Then you have a different problem - you don't have a way to reach target customers.
Even if you build your product, how are you going to build a sales pipeline? Your customers won't hear about your product by themselves - you have to get it to them. Many many companies make products that are good, are actually useful, but they don't know how to build the marketing/sales pipeline that will actually make their products profitable.
And just like validating the product to build - building/validating a sales strategy is usually something you should do before building the product, both because it's harder, and because findings there may change what product you end up building.
Right now I have an MVP of a function as a service platform; a general purpose development tool. I'm thinking meetups are the best bet, just to meet people, ask questions, and listen to pain points. But that alone is a skill set that needs to be cultivated; asking the right questions, not coming off as pushy, being self confident, and finding the right events.
The nice thing is that presentations shine a spotlight on you, and then potential customers will come to you rather than you having to go to them. Eventually you will need to do the latter, but your first customers are likely to be people in the crowd watching your presentations or their friends. When you do start having to go find more customers, you will have a much better idea who to target as well and have at least a small network to utilize.
Has that ever worked? I'm not on LinkedIn, yet somehow companies still find my work email and I'm always getting emails from people about how there product is the best thing ever and can we set up a call, or there is a webinar, or can they come by. Oh, and did I not see their previous attempts to reach me? Yes, I saw them, but I've never responded to any of them from anyone. I just can't imagine cold-calling/emailing people actually works.
The best thing you can do is to make sure you appear high in the google rankings so that when I have a need and start searching for whom might be able to fill that need, you come up near the top.
I felt this way for the longest time. I hate cold calls. I hate making them, I hate recieving them. Everyone I've ever talked to claims to hate cold calls. Why do people still do this. Who the hell is buying from cold calls?
So I sat down with a couple of people from a sales team, and just asked them what they did. And apparently, a good chunk of their day is legitimately just cold-calls. (Literally through the phone book, or through LinkedIn, or tradeshow cold-stops, etc). While a cold call almost never translate into an instant sale, we can trace most sales back to a start from a cold call.
They don't sell pecan pies or double glazing either. Enterprise software at price tags over $100k/each, or custom development engagements at $100-300k. And it usually starts with a cold call.
So while it still sounds absolutely insane to me, multiple sales people have told me that cold calls work. And these folks regularly win deals and earn good commissions, so I tend to believe them.
Because we're wired the way you describe, unable to even imagine a world where one of those emails would ever get responded to, we miss the sorta obvious fact that, yes, they do work quite nicely.
People wired like normal don't have the same dread of unsolicited contact that we do. And those are the same people who end up as managers, bosses, business owners, etc. People who do the actual software purchasing in the world.
So yes, as impossible as it seems, those mails do work. And we need to send them.
I still find it hard to do. And I'm never anything but amazed when it works.
For what it's worth cold calling is a bit different than it used to be—at least in software sales. Today many companies take an account-based approach. This means that there is a good amount of qualification happening before the cold call. Does the account use Salesforce, Gmail, other key integrations? How much ARR are they doing?
If the account is a good match, then the reps will go through the organization on LinkedIn and try and find 3-5 key stakeholders. Who knows about the problems this software solves? Who can be an influencer? A decision maker? Those people are put on a cadence that involves several touch points—emails, calls, social mentions. Stuff like that.
By the time the first cold call is made there is a fair chance that the person on the other end is interested in the solution—or at least in hearing a potential one. Because the research has been done upfront and leads that don't match have been disqualified, this is much more effective than the power dialing.
Once the decision-maker position is knowable thanks to (a) + the subscription, it was quick to find a name to use to break into the fort so to speak via a “two-touch” method of email and cold calling. A sale at the end of the day begins with a conversation and a persistence in continuing the contact in order to accelerate a deal.
It’s important to note that presentation goes a very long way; it helps I write in my leisure and have a fastidiousness which shows off in my email templates. That’s where I think many cold callers fail: they are too urgent or come across as too unprofessional which registers as a sense of risk before the relationship can even begin.
Finally, everything involves iterating. I was able to comfortably deliver my sales pitch in under 10 seconds over the phone to some of the largest retail buyers in North America by crafting the message via answering the question: “what is it they need to hear?”
10 seconds is a lot of time, but not so much time that it will leave a bad taste in the customers mouth if they have no current interest. You are trying to help them, after all, and they should be able to receive that first impression no matter what.
But many categories, where you solve a common and easily described business need, it can work great. This is one if the best guidelines for designing a product to sell.
If it didn't work people wouldn't be doing it I presume. It probably works every now and then but it's good enough when the cost of doing it is low.
When does it work? When you reach someone who is actively looking for it.
For example, in the talk given by YC Partner Aaron Harris[0], suggests that cold e-mailing professional investors work when done right.
Perhaps you need to go to meetups with potential customers instead of other developers.
Are you aware of stackshare.io? It's not perfect for what you're asking - you have to search for specific tools rather than categories like NoSQL - but if I understand your goal correctly it seems like something that'd be useful to you.
Smells like a side project waiting to be built.
1. Make a list of companies & products that implement "serverless" or "NoSQL" or X.
2. There are plenty of tools that search websites to see what they're using. They tend to work better for frontend tech than back though. Sometimes backend tech is visible though. Here's a nice compiled list based off a quick Google Search - https://geekflare.com/what-technology-website-using/
3. Search job boards, industry forums, social media, chat channels (Slack/Gitter/etc), videos, online in general for any mention of those products. You'll get a list of companies using them. Forums, social media & chats will help you see what issues your users are having with them & allow you to build relationships without "cold calling".
I think this is why the average age of entrepreneurs skews higher...because you get more experience and connections on who to talk to and what questions to ask. And this is why serial entrepreneurs succeed.
If you think of it as a software product standpoint. Once you have a team to build out the entire stack, your next software product would be easier. But the time it takes to find your UI person, backend, mobile, etc...takes time.
My inner circle of professionals are developers. If I wanted some dev resources I could. But when I meet certain people for the first time who don't know a lot of devs, they look at me like a unicorn.
My wife runs a small business/franchise. We were hoping to use that as a stepping stone for future, bigger businesses. There are lots of small business associations around us, Chamber of Commerce, etc. They would have some resources if you want to network.
Search for job ads on angelist etc.. if a company is looking for a dev with NoSQL experience they probably are using NoSQL.
There isnt necessarily a 'right way' to do things.
I have received terrible advice from marketing/business people. Showing people my MVP was fine for some customers, but others didnt trust me based on a low quality landing page.
While I wanted to make everything perfect and add a feature before presenting it, I was pressured into showing people.
What I thought they'd say, they said. What I thought they wanted, they wanted.
3 years later, things are fine. I worry I created some skeptics that spread negativity(which I've seen).
There is something to be said about building your vision.
As a note/recommendation, don't be absolute in either. Ask for feedback from friends along the way.
I'm learning more and more that with many things in life, everything is a gray area. Trying to distill something as complex as success into a ruleset is impossible.
Your story about the MVP is what makes me nervous; it's good to hear that there is some wiggle room when it comes to the MVP impressing or flopping.
Not all of them are like that, but you get used to the overthinking approach most of the techies take so you expect some critique rather than some sort of defensive take on the matter.
The article suggests doing a search for potential companies, finding contacts on linkedin, and sending out some emails. But what about experimental technologies or developer tools? I wouldn't expect a lot of success with a slow moving Fortune 1000 company in my city, and there's no way to search "startups using x" for a generic technology, like serverless or NoSQL.
I have found a little success going to meetups and talking in person to other developers and entrepreneurs, so maybe I need to more aggressively take this route. The internet is too big/impersonal/oversaturated from what I can tell.
What would really be helpful as a software engineer is a guide on how to improve entrepreneurial networking, which has to be the foundation before tackling some of the techniques in this article.