Until then I had spent too many years on a technically difficult consumer product. It had drained away my life force and my passion for coding.
In my case I decided my next product should be:
- B2B
- target SME's
- a simple CRUD app: a nice UI on top of a simple database schema.
It is a nice business to run. Pleasant customers, simple to maintain and support, and quite lucrative.
Here are some definitions of acronyms:
B2B: Business to business.
SME: Small and Medium Enterprise? Subject Matter Expert?
CRUD: Create Read Update Delete.
B2SMB: Business to Small Business?
CEO: Chief exec officer, SEO: search engine optimization, they have nothing to do with one another.
VC: venture capital
I'm not sure what SME means, that's why I posted this.
Out of 4000emails/calls, which were not pushy at all and focused on understanding their needs, no one ended up paying ($3.6k/y).
What do you do differently?
It was hard for me too. I happened to consult for a company where someone got fired and was disgruntled about it. They hadn't had all of their accounts closed and went and did damage. It occurred to me that this must be something a lot of companies struggle with and so I decided to try it out. I spent two months just writing and calling people before I felt confident enough that this was a real problem.
So try and think of places you have worked or the place where you work if such a place exists. What kind of time consuming and tedious processes do they have that could be optimized? Could you talk to someone there about that?
But seriously, I agree that this is the way to go. Add low fixed costs and you can have a very healthy, very profitable company. And if the business model scales reasonably well even a potential VC ready startup with the need for VCs. Can't think of a better strategy to become, and stay, my own boss.
I decided that I wanted to create something that
- was B2B. Consumers are fickle, things can explode but they can also go out of style just as fast. It's more sexy and makes for better smalltalk but my assessment is that they are much more difficult to grow predictably.
- targets SME's. I am somewhat extroverted for a developer, but I will never be the type who goes golfing with CEO's to close deals. Million-dollar deals is not my game, I will go for higher numbers of small ones.
- targets tech-savy businesses. Because I speak their language, I understand their needs and I stay in the loop of their world out of curiosity, not because I need to keep up with my industry.
The problem is neither hard nor easy, by the definitions of this article. It's deterministic; there's just a bunch of work to be done. I'm doing it. It's slowly evolving. This is definitely a reflection of me being 40 when I started it, it's somewhat boring but that suits me perfectly :-)