If you haven't gotten started working on your business, what's been stopping you?
If you haven't gotten started working on your business, what's been stopping you?
#ask-ih
If you haven't gotten started working on your business, what's been stopping you?
#ask-ih
I've been in a constant cycle of coming up with an idea, finding too much competition (I know some is good, but not to the point you can't compete), trying to tweak the angle of the offer and finding too much competition again on that side. Then rinse and repeat again and again.
I'm really trying to make sure I have a good market to be able to reach out to, but man it's starting to drive me crazy.
You said " Finding to much competition ", what are you afraid off? Jet.com decided to compete with Amazon. They sold for millions. Google had 20 competitors when they started.
Starting with zero community contact and still learning the material, along with bootstrapping...I get what you're saying, but I'm new to the community and they already have a load of other solutions they are using that offer the same or more for around the same...
Maybe I could make some inroads eventually, or I could try to find a less crowded avenue. It's just harder and harder to find that avenue with so many solutions today.
A SaaS model with competition requires 98% less cash to reach product to market fit. Some VC backed startups waste $3-$4 million on product to market fit.
Again - I agree, having competitors is good :). Just if you have 20 sites already well marketed and not a lot of complaints offering even more features for less price than you were planning. Does it make sense to continue? I say no. Could you be 21 and maybe get some traction, sure.
But why not find a more under-served market where you can reach people that are looking for something better. Maybe that's just not easily possible anymore with so many sites. That certainly might be the case. That's just what I'm trying to do right now. It's not fun and it's very frustrating to do, but I don't want to build something and then try to reach people.
If I am permitted to say something here.
I don't think you should just enter any market space because it has way less competitors because you would most likely fail and discover it doesn't work that way.
Before going into any space you or your Co-founder must have a market domain expertise or a first hand experience on the problem you are trying to solve, must also have love, passion and interest in that market space.
Expertise/experience helps you figure out what to start and how while love, passion and interest helps you stay motivated from development to production going forward.
Cheers,
Joseph.
While I agree. It's just myself and my expertise is in development. And the boring kind of business development. Nothing new and exciting to capitalize on or things saas folks/etc would use and I'm not ready to sell to an enterprise.
So I need to branch out and just picking areas that seem to have a lot of tools needed. I need to pick my areas carefully since it's going to include a lot of learning and research upfront.
Have you diverted your attention a bit to the African market?
If "NO", are you willing to partner up on something we can discuss about?
I don't know anything about the African market. I would be interested and I'm sure others would to - why not write a blog post on it?
I'm not ready to partner with anyone simply because my available time is haphazard and I don't want to promise anything I can't deliver.
You can sometimes make a lot of the competition "disappear" by narrowing down your customer segment (or value prop). Let's say I'm thinking of making a language learning app. Uh oh, tons of great competition. But I can narrow down by figuring out how to help kids of a certain age with a certain learning disability to learn a language. Or I could look to build something for innovative charter schools instead of selling apps directly to consumers. Or I could pick one tiny element of language—phrasal verbs are especially tough for folks learning english—and focus on that.
It's not always doable (sometimes it leads you down a path which is just a small feature of someone else's existing platform), but sometimes you can pick out a burning issue for a narrower group of people which isn't being solved by the dominant "competitors".
If you want a more compete/academic argument for why (and how) small businesses can compete with the big ones, check out The Innovator's Dilemma book by Christensen. Sounds like you're fairly analytical, so maybe it gives you a helpful lens.
You make a very valid point. In a lot of areas that's how I've gone before. I made an ad server that had less features than free ad servers, but just made it easier to use. That worked out for awhile and made some good side money.
I simply may be looking at the wrong sector. I've been focusing on marketers and they seem to much more prefer fewer tools with more features. So they aren't looking for the specialized tool with feature x, they want the tool with feature x,y,z,etc all in one.
Oh man, I hear you and can totally relate to you. I feel that I "mast**bate on the future" of what could be instead of focusing on picking one idea, focusing on it, and getting my hands dirty.
I've had a pretty bad February, so glad March is here!
My family moved, lost all our critical documents along the way, became ill with some sort of stomach flu and both my wife and I are starting new jobs, and selling our house.
I need to keep pushing full blast like I have been trying to resolve all these problems and scenarios. Instead of relaxing when I used to be doing all the calling and paperwork filing, I need to start pushing on my business.
Minutes here and there count! If I can get one small task done each day then I'm making progress.
Yay March! (But beware the Ides)
If you're in too deep with life admin, sometimes the most productive thing for your future business is to first permit yourself to spend the time climbing fully free of the admin hole. Not always, of course. But if it's actively stressing you out, maybe worth clearing it first.
And good luck with it regardless. Sounds like you're coming out of a tough month.
I'm trying to make a physical product, so actually finding someone that can make the product for a decent price has been a massive hurdle, and finally the anxiety that the prospect of having to make sales generates, makes me not want to do it.
Since you're in London, I'd recommend reaching out to the folks at UCL. They have an incredible fabrication lab with insane equipment. They're often looking for real-world projects for their students to work on, so you can sometimes get a free maker that way.
And if this is important to you long-term, it might even be worth doing a part-time course there, purely for access to the equipment (and the people who know how to use it, which will also include yourself after the course).
Cheers, that's a great idea. It's a food and beverage product though so I need someone willing to join a couple ingredients for me. Still looking..
I'm guessing 95% + of this community is interested in the predominant themes of "taking action now" and the like. But some of us here are actually perhaps taking a different approach. So I'm sharing my point of view just to give perspective to the breadth of your audience.
I actually just updated my IH profile to exactly make this point. So I'm copy/pasting that here, as it's the same points I want to make.
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I joined Indie Hackers to explore the idea of self-employment or running a small business, but my timeline is really 10-15 years from now, and the effort is exploratory: I may do it, I may not, TBD.
I'm not in a hurry per se, but also, everyone's life situation is different. Some people are looking for something right away, either because they have to (lost a job, profoundly unhappy with current job, etc.), they have flexibility (if it doesn't work out, their day-to-day living costs are minimal or they have a really comfortable financial cushion), or they just identify with being an entrepreneur and can't bear the idea of just being an employee somewhere else.
For me, things are not so simple. For example, while I am interested conceptually in self-employment, I haven't concluded it's the right choice for me. Being in a big company offers you significant leverage: the value of a single action is magnified by having a great systems infrastructure, talented coworkers, a lot of problems already solved, etc. Thus, the marginal return can often increase rather than diminish, if you pick the right problems to work on. I find myself getting quite good at this style of work, so it's possible that my value is in fact maximized in large companies. I know this thought process is counter-intuitive to many, but my goal is to think as carefully about these things as possible.
I also think a lot of the writing and discussion of entrepreneurship is not nearly as high a signal/noise ratio as people may perceive to be. A lot of it is rife with survivorship bias, and people are generally really bad at explaining how success came about, which is multivariate to say the least.
What I do like about those writings and discussion are:
I just write this to make clear that everyone's perspective and approach is different, but it won't be obvious just from reading what I say or write, so by stating my position clearly and carefully, it can actually help people both understand me, and also provide a point of reference for people who share some of the same ideas that I do.
For me it's the fear of feeling overwhelmed if the idea works and I also have this little voice in my head saying that "nobody cares, they won't buy it anyway"
The joke is that I have already started a lot of businesses since I was in college even if this little voice told me not to.
Anyway #entrepreneurproblems
Every entrepreneur is overwhelmed when their biz starts to work. And every successful business has found a way to duct tape it together for long enough to get through that stage.
Yes, absolutely.
Courtland, is it really 70% of makers never market their creation to the level of a sustainable business? And what MRR is a sustainable business?
Stats like these are such garbage for making personal decisions because you aren't a population. You are an individual, and you're going to have a bunch of different stuff applying to you than the "average" whoever that was studied to make a cute number.
Everyone has there reason to build a hobby.
If that is true, 30% is pretty good isnt it?
Thats one way to look at it. But honestly Courtland your platform should school the engineers amoung us to balance out the newly created SaaS products with marketing/sales groups. Possibly mentoring threads, and often. Possibly marketing co-founder threads. Not just blogs about marketing as there are already a hundred thousand. But some real live human interaction to move the needle to convince engineers technology does not sell itself. And engineering is only 40% of a company. Furthermore, many SaaS founders build technology so simple, no customer would pay $29 a month or more for this value. And those who don't put in the effort, are really building a hobby, not a business. Maybe one wakeup call could be a vote by the audience, hobby/business. In this forum she tells founders when they have zero chance with their idea and this saves folks time and energy. https://1m1m.sramanamitra.com/free-public-roundtables/
This comment was deleted 7 years ago