BC STARTUPS
Saved by @zmbnski

Candid and potentially controversial series of tweets coming up... (I hear twitter is good for that sort of thing 😅) read 👇🏻

 Here’s what it feels like to launch something to the indie maker community:

Launching a free, open source tool:
“This is awesome! You’re awesome!”

Launching a commercial tool:
“TWO DOLLARS? You are literally Hitler”
I’m exaggerating for comedic effect of course. But there’s a lesson here...
I knew before I started working on Promomatic to be very wary of building a utility tool for makers. Makers are by definition problem solvers and their favorite hobby is finding a better / faster / cheaper way to do what your product does.
It’s so tempting to build things for makers because they seem accessible (thanks to PH, IH, Reddit etc) and you get an immediate feedback loop.
But I see too many indie makers getting seduced into an endless loop of building products for other makers and ending up generating little to no revenue.
I don’t think there is a long term business opportunity in “utility” tools for indie makers. It’s fine to launch to that audience, but you need to quickly move up the value chain if you want to survive.
As an entrepreneur you don’t want an individual pondering whether your product is worth a single digit dollar amount. You want a *business* to not bat an eye at putting your 3-digit monthly / annual subscription on the corporate card because you solve such a valuable problem.
So, don’t do what I’m doing. My goal is not to sell to indie makers. My long term goal is to move up the value chain to businesses. For that, I will need longer than 30 days.
Plus, launching in and of itself is the majority of the challenge for me right now. Turning one of these things into an actual business, that can come later :)
In summary, don’t expect to make money from tools aimed at indie makers. If you do find yourself in that situation and you want to grow revenue, you’ll need to move up the value chain to SMEs.

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Marketing Examples
Marketing Examples
@GoodMarketingHQ
🔥 I got 2000 new subscribers from my Product Hunt launch

THREAD...

Last week I launched Marketing Examples to Product Hunt.

✔️ 1,500+ upvotes
✔️ Product of the Week
✔️ Email list grew from 1,300 to 3,300

This is the step by step account of how I did it


Step 1 - Don't launch straight away

23rd May 2019 Marketing Examples v1.0 went live. The site had a few case studies, several bugs, and an email box which didn’t convert well.

The old version of me would have thrown it on Product Hunt straight away. But I decided to wait.

Why?

1) I didn’t want to waste my “turn” with the very first iteration of my site.

2) I didn’t want to launch in a vacuum. Product Hunt multiplies current momentum. Having a small following of “fans” on launch day goes a long way.

So I set myself a target.

✔️ 1000 email subscribers
✔️ 1000 twitter followers

And then I would launch. 70 days later I hit my target.

It was showtime.
STARTUPS
Ben Tossell
Ben Tossell
@bentossell
I don’t buy into “you should have a cofounder”

I think investors are just hedging their bets on the team

Actively finding a cofounder seems odd and forced to tick a box ✅

If you (potentially) have one, great!

💰Pay amazing folks (contract/FTE/PTE)

One pro is to share the burden with someone who cares as much about the business as you do.

Going looking for a cofounder (whether you’re pressured to or not) seems like a disaster
STARTUPS
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Shekhar Kirani
Shekhar Kirani
@skirani
Lots of startups get stuck
before they get to Product-Market-Fit.

What would be the reasons?

Here are some, I see on a daily basis. They are related to issues with founders or market (in no particular order):

1) Founders haven't studied or trained on basic things of startups: idea validation, market validation, customer value-proposition, team-building, product building, basic finance, and total money required to do few iterations.
A: Work for a startup for a few years and learn.

2) Founders are solving a problem that they face in their daily life at home or work and start solving for themselves before checking whether there are others who care about the same problem. After building the product, they realize the market issue.
A: Idea validation failure

3) Too headstrong and think every potential customer can't imagine the value unless they experience the product. Hence, start building the product.
A: If you are deep and know you are at the same league as in Steve Jobs, this makes sense

4) Founders talk to few friends and colleagues and start building a product. After building the product, they realize there is no high demand for the product.
A: Spend month(s) on the problem and not on the solution.
STARTUPS
Garry()
Garry()
@garrytan
Subtle real advantage nobody talks about: if founders can access deeper pools of capital early/quickly, they can get bigger faster without spawning lots of competitors.

If your startup is real, pitching Sand Hill is sometimes like giving away copies of your treasure map

This advice is seldom given because most of the time and for most founders, you are still better off talking about your idea as much as possible to better understand where the dead ends are in the idea maze. Can’t do that in isolation.

Asking investors what is hot is usually less useful than asking what has worked, and what didn’t work and why? That’s how you can skip ahead and avoid death.

“All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.” —Munger
STARTUPS
Jan-Erik Asplund
Jan-Erik Asplund
@janerikasplund
.@zapier built a $140M ARR business on $1.4M in VC that has become the logic layer of the no-code industry.

But it has the potential to be something even bigger: the Netflix of productivity.

Our report and a thread 👉

We believe @seqouia and @steadfast got a good deal buying into Zapier at $5B.

We value Zapier at $7B based on:

- 30-50% YoY growth over the next five years
- Zapier’s monopoly status in the solopreneur/SMB market
- 30-40% YoY growth of no-code TAM

No-code is huge and growing, but as @edavidpeterson has written, no-code is about more than tools: it’s about a philosophy that emphasizes interoperability and customizing your software to your needs.

https://t.co/UJY6BRtXwl


.@zapier enabled interoperability by building a solution to one of the intractable problems in SaaS: APIs that don’t talk to each other.

The product took off and hit $100M ARR in just 9 years, comparable to companies that have raised 100x as much money.

https://t.co/0Thk42eRpJ


Zapier was riding an explosion in APIs that started the same year they were founded—2011.

Suddenly, every SaaS business wanted to offer its users extensibility, but not spend time figuring out what integrations to build or building them.

That’s where Zapier came in handy.
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