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A comment on Sales mistakes that software engineers make. Parent comment

Re:Sales mistakes that software engineers make by lbotos on Thursday November 01, 2018 @12:10PM (#18355413)
A few years ago I wanted to make a niche marketplace to sell/trade tabletop miniatures. Instead of actually building the thing, I made a few mockup interfaces pages, and then just made a responsive HTML page. None of the buttons actually worked. I then put a modal that said "launching soon, sign up now for news and a special bonus on launch".

I spent $100 on ads on reddit and targeted forums with the goal to get 100 emails. If I got 100 emails, I would actually try and build the thing.

I got ~57.

You can market very far without anything that works. This is the "growth hack/MVP" mindset. I saved myself weeks of programming which would have been fun, but arguably a waste to building that specific business.

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Re:Sales mistakes that software engineers make by Baeocystin on Thursday November 01, 2018 @02:32PM (#18356978)
How did you determine if that 100 email cutoff you set is reasonable or not? Honest question.
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Re:Sales mistakes that software engineers make by lbotos on Thursday November 01, 2018 @03:02PM (#18357279)
I knew it was a small niche market, and I set it as really a "reasonable" goal.

"If 100 people in 30 days are interested with this ad spend, then I'll reach out engage them and build the thing."

Depending on your app/market, you can change that number accordingly, but I think 100 is just a great "feel good" number thats hard enough to hit as evidenced by my test.

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