Ask HN: {Startup} Do you feel that you are doing exactly whats not recommended?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5758145

by shail • 13 years ago

4 5 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

While building a product: Developing all the features without customer feedback, not launching quickly enough etc.<p>What else?

orangethirty• 13 years ago

There is hardly a wrong path, though the only advice you should follow is this:

- Release early with feedback from customers.

- Charge money.

stupidideas• 13 years ago

release early but don't release too early...I did and in a way I feel it's coming back to hurt me. I approached my first merchant with the idea of running trail test and told them I was mainly looking for some customer feedback. They agreed to help out but I got more media coverage than expected and that's where things took an unexpected turn. I was upfront that my product was not ready for the masses and that I just needed to see how it worked in the real world so I could perfect the product. I was also upfront that my development skills would limit the growth of the product and that I was hoping to attract the attention of a technical co-founder and maybe an investor. We ran the test run, I got my feedback and I even talked with a few investors. I Then went back into development, made the changes (took longer than I thought) and now my first customer is most likely not going to stay with the product. They made $360, I made $72. I did however find a technical co-founder:)

cdvonstinkpot2• 13 years ago

Yes, I don't know the first thing about doing customer interviews. I don't know where to find my customers in the first place to get them to rent my product, let alone ask them questions regarding the development of it.

Then there's the market research aspect of what I'm doing. I know there's a market for VPS Instances, which is what I rent. But I haven't done any specific research for the specific niche I'm targeting, which is the financial sector who needs low latency access to New York City's financial district. I just know there are people who will find value in that my servers are colocated in a data center close-by to Wall Street, so I make that a selling point.

I know I want to eventually target big data customers when I ever get the opportunity to reinvest revenue & buy additional servers that I can build a cluster large enough to handle big data workloads, but I don't know if there are big data customers in the financial sector, I guess there ought to be, and it's a specialized enough market that if there is I could be a monopoly in the field. Maybe, I haven't done the research to find out. I don't know where to begin to do so.

It's not like I don't want to know, I just don't have the budget or the contacts to find out. For christ's sake my daily Google AdWords budget is less than $2. I don't even know if that's going to work at all.

I'm totally self- funded, so there's been no real need to show anyone a business plan, and as such I haven't bothered to write one. I'm not too good at writing projects, I stick to building servers which I can do.

I might need to seek outside funding, even as small as I am- I only have 1 server- albeit a real fast one, just to be able to manage a marketing plan to find customers that will fund expansion beyond server #1, and to finance operations expenses like colo fees. I read on the net that atypical Google AdWords campaign is $1,500/month, which is far beyond affordable to me.

shail• 13 years ago

I looked at your website and remember reading about few of your submissions such as trying to find a co-founder, web developer etc. I can help you with some development on that front (no fees). But I would like to know more about you as person. I could not find enough information about you, what have you done in the past etc. Connect with me on my email id (its in the hn profile).

cdvonstinkpot2• 13 years ago

EMail sent. I'll be sure to remember you when I make my millions, lol.

Ask HN: {Startup} Do you feel that you are doing exactly whats not recommended?

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