From idea to paying customer

https://www.linen.dev/s/linen-community/t/545988/from-idea-to-paying-customers

by cheeseblubber • 4 years ago

307 81 4 years ago

nl• 4 years ago

- The API would then redirect them to a blank white page with the words “Syncing in progress”
- I would frantically run a script in the background that actually trigger the sync locally ( I had to do a manual sync locally because I was using nextjs and hosting on vercel which didn’t support background jobs)
- I would then make small talk to distract them on how long it would take
- Once it was finished I sent them the link of the page that was finished along with DNS instructions to set up subdomain forwarding

Love this so much.

The irony is that SO much enterprise software is basically this, and there having the person on the line is sold as a benefit!

mellosouls• 4 years ago

Earlier discussions of the project fwiw:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168882

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908

throw031720192• 4 years ago

CSS reset clobbered the horizontal margin. Text is edge to edge on mobile. Very hard to read.

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

Smells like tailwind to me. Chuck an p-5 on that body!

throw031720192• 4 years ago

Update: it is fixed now. Thank you!

jmathai• 4 years ago

OT: visiting the website rendered my browser navigation control (Safari, iOS) completely hidden. I lost the ability to go back or close just its tab.

Is that intentional?

Edit: reproducible and happens when I scroll the content. Maybe related to the sticky header. Killing Safari and reopening got my browser controls back.

igorkraw2• 4 years ago

I'd be curious about stories on how to approach potential customers without existing relationships. Do you just cold email them?

ilrwbwrkhv• 4 years ago

No you got to have friends and acquaintances who have that problem.

onion2k2• 4 years ago

Yes.

And post online. And submit links to aggregator services. And message people on social media. And go to face-to-face events and sell to people. And post in places even if they say you shouldn't promote things.

Really, you need to be willing to do all the things you hate other people doing...

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

Really, you need to be willing to do all the things you hate other people doing...

This is why I am a firm believer that marketeers are a different breed of people altogether. Marketeers, recruiters, managers, sales, etc.

I mean software developers are weird, but THESE people, yikes. (this message is tongue in cheek)

stanac• 4 years ago

you need to be willing to do all the things you hate other people doing...

This is worth remembering. Always hated receiving cold emails.

edit: grammar

igorkraw2• 4 years ago

Thanks. I guess there's different ways to go about it though, I can respect a cold email which asks for my consent before starting the sales pitch in a 2nd email for example

12907835202• 4 years ago

The landing page doesn't seem to mention the cost at all? The burger menu also doesn't appear to work on mobile (Android Pixel 6) so maybe it's hidden in there.

soulchild37• 4 years ago

Isn’t this a violation of Slack and Discord TOS? I think this guy did well, but as this tool grew more popular, Slack and Discord might pursue legal actions

shafyy• 4 years ago

I had the same thought. If I remember correctly, one of Slack's paid features is that you can retain older chat archives. This kind of circumvents that. Now, I think it's a cool product and I hope that there will be no legal repercussions.

dinobones• 4 years ago

I think that's exactly why OP's idea will take off. Everyone is too scared to build a competitor.

Airbnb started by spamming Craigslist with fake ads. Stripe started by accepting payments to a single bank account. Doing something shoddy/somewhat shady and not being afraid of the repercussions gets you ahead in startups.

So what if OP breaks someone's "TOS", by the time they notice or OP's product gets big enough too care, he will likely have sufficient enough capital to fight them off. If he never gets that big, more power to him for something that makes him some beer money.

onion2k2• 4 years ago

Stripe started by accepting payments to a single bank account.

Where can I read more about that? It sounds fascinating..

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

You will probably find there are a lot of people up for it. There is a whole black hat community out there trying to make a fast buck fast and loose. If anything this would be too pedestrian!

hnbad3• 4 years ago

The problem with this approach is that it's high reward but also high risk. On the one end you have Airbnb spamming Craigslist (which at worst could have resulted in a cease & desist preventing future use of that marketing channel) and on the other end you have Theranos setting up a fake lab and producing fraudulent blood tests.

"Be bold" and "fake it till you make it" are good slogans, but there is always a gradient between boldness and reckless negligence. "Take calculated risks" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

If OP gets banned by Discord and Slack, their product is dead in the water and they'll have to deal with angry customers who paid for a service OP can no longer provide. This means if this really is a TOS violation, they'll either have to fly under the radar (which arguably failed when they hit HN front page) or they need to grow influential enough to enter negotiation with Slack and Discord to get a special deal.

MangoCoffee• 4 years ago

I think your analogy is flawed. Linen have dependencies (Slack/Discord).

while Airbnb and Stripe are independent. There won't be enough money to fight them (Slack/Discord) if it stated in their TOS that they can turn off their services.

Linen's situation is more like developing add-ons for Microsoft's Office until Microsoft decided to add features that does what your add-ons do for free.

chrismorgan• 4 years ago

I don’t think there would be any cause for Slack to complain for at least paid accounts. I glanced through the relevant terms, and there’s really only one even vaguely relevant topic, largely around competing with Slack.

In their App Developer Policy <https://api.slack.com/developer-policy>:

As part of good business practices, Applications and developers are prohibited from: Circumventing Slack’s intended limitations (including pricing, features and access structures). You may not use the Slack API to replicate or compete with core products or services offered by Slack

And in their API Terms of Service <https://slack.com/intl/en-au/terms-of-service/api>, which cites the app developer policy and then adds:

Further, you will not: … (C) access our APIs or documentation in order to replicate or compete with the Services

If Slack spell out that there being no public mirror is an intended limitation, or if they offer a direct equivalent, then they could complain. And they could do for free accounts, which have a history limit that this would incidentally circumvent. But for paid accounts I don’t believe either of these are true, so if it were limited to working with paid accounts I’d say you’d be in the clear with Slack for now. Of course, you’re still subject to their caprice in changing their rules, implementing new features, or just booting you off their platform even without cause at their whim, and that’s a significant existential risk for building such a business.

But I don’t think Slack would be particularly likely to boot them off, given that any hostile action on their part would be akin to claiming some degree of ownership of the data. The data belongs to the customer, and they should be able to do whatever they want with it without hindrance. Of course, such reasoning as this is only reasoning. If they did cut off such API access, they’d hardly be the first large company to shut the portcullis to support their own interests against their customers’; Twitter, for example.

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

It's an interesting question... In my experience at a number of companies / assignments, Slack made its way into the business through "the back door", so to speak; development teams started using it without prior business approval - in a lot of companies, the use of unmonitored chat services was a no-no, so a lot of people were stuck on e-mail or a Microsoft project. But through "grassroots" movements, Slack was shimmied into these companies and took off, until the management was convinced to start paying for it.

TL;DR I strongly believe Slack became popular through their users bending/breaking some rules.

I also believe that the users have the rights to archive and republish their chat messages as they please. I don't believe a service that archives messages will cause too much overhead to Slack either. They may start charging for API access though, which is fair.

hnbad3• 4 years ago

Slack became popular via community slacks, which the company always stated they were willing to tolerate but not interested in supporting. I don't think that qualifies as bending/breaking rules so much as repurposing. Slack still tolerates community slacks but has set precedent for setting hard limits on user counts, which has led to many community slacks migrating to Discord instead.

If anything, Slack benefitted from community slacks until they outlived their usefulness and then Discord benefitted from the influx of new users. They definitely took notice at the time and added features new users had been used to from Slack.

jbirer• 4 years ago

He just needs to rebase to a country that doesn't really listen to US laws.

akudha• 4 years ago

How is this practical? especially for a tiny project like this?

ttoinou• 4 years ago

Pieter Levels made this already for NomadList https://nomadlist.com syncing its Discord and Slack

newbie5782• 4 years ago

How to even decide on what idea to focus on? Just keep a list of ideas stored in the Notes app and decide on a whim or? Would love to hear other's processes.

autonomousErwin• 4 years ago

I too have an idea list - I suppose the idea you choose is the idea that you're thinking about the most

newbie5782• 4 years ago

How do you keep track of them? Do you have some grading system implemented?

bazmattaz• 4 years ago

Hey this is my job! You don’t necessarily want to focus on an idea but instead get obsessed with a problem to solve. You want to spend some time validating the problem and interviewing customers with this problem. Only then do you start ideating on ways to solve the problem for users.

I have a big list of ideas too but I’m not entirely sure they all solve a valid problem. I’m nervous about spending a lot of time on something that’s cool but not sellable

d3nj4l• 4 years ago

I had to do a manual sync locally because I was using Nextjs and hosting on Vercel which didn’t support long running jobs.
Finally if they were ready to pay I would send them a Stripe checkout page for payment and I would then update a field in the database manually of whether the user was a paid user.
I could have spent 4-5 weeks coding and polishing up the onboarding process and getting payments ready

Just use Rails...

RileyJames• 4 years ago

Yup. And if you want to go even faster, don’t start from scratch, use JumpStart.

https://jumpstartrails.com/

orangepurple• 4 years ago

Cool!

But: One paying customer leaves and you're back at ZERO/month

I'd celebrate cautiously.

The whole initiative is one cease and desist letter away from collapse.

We're here for a good time not a long time. Have fun and good luck!

t_mann2• 4 years ago

Before I wrote a single line of code I had spent a week talking to potential customers and even before that I had spent a week doing customer research and identifying potential ideas that I wanted to work on.

This sounds like a great approach to any startup / for-profit project that easily goes overlooked. However, I guess most people will still get stuck at this point:

I had built a relationship with other open source projects so I knew where my early customers was going to be.

Background: I have an idea that I think might be interesting for large corporations with lots of retail customers, specifically mobile service providers, ISPs,... However, I don't know anyone at T-Mobile or similar, so I've been carrying the idea around for a long time. It'd probably be more of a consulting-style gig than a startup initially, since it'd need to be heavily tailored for each of those giant idiosyncratic businesses. Any thoughts or suggestions much appreciated.

Anyway, thanks for sharing, OP!

iglio• 4 years ago

However, I don't know anyone at T-Mobile or similar, so I've been carrying the idea around for a long time.

You could always try and get a job at one of these business for a year, with the primary goal of building connections.

t_mann2• 4 years ago

Bold move, hadn't thought of that, thanks for sharing.

avereveard3• 4 years ago

He'll get a nda as soon as he get into the door, that won't help.

s1k3• 4 years ago

Cold out reach on LinkedIn to the people at these companies that might be buyers. Tell them your an entrepreneur doing user research and you think they might have valuable insight into a problem space your interested in. People love talking to entrepreneurs and they love talking about their problems. So just phrase it so those 2 things come across and make sure they don’t think it’s a sales call (at least until you are ready to sell something)

There is a book called “The Mom Test” that covers this part of market discovery very well. Aligns almost exactly w/ how OP approached it.

anonymous344• 4 years ago

Nice writeup, but I don't understand why would any company would want their chats or other stuff to be moved outside of their envinronment to third party who has absolutely no credentials of security. Even the bigger operators has made stupid mistakes and got hacked

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

Another comment mentions open source projects, open communities like that. There's some OS projects that use Gitter, which has search engine indexable chat history which ended up being quite useful.

I'm in a big Go Slack community and it's not indexed, which is a shame because there's a lot of really good info there.

znpy• 4 years ago

Which is ironic because slack supposedly stands for “searchable log (of) all communications (and) knowledge”

https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/28/13098164/slack-is-an-acro...

risyachka• 4 years ago

There are hardly any security issues here. The app basically exports info that is intended to be public using read-only access.

rad_gruchalski• 4 years ago

I think I can answer this. I was in the Yugabyte community slack for a bit. So many people ask constantly the same questions, some good threads exist discussing some pretty unique problems. There are many interesting solutions that are effectively lost after some days of general activity.

I like the idea of Linen, I think it could be pretty good in recording those unique technical threads for future knowledge base management.

codingdave• 4 years ago

From idea to talking to people to spending a few weeks laying out the right solution to finding one pilot customer willing to pay and than into a month of coding to produce what that one paying customer wanted.

This is actually the right approach. This is a good story of how to test out a product idea. Just a terrible headline to describe it.

hnbad3• 4 years ago

They say they actually only spent 2 weeks coding and that the overall process from idea to 1k took a month in total, so it seems to be still accurate.

is_true3• 4 years ago

I went like this:

idea -> 6 months sending emails -> 1st sale -> 2 weeks building what I just sold

This was after doing build -> sell for far too long.

OJFord• 4 years ago

Some prefer building to selling though, so I wouldn't say it's wrong (for everyone).

I have various 'projects' between shower-thought to prototype/usable-for-me that it wouldn't make sense to sell first, because I'm thinking about or building them to scratch an itch and use myself; popularity with others and people paying for it would be great, but it's only the right place to start if the point is 'right, I want a successful business'.

Ma8ee• 4 years ago

But you wouldn’t have been able to build it in two weeks if you hadn’t built a lot of similar stuff previously?

lairv2• 4 years ago

So how do you go about seeking clients without having an actual product, do you just randomly contact people asking them if they would be interested ?

mgbmtl• 4 years ago

In-person networking, depending on location, can be efficient. You build trust pretty quickly, agree on the base requirements, etc.

I usually switch my brain off after hours, but for example, recently at a baby-party event, someone was asking what I do for work. Ended up asking if my company would like to bid on their project, gave me a bunch of insider info.

I don't want to be that person who only talks about work, but small comments here and there, like planting seeds, and then you get emails of "can I introduce you to X, who is looking for Y?"

TruthWillHurt• 4 years ago

Amazing that you skipped login/signup and self-service bootstrapping!

Such a great decision. even OAuth/SSO solutions can complicate things, and why spend time on automation before you have the load to justify it?

Well done.

YeBanKo• 4 years ago

I find it very impressive. Some things that stood out to me is fully manual onboarding and even manually updating the database. It makes tons of sense, but as an engineer we tend to want to automate all the things, and, I guess, loose momentum.

adv0r• 4 years ago

wait, "Backed by ycombinator", while in the blog post I tried cmd+f "YC" and "ycombinator" without luck

How is something backed by YC if it took a month to build?

jstanley• 4 years ago

Where are you getting "Backed by ycombinator" from?

XCSme2• 4 years ago

Their landing page: https://www.linen.dev/

eloisius• 4 years ago

This is interesting to see, and reminds me that I really have no idea how to sell myself. I spent 7 years on this exact thing--a project to archive a community Slack server to a crawlable website, even with full-text search that (IMO) worked better than Slack search. I made the code available for other communities to use, and never once considered that this was a sellable product. I shut it down this year after a flurry of folks started asking to be opted out of the archive.

In case you want to run your own: https://github.com/zacstewart/tech404logs

solumunus• 4 years ago

You really don't! You've finally learned that you have an established project which is sellable and your immediate reaction is to link your public repo for others. Why not make it private, develop the project and sell it? You're nearly there...

XCSme2• 4 years ago

Why is there no Pricing section?

Double_a_92• 4 years ago

That kinda sounds horrifying... I wouldn't want my casual chat within some semi-private community to be google searchable.

simonhamp• 4 years ago

4-5 weeks coding and polishing up the onboarding process and getting payments ready

I don't know when Linen was first created, but these days you can get most of this done much more rapidly.

Check out Laravel Spark[1], for example, where all of that billing stuff is neatly abstracted away so you can focus on your product

[1] https://spark.laravel.com/

cercatrova2• 4 years ago

But then you'd have to write PHP...

(I know, users don't care about tech stacks, but if I'm going to be developing the product over time, I definitely do care what I'm coding in)

artificial2• 4 years ago

Right tool for the right job. What language do you prefer?

conqrr• 4 years ago

Would this still work for some lo side projects? With only a few hours a day, the research is possible, but shipping fast is definitely not.

kirso• 4 years ago

I always love this kind of posts.

Because they outline a great approach that actually works and is solid.

Yet, we always have HN comments why the idea would never work :)

From idea to paying customer

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