I made a healthy 6-figures pa in the Mac App Store with zero marketing for 3-4 years when I first got into software. That was about timing and getting a few products right.
Plenty of stories like that. Just like there are plenty of stories where companies, say, had everything locked down but engineering and failed.
I've never met a successful entrepreneur who spoke in absolutes. To a person they've all admitted there's a lot of luck / timing / chaos involved.
I've met failed entrepreneurs with degrees and funding and plans -- people who on paper did everything right.
Can you provide some examples?
Their tech stack was custom built and primarily designed by a single developer. The company grew rapidly, but he kept all the institutional knowledge.
They were winning more streaming content, but couldn't promote it it launch it on time because their developer held the keys to the castle and all changes were funneled through him.
Unfortunately, the company couldn't grow at such a slow pace of development and the parent company shut them down with about a hundred people losing their jobs.
I'm in Silicon Valley and I see a lot of strange things, but I've never seen a business fail because of product performance or wrong choice of computer language or framework, but:
- Friendster did have significant site performance issues that may have contributed to it getting marginalized.
- Twitter routinely showed the "fail whale" until they got their act together.
- eBay was 30 days late in doing their Japanese version, which allowed Yahoo Auctions to dominate that country. (Their whole i18n situation was a fiasco with parallel US and non-US code bases and url-based locale setting.)
- Real Media sold their real5 streaming server to most US radio stations, yet could never get G2 server to work reliably.
- I've talked to startups with a 50,000 LOC web product and 200,000 lines of test code. I'm curious how that worked out.
This is so obvious, that is easy to miss.
To share my story (which contains a lot of luck, so, or rather good "timing"). I started my small logistics / supply chain start-up last October, theplan was to have first, meaningful discussions about prices and contracts in June / July and have first revenue in August / September.
Pretty privileged to be ablt to afford almost a year without revenue, right? My targeted market was solar modules from China / Asia to Europe and eCommerce fulfillment logistics.
Now, with logistics in place (software not so much), covering th whole chain from China to consumers in Europe I am talking to organisations in germany to help them et supplies from Asia to hospitals and so on. I am basically selling three months earlier than planned. And i realized that my enxiety about reaching out to customers and try selling my services is all but gone after a couple of days.
So: Sell more. Get revenue.
And don't be greedy. The whole idea of getting into medical supplies (I am not going to charge more than my own minimum salary and actual costs) comes from an inquery to run logistics for a business importing hand sanitzer to be sold through Ebay and Amazon. Show some business ethics. Nobody expects companies to turn into charities, but at the very least don't charge more for customers during crisis because of the crisis than you would have otherwise. Should be great for a long-term relationship.
Startups running out of cash right now can cut costs, yes, but the only path to long term survival is to sell enough to cover your costs. For that you need a list and a pitch / script (or a SaaS platform funnel)
It’s a turbulent time. There is almost someone out there struggling who would pay for what you’re selling, but not the way you sold it before this crisis. If not, there’s almost surely someone out there who can use a different application of your skills.
And you know what? Business isn’t the end of the world. A living human can rebuild a dead business. A living business can’t rebuild a dead human (unless Peter Thiel became a necromancer recently)