dsshanley
There are excellent points in all of these responses, and customer development is critical before you dive into product. I would suggest you go through the process of:
• truly identifying your goals (what do you want to get out of this? is this a 10 year business or just a side project)
• target spaces where users already exist (FB groups, LinkedIn groups, Shopify marketplace, etc) where you can access them
• Based on your goals, decide on whether you want a small % of a large user base or a larger % of a very niche user base. As you are discovering, only a small % of folks are going to be interested if there's not a massive frustration or fear you are tapping in to.
It's worth noting that content marketing takes time and is only one piece of the acquisition strategy. It would have been helpful to see a timeline and if/how they allocated budget and time to other tactics near-term. Your content engine really doesn't tend to kick in until 6-12 months after you've developed some sort of an audience.
So, as you plan to go to market, what else are you doing to pair this good advice on building content with other tactics?
They originally germinated the one seed, but it's male and has no female counterpart to create fruit. So, they successfully germinated more from another collection, and it turned out they were female. They had no idea what they would get, and as the paper outlines, they don't know why some, but not all, germinated.
Seriously amazing when you think that this biological reproduction function works after having been dormant for so many years.
And I lived right next door to Renard.
It's hard to imagine that during the planning, budgeting, and all the upfront work that someone didn't caution him against the unscrupulous landlord. The landlord was a guy that wrapped a chain around our neighboring building to pull his building back onto its foundation. This is a guy that had public, outstanding violations and complaints on his building and unpermitted work.
And they moved in to a microscopic kitchen to do white-tablecloth dining in a local neighborhood. Yes, they moved in right after a hot restaurant, St Jack, moved out, but St Jack had a marketing/advertising/buzz machine behind it. They systematically created success, not the other-way around.
I guess the moral of the story is take this to heart:
>I told myself what I'm sure every single novice restauranteur tells themselves: I'll be in the 1 percent that make it, by sheer will.
Take the leap, but you've got to do your diligence. Listen to the feedback and concerns people voice about your endeavor.
We're trying to tackle this entire experience by building a collaborative data tool that's easy enough for everyone to actually use. It's a good fit for technical leaders that are running non-tech teams or teams that simply don't have the time to spend on connecting all the data sources: Intercom, Github, JIRA, etc.
We're a small, experienced team looking for that special person that can blend their engineering experience with their ability to directly deliver value to our early-adopter customers.
We're working on helping teams manage and understand their internal data -- we call it Little Data. It's about owning the UX around a team's most important data and pushing that information to where they're working. It's about reinventing the old crufty "business intelligence" market with new tools and a new approach.
We're language agnostic (though our stack is current Ruby/React), and we're happy to share more of what we're building.
Come check us out: http://usenotion.com/jobs