a hundred questions when they actually use your product. this is also a good opportunity to learn about how to sell to the next client by improving your sales pitch.
Not sure if your product is amenable to this, but one learning I would share is give a "shared account" for trial. for example the product could be branded in your name, other trialling companies could be using it at the same time etc.
say for example if you were sellling GMAIL, you would give them a 7-day free trial but they have to use an email and password you give them like username: test@gmail.com , password: test123 and other users will be logging in at the same time - trying sending and receving email, tagging mails, suggested replies etc.
I sell a product that allows customers to send messages via WhatsApp. I give them a shared account to play with as long as they like. but if they want a branded account , they have to pay upfront and only then i set it up.
back to the car analogy. Think of it like a demo car http://bit.ly/2ySHeTc . The client get a feel for the car but pays if they need one, all for themselves.
> I think sharing a bit of the technical side would help attract the people you're looking for. For example, sharing your technology stack would attract the people familiar with that stack.
Mostly React and NodeJS.
- Web app is MySQL, React, Redux and NodeJS
- Multiple micro services (REST) built on NodeJS and Spring Boot
- Other tech: RabbitMQ, WebSockets
> Also, if you share a block diagram of your process, even without going too much into details in case you're worried to be copied at this stage or something. Something like a box receiving a message, and another box processing the message and sending it to a "partner", that gives an idea on how this machine works might help. Heck it can help people think more abstractly and propose ideas to generalize that solution to address a different vertical than the one you're addressing right now.
Not at all worried about getting copied (lesson learned from YC Videos). A video is show here - https://www.zoko.io/zoko-sales . Question is what's the right business strategy/tactic to get to $100K a month? Continue to sell the product shown in the video or make an API that will enable partners to make the product show in the video.
Thank you for the pointers. Good point about "Zoko not using Zoko" :-) Will change that before teh end of the month.
>Where is that from? I found a Medium post with dubious "stats". Maybe include testimonials in text and video?
The stat is from a widely quoted Forrester study.
Interestingly the website was built in a day using a free service called WIX. We dont have much difficulty convincing clients. Our paying clients may have actually seen our website in passing. Most of the selling is by getting clients via facebok and linkedin ads and demos scheduled via Skype/hangouts/anydesk/zoom etc.
Probably had 4 people reach out to us by the website in 4 months. its been kind of ignored till now.
> The stat is from a widely quoted Forrester study.
Then I think properly quoting that with a reference link to the report. People might not read it, but they'd at least know they could. As much as I don't like the 50 billion IoT by 2020 figure, a link would help me.
> Probably had 4 people reach out to us by the website in 4 months. its been kind of ignored till now.
The site is ignored because it hasn't been converting or is it not converting because it has been ignored?
I'd like videos that explain different ways I could use the products. Say I'm a shop owner, what exactly can it do for me. What's the problem it solves and how? You can get such a video for a few hundred bucks.
Resources on how to set things up.
An example application for developers.
One of the things we insist on in our own product: a dev must be able to extend the application in less than 5 minutes, a user can go through an example in one minute. All the products we shipped where we ignored this sold because they solved but sucked. We're shooting for self discoverable functionality next. It's painful to see a user struggle to accomplish something. Have you shown the site to shop owners and devs and observed them?
EDIT:
How would you take me from now to paying customer? How do I give you money?
Also, a counter on your front page on the amount of sales that went through your products would speak volumes and give you a nice KPI to track. Total dollar value, number of customers served, number of clients, average per client, average purchase amount.
A nice dashboard that tells you things, and help you guide this turning knobs (optimize for number of customers or average purchase price?)
If you can add endpoints for such stats for clients to tap into, generate reports, use with other BI tools, to help them steer their business.
Something to help them get an idea on their Net Promoter Score and then the backend to run language processing on messages and display what customers liked and disliked in a tree map. I.e: 60 percent of your customers are detractors, 40 % of these disliked the interface, etc.
Thanks for the pointers on the shortcomings of the website. Have added them to my long list of to-do improvements to the website.
> How would you take me from now to paying customer? How do I give you money?
- Customers start an an incoming lead from linkedin ads or facebook ads.
- Then a phone call letting them talk and me asking a lot of questions about the problems they face using WhatsApp for business today.
- Then I show them a screen share demo and touch on their problems and how the product solves it.
- Followed by a signing an order form (word file)
- We then setup their accounts and send a precomposed email with links to the API, API key and access details to the web app.
- Also start a whatsapp group so they can ask and get immideate help in integration.
- Billing starts 7 days after API key receipt. All fees paid upfront and all usage through upfront purchase of credits. We have setup stripe in the billing section of the web app.
Maybe you can flesh out that scenario on the website to explain the process to a prospect. Putting a video out there so you don't have to do the operation with each client (one video that shows how the product can solve the problem).
What's the need for signing the word file? Why do they need to sign it?
Can I as a prospect directly click on an icon on your website or scan a QR Code and start a WhatsApp/FB messenger with you?
Not sure where the icons are showing up. I had removed all such links. (forgot to mention its a 3 person team. me, cto and an entry level coder)
>Maybe you can flesh out that scenario on the website to explain the process to a prospect. Putting a video out there so you don't have to do the operation with each client (one video that shows how the product can solve the problem).
Maybe its an Indian thing but folks dont seem to read anything. They prefer to call me directly and then see a demo. I also like the call first, because I can quickly decide who will convert and who will not.
> What's the need for signing the word file? Why do they need to sign it?
Thats the contract. If there's no ink on paper we dont setup dedicated accounts. Most of the work is manual for setting up accounts, linking numbers, setting up template messages etc. So unless its a customer who is ready to commit for a year, the coders dont even hear about them.
> Can I as a prospect directly click on an icon on your website or scan a QR Code and start a WhatsApp/FB messenger with you?
Not self serve right now. Once you sign a contract, you get a demo account (still shared with other clients). you get an email with access information so that you can start playing with a shared demo account and also play with the API, while we setup the accounts.
>Not sure where the icons are showing up. I had removed all such links. (forgot to mention its a 3 person team. me, cto and an entry level coder)
They don't appear on mobile, only on desktop. Must be a media queries issue.
>Maybe its an Indian thing but folks dont seem to read anything. They prefer to call me directly and then see a demo. I also like the call first, because I can quickly decide who will convert and who will not.
A prospect who has to call you cannot buy when you sleep.
I'd treat prospects calls not as a preference, but as a symptom of the product's ambiguity. This is problematic.
I do not understand your product because there's no real clear, concise, complete, and correct description of your product. In that case, there's a choice to make between complete ambiguity on one hand, and calling you on the other. We shouldn't conclude that I'm calling you because I prefer to call. I'm calling you because the product's description is not doing the job it's supposed to do, you are doing its job.
Instead of having customers call you and conclude that they prefer calling you, can we ask ourselves about what their alternatives to calling you are? Reading? They don't. Why? "People don't read". Maybe, but do they not read because it's an intrinsic human behavior, or because the product's copy and description sucks? We don't know until we fix the copy.
In this case, you have become the bottleneck because there's only so many calls you can answer, and so many hours you can work and describe the product.
I'd say you have a hypothesis about people not reading. Can you test your hypothesis by fixing the links of the icons to point to your facebook and twitter pages, and add a product description.
Did you have users open your website and observe them and talked to them while they're trying to make sense of what you're selling. Did they understand what your product does from your website or did they look puzzled? What can be done to fix that and put a ton of lubricant to the pipeline.
>If there's no ink on paper we dont setup dedicated accounts.
Why not?
>Most of the work is manual for setting up accounts, linking numbers, setting up template messages etc.
Why is the work manual? Why do you have to set up template messages? Can the customers set up their own template messages? Can you propose the most common template messages and offer them so a customer can have their basic needs met by default? What exactly is the manual part of the work?
>So unless its a customer who is ready to commit for a year, the coders dont even hear about them.
Why are the "coders" involved when a new customer is signed? What are they doing when a customer is signed? What can be automated? How are you spinning up new accounts? What inefficiencies have made it like that?
Prospect lands on your website. Prospect reads your product's description, or watches a video. Prospect can click on the pricing page. Maybe you offer a free-tier or a trial period. Prospect signs up for a free-tier account with limited functionality and is now a user. User likes product and induced demand kicks in. User can click to upgrade their account in exchange for a monthly fee or per interaction simply by going to billing and pulling out a credit card or something. User can set recurrent billing.
Anytime you or the "coders" have to intervene, I'd see that as an inefficiency that has to be cleared.
Work Rules by Lazlo Bock may give you some good insights. It references a rigorous study by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter. The gist of it is that the 3 best indicators of on-the-job performance is a work sample test, general cognitive ability tests and structured interviews.
If leadership quality is something you wanna test for, you just have to design the questions in that manner - for example ask about how she handled professional failure in the past, ask her to give you some tips to motivate subordinates, to teach you something you dont know, even its a fun fact, like turtles breath through their bottoms.
As for your concern that "most people would have read about these sort of questions and come up with some template answers". You could flush their prepared answers by asking the candidate to give you a 10 second summary of their answer first, then ask them to give another example in a 10 second summary. After they have exhausted their "template answers", ask them to take their time to give you an example other than these 2. Give them ample time. Don't bully them or put them under pressure, work with them to elicit another example and dive deep in a collaborative manner. for example with "why did you think at that time, this was the right approach", "I messed up recently by doing xxx, how do you think I could have handled it better". (Don't do this for all your Behavioral Questions. Pick the last question especially if the candidate is performing well)
End of the day most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313878823_The_impor...). I cant find the reference for my life, but I think it was Google (or Amazon) that found out that given the same structured interview process, some people were better than others in selecting great teammates that performed well on-the-job. The key is to encourage these type of interviewers to do more interviews.
Regarding the business model: You ever thought of a Franchise model? Perhaps train a few folks (perhaps folks who were incorrectly greasing before) who can then take contracts for the large job sites?
I have seen this practice with diamond coring machines of companies like Hilti in markets like Dubai (building contractors don't need the machine , they just need the holes they cut and they don't need it everyday) where folks but the coring machines and then charge per hole (per Zerk in your case) and Hilti provides training to them.
Regarding the segment: If incorrect greasing leads to machinery failure, then perhaps look at operations where machine failure can be mission critical. Sites like Baffin Island, where large contractors' maintenance plan is "buy 10 of each machine" If one breaks down, they just park it and put the next one into service. OR Offshore Platforms where downtime can mean several millions down the pipe. Example projects offshore in Guyana where replacements are not available onshore too.