Slightly off-topic, but I wanted to expand on anxiety quick:
> Anxiety, though, (and I'm speaking from experience here, having had some light anxiety attacks caused by too much regular caffeine usage) seems to be characterised by a feeling of impending doom, that everything is wrong, it can't be fixed, it's all hopeless, etc.
I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder earlier this year, after some career-related stress gave me a panic attack. Your description, the feeling of impending doom, everything is wrong, etc. is spot on. For me, it feels like a broken fight-or-flight response. I feel like I have to physically do something right now, and if I don't then something very bad is going to happen.
After my first panic attack, I immediately scheduled an appointment with a doctor. I was prescribed Xanax to take whenever I feel anxious, and then I was given a recommendation to see a therapist.
The therapy has helped, but by far the biggest improvement has come from daily, rigorous exercise.
Two months ago I started running twice each day, along with walking to/from work and walking our dog. My anxiety has been almost completely eradicated, excluding a couple random 5-minute bouts every other week, whereas before it was an every day, all day thing. I'm also happy to say that I have not had to use the Xanax at all since I began exercising.
If you're feeling any of the symptoms of anxiety (feeling of impending doom, it's all hopeless, etc.) or depression, please, make an appointment and see a doctor. You can get help.
As someone that has a Windows Phone and uses Cortana, yes. Everything he was doing is a pretty standard response or action from Cortana.
I mention this every time, but I think the most interesting thing about it is that developers can integrate their apps with it. For example, you could open Cortana and say "Send a Yo to John Doe" or "GenericBankingApp, transfer $25 to my checking account".
I've been meaning to sit down and build a couple small apps that take advantage of this, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
FYI, it looks like the mobile site has some issues in IE on Windows Phone. The white text is a bit hard to read with the background image [1], and refreshing the page results in this [2]. Looking forward to trying it out though!
I also had the problem that when I selected an input box, the keyboard would open and the app would think that I had flipped the phone.
It then showed me the black screen prompting me to flip it back which caused the browser to lose focus of the now nonexistant input box causing the keyboard to collapse again.
It's important to note that the Cortana app itself is in beta. I think the most interesting news about Cortana is that, unlike Siri and Google Now, it can be extended by 3rd-party developers.
For example, my Chase Mobile app uses Cortana. By activating her and saying "Chase Mobile ATM", Cortana will launch the app and search for nearby ATMs. I imagine that the GroupMe developers can extend it in the same way: "GroupMe Send 'your message here'".
> It's important to note that the Cortana app itself is in beta
I would say that's a cop-out. If it's a headline feature, it's not a beta. It should work correctly (ignoring 3rd party apps having to update to integrate).
This applies to Apple as well. When they first announced Siri, they called it beta but it was the headline feature in all their ads.
If you add a weird little feature, I'm OK with the beta label. But you don't get a free pass on half-implemented or buggy software. You can't have it be a focus and say "but it's not ready".
(This isn't about Cortana, I haven't used it and can't comment on how complete it is. This is a general rant.)
Oh I agree, it shouldn't be advertised as a headline feature if it's not fully functional. I'm just pointing out that Microsoft considers Cortana to be in beta, and it's only available on the developer preview of the OS. With that in mind, it's possible that Cortana just isn't doing everything that it should be doing, and thereby isn't quite as useful as it could be.
As someone who uses Siri all the time, I can't wait unt Apple copies 3rd party app integration. There are a number of very small tasks I do repeatedly during any given week that Siri could easily take care of if integration points were available.
Funny story: she set up that Etsy a couple days before visiting her family in Florida, and actually lugged her sewing machine on the plane just so she was able to take any orders while away. Just to give a glimpse of how great she is, hah.
A few people were upset that I called it a failure after 4 months. You're right, 4 months is nothing compared to most other startups or software businesses.
Let me clarify that I'm calling it a failure not because I wasn't rich in 4 months. Instead, it's a failure to me because I lost interest in what it did and who it was for, and I had no intention of ever working on it again.
My entire site design and copy have been a source of downright embarrassment. In fact, this week's "challenge goal" is a brand new home page, landing page and sales page design.
The copy itself is going to need to change to reflect the pivot from inventory to ERP, so happily "Inventory management without the suck" is going away.
> The "not interested" inversion of "contact us" is also pretty weird and announces that you expect people to not be interested.
Curiously, I thought this myself when I put it up. To this day, I can't fathom why I thought that was a good choice of words (or why I never changed it).
> Then as you scroll it's just a wall of text all the way to the end.
I had been experimenting with the "hybrid copy"[1] sales page that Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers has been a proponent of. It's worked incredibly well for my actual landing pages, where a user knows what the product is about when they click whatever link or ad brought them there. However, I took it way too far by doing "hybrid copy" on the home page.
The new design I'm working on is going to be the classic home page with a brief overview of the product and a CTA linking to the "hybrid copy" features/tour page.
Edit: I neglected to mention that the "hybrid page" experiment resulted in a noticeable increase in new trials.
I hate to come off as a "life coach" type here, but you really need to stop coming off as being so negative and ashamed of yourself and your efforts.
I'd prioritize that over any amount of A/B testing at this point, since self confidence in yourself and your product will show through stronger than anything else at this point.
I'm a very proud person, and I'm proud of what I've accomplished. That being said, you're right about coming off as negative or ashamed. I don't actually feel that way about myself or my efforts, but I realize that it may not look that way over the internet.
In fact, I had intended the "downright embarrassment" bit as a joke. Still, thanks for pointing it out!
I've noticed a slight difference in how we in the midwest talk compared to how the west coast (Seattle and SFO) talk. In particular, I'm not perturbed by the writing style and I see clearly a confident young man who is building experience. In the midwest, often, modesty and humility are required for most public conversations. One way to express that modesty is to be quiet (think 'tough cowboy'). Another way to is be self-deprecating (sometimes it comes across as false-modesty), which is what you do. And yet another is to talk about the other person or make small talk. It's something we all do from here. On the west coast, in contrast, there is a common desire to talk oneself up either by referencing a pedigree, accomplishments, or trajectory. As a simplifying stereotype these descriptions don't apply to all people or all the time.
I would take away two lessons from this discussion.
1) The midwest modesty we both use is somewhat foreign to other cultures. Don't feel like you have to change yourself, but, don't be surprised that different people will understand you differently.
2) Focus on the product before fixing any analysis or blog or other meta-startup thing!
> The flipside is that a lot of developers don't have enough hobbies to draw from with which to start a business.
This was (is?) definitely me. I have a grand total of three hobbies: Building software (also my job), playing WoW and reading.
I couldn't think of any business idea that I could build off of WoW (and I'm pretty sure Blizzard doesn't allow that), so I took a different route for finding a problem to solve:
I surfed through small business forums and picked the problem that most people were complaining about. That happened to be inventory management.
(I'm happy to say I've since quit WoW, on account of the nonexistent IRL returns).
I wondered where the random burst of traffic came from.
For those who haven't read the more recent posts, I received a ton of great feedback from HN and other entrepreneur friendly places. I've also been gobbling up great advice from places like Rob Walling's "Startups for the rest of us" podcast.
About a month ago I started a "challenge", inspired by Brennan Dunn, to rebuild my "failed" product, and it's been going pretty well so far.
Most importantly, a few days ago I announced that I'm "pivoting" from just inventory management to a full-blown ERP for printing companies. I chose printing companies because I'm a full-time developer at a printing company, and I know exactly what kinds of problems we face with our terrible ERP system. Though I need to be super careful not to build a system that is so focused only my own company can use it.
If there's one piece of advice I could give somebody else, it would be to narrow your niche like I did with printing companies. This has helped me so much it's downright ridiculous.
Edit: Also, when I originally posted the article some people were concerned that I was just trying to build a "meta" product with Iron Conversions. I admit I had planned to build a product with it, but I've put that on hold indefinitely in favor of rebuilding Rakasheets. I don't know if I'll ever return to it, so for now Iron Conversions is just the place I'm blogging about my progress.
- It sounds like one of the problems you ran into was massive undercapitalization. While some businesses can grow without spending anything on staff, promotions, marketing, etc., that's not the norm. Figure out how you can inject more resources into your business. Cash/barter/debt are all viable strategies (although debt is a potential time-bomb.)
- <4 months part-time is't really enough time to spend on a business before evaluating it as a failure. While pivoting may make sense, I'm pretty sure that $300 + 120 days doesn't generate enough data to say anything conclusive.
- SaaS products like Rakasheets are deceptively expensive for customers. This is good for the SaaS provider. Your middle-priced plan is ~$700 annually; factor in low turnover if you do a good job, and you're basically selling software in the $1500+ range. Keep this in mind when figuring out how to promote your product. The cheapest promotion channels may not be best for a relatively high-priced (vs consumer-targeted) product.
- If you're low on cash, try direct sales to start. That's you on the phone, or sending email. Or getting in your car and driving, if your area warrants it. If you're really offering something that will benefit your prospects' business, they want to hear from you.
> <4 months part-time is't really enough time to spend on a business before evaluating it as a failure. Wile pivoting may make sense, I'm pretty sure that $300 + 120 days doesn't generate enough data to say anything conclusive.
There was a lot of hubbub before about calling the whole thing a "failure". I should have made it more clear that I wasn't calling it a failure because I spent 4 months and only got one customer. Instead I was calling it a failure because I was no longer interested in what it did, and I had no intention of working on it any longer.
> SaaS products like Rakasheets are deceptively expensive for customers. This is good for the SaaS provider. Your middle-priced plan is ~$700 annually
This is something that I hadn't even considered until an actual small business owner sent me feedback saying the exactly that. Previously I thought people were like me, and only considered monthly costs of products unless they were buying an annual plan. It may be that I'm alone in that.
There's also the issue of how many inventory items I would let each plan track. The smallest plan, which was $29/month, only let a user track 25 inventory items at a time. That's a laughably small amount of inventory. I attribute this to not targeting a specific type of customer, but it could also easily be attributed to not thinking it through.
> If you're low on cash, try direct sales to start. That's you on the phone, or sending email. Or getting in your car and driving, if your area warrants it. If you're really offering something that will benefit your prospects' business, they want to hear from you.
I live in a small town of less than 4000 people, and the nearest printing company other than the one I work at is an hour's drive away. That makes it hard to talk to them in person while still holding a 9-5 M-F job.
With that in mind, there's really no excuse for me to avoid cold calling potential customers. If my own printing company is an indicator, sales won't be made until numerous phone calls have been made.
I'm glad to hear you're going back and refocusing the original project. I have to admit that when I got to the "Iron Conversions" part of the blog post, I was flabbergasted that you'd pivot towards an aspect of the business that you were apparently not good at. What you said about Iron Conversions was vague enough to leave some doubt, but it sure read like "My product failed, partly because I can't convert customers to save my life. I know, I'll start a new business helping people with conversions!" Put this way, it sounds like a pretty delusional plan, unless you learned something magical about conversions that for unknown reasons you just don't feel like applying to your existing business. Hope that doesn't sound too harsh.
Not harsh at all! You're right, but in my defense "Iron Conversions" was just going to be a massive dunning email generator. It would have hooked into a user's Stripe account and responded to webhooks with A/B tested dunning emails. The onus would have been on the user to convert their trials.
Thanks for sharing. I'm interested in knowing why you think it's worth doubling down?
Besides the lessons you've learned, did you see an actual opening in this market, or is your motivation mostly that you think you know much more than you did a year ago? Because while that may be the case, that doesn't mean that the conditions are right for your app to succeed. From an outsider's perspective (I know as much about inventory management as you used to -- just about nothing)...it seems very hard to get people to switch from whatever legacy products they were using before...it's not just quality of competing product, it's the cost from escaping the inertia of legacy frameworks.
> I'm interested in knowing why you think it's worth doubling down?
There's a bunch of reasons for me to try it again. The most persuasive one has been all of the great feedback I've received from trial users, people on my mailing lists and interested HNers telling me that it just needs a little bit more to be a viable product. "A bit more" in this context is stuff like accounting or order management, which I was really resistant to before as it went against the "grand vision" I had for my product.
And if I fail again, it will at least serve as a guide on "what not to do" for everybody that has been following along. I won't be any worse off financially; I'm not risking my job or income beyond the $50 I spend on AdWords each month. That being said, I'm still highly, highly motivated to succeed.
> Besides the lessons you've learned, did you see an actual opening in this market
There's a big gap in the "ERP for printing companies" market. The only big name in this area (which I won't mention for fear of legal reasons) puts out a terrible product. It fails so often, and it's so darn complicated for Regular Joe Employee to use that it's a wonder this company has any sales at all. I'm often the person that gets called in to fix the problems it causes at my own company, much to my dismay.
You're right about people switching from legacy products though, and that's definitely an area I'll need to gather more information about when I start customer development in the next few weeks.
> or is your motivation mostly that you think you know much more than you did a year ago?
I feel like I know a lot more now than I did before, but I'll never know it all. For example, I know that customer development and marketing is way, way more important than any code I'll ever right. In fact, that's why I'm not writing a single line of code beyond my MVP until I get some real customer development and feedback.
I don't think your budget is big enough for a successful AdWords campaign. In fact, I think at $2 max a day you're probably just throwing that money away. My guess (I don't have much details here) would be that you're looking at 1 or 2 clicks a day and that's pure luck if any of them convert. Given that constraint I would avoid AdWords altogether at this stage. I'd bet that a cheap, but quality, mailing list containing businesses that might need your product would produce a better return.
That "terrible" product has more users than you ever will becuse it's makers understand that sales and marketing are far more important (and the product is not as bad as you think).
If there's one thing I've learned from Rob Walling and Mike Taber's podcasts[1], it's that marketing and customer development are by far the most important parts of building a successful SaaS business.
> the product is not as bad as you think
This is true. I know that I'm a developer, and as such I can easily see the mistakes that my competitor has made. Meanwhile, the average user just thinks it's a run-of-the-mill program, put on this earth to torment them like any other software.
I sell Inventory Management software, and I priced the three plan levels by guessing. I went for $29/$59/$129 across three different plan levels.
Many trial users have told me that my pricing is way too high. I imagine these people actually want the product for free[1] and will probably never "buy" it until it is.
On the opposite side of this spectrum, I've been told by potential customers that my pricing is so low that they wouldn't consider buying it because it isn't a serious price.
I've just started rebuilding[2] this product because it failed for a variety of reasons, and once I get to pricing it won't be hard to figure out which side of the argument I'm going to favor.
That's interesting Joshua. Sounds very similar to a situation I was in previously that I am also trying to avoid again! We guessed our pricing on competitors and some (poor) customer research, and we heard both of those "you're too expensive/cheap" arguments as well!
> Anxiety, though, (and I'm speaking from experience here, having had some light anxiety attacks caused by too much regular caffeine usage) seems to be characterised by a feeling of impending doom, that everything is wrong, it can't be fixed, it's all hopeless, etc.
I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder earlier this year, after some career-related stress gave me a panic attack. Your description, the feeling of impending doom, everything is wrong, etc. is spot on. For me, it feels like a broken fight-or-flight response. I feel like I have to physically do something right now, and if I don't then something very bad is going to happen.
After my first panic attack, I immediately scheduled an appointment with a doctor. I was prescribed Xanax to take whenever I feel anxious, and then I was given a recommendation to see a therapist.
The therapy has helped, but by far the biggest improvement has come from daily, rigorous exercise.
Two months ago I started running twice each day, along with walking to/from work and walking our dog. My anxiety has been almost completely eradicated, excluding a couple random 5-minute bouts every other week, whereas before it was an every day, all day thing. I'm also happy to say that I have not had to use the Xanax at all since I began exercising.
If you're feeling any of the symptoms of anxiety (feeling of impending doom, it's all hopeless, etc.) or depression, please, make an appointment and see a doctor. You can get help.