This post is a bit longer to give you some context.
We are a product team building products for almost 8 years.
We are on a journey of creating a sustainable way of living by doing what we love.
We started by doing basic digital agency work. But we didn't like working with clients from all fields. We hated the hassle over every penny with clients who didn’t value our work.
Next came the idea of building the next unicorn. After a few trials, we figured out we don't want to sacrifice so much of our lives to it.
Then we thought we have enough skills and experience to build a sustainable bootstrap product that will make us a good living while doing what we love. Building a product that matters to people.
But again, this wasn’t easy. Especially for us who don’t have the expertise in some vertical to understand its problem enough to build a solution for it.
We’d have to stay years in one problem space to truly understand it, connect with key people, and deliver great solutions without funding capital. But that needs cash and passion for that space, which we honestly don’t have.
We love building great products, and we are really good at it now (I can share references if you’re curious).
So we struggle with monetizing our passion. But we are trying to be as honest as possible with ourselves.
My question is -
How a team that loves and is great at building products that solve problems under big constraints (we are only a 3-man team and always worked without funding) can help others on their journey?
I feel like we need to pick a niche, where we can offer our expertise. Kind of a SWAT team for your company. But who is “your” company and how do we pick the “niche”? I feel like I lack an understanding of the problems companies face and how we can help them.
Was anyone in a similar situation? Do you see ways your company would benefit from working with us?
Turns out, this is a common problem.
Friendly Challenge: imagine 3 very different future niches for your team. Leveraging your interests, experience/expertise.
Mix in the Clients you'll serve, Products you build, and Problems you solve. Each version would have a 5 year plan. Start a discussion -- which one energizes your team?
More on this subject by the authors of Design Your Life > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SemHh0n19LA
Highly recommend their book! PM me if you want to discuss.
What we did was to refine the process of consulting: validate the client, walk them through a blueprint for success and be explicit about the requirements and the people who need to be on board before we could start.
Then we worked on our platform (https://iko.ai) to remove as many tasks off our plate as possible.
We also had to think about verticals and we'll get there with a package for each vertical if we're thinking in terms of sectors, or in terms of functionality when it's something common. That's why we built our platform with a plugin architecture. It has the time series forecast plugin, the sentiment analysis plugin, etc. And that's also why we made sure they had APIs, so we could compose and do interesting stuff instead of re-deploying everything.
I'd say refine your processes and extract common tasks into your own tooling so that you ship faster. You'll be in a better position to think, and you may have a product for teams similar to yours.
For example, we do ML projects and built our platform to help our own team. There are many teams like us out there. Similarly, there may be many teams like yours out there.
- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26455105
- [1]: https://iko.ai/docs/story/
However, you have 8 years of working for customers, building their products etc. Are you saying that you never came across a few problems within those 8 years that you would like to solve ? Start there. I am sure there are a few areas/problems that you came across. I have been running a SAAS product for almost 7 years now and I have written at least 25 problems that I would love to solve some day if not doing the current business :).
I am not sure if this is necessarily true. You can spend a weekend studying and understanding a vertical you want to build for.
You can start with questions like "what are some of the pain points this vertical has", come up with ideas, test those ideas and make a determination if your idea is worth pursuing.
Should you pick a niche, yes I think this is necessary. For example, instead of focusing on trying to fix the internet for everyone, focus on solving issues in the UI/UX world for example.
Hope this helps.
I think your situation is ALL of our situation. We are ALL kickass eng but no connections, no non-tech ie sales/marketing, no industry specific insight and the lack of key to your success: inside connections.
Startups need VC's not for money but for the connections. VC helps the startups get not only in touch with people who makes decisions for the company but moreover have the ability to convince/convey/"pressure" them to at least give you a try. Another reason for VC's; make other startups use your product to launch theirs. Case and point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen He epitomizes that once you have that inside connection, you can make a 1+1 tool for a million dollars and the entire industry will jump on board and pay whatever it takes. It's amazing how people with no clue can quickly build up a company to add 1+1 and turn it into a billion dollar company and you can't even though yours for fraction of the price can do 1+2.
I've been in Silicon Valley and at various FAANG/M to now have a clue to how things work.
My observations:
1. Best products never gets greenlighted....never. Mind boggling.... but true. Decision makers are almost always a non-tech.
2. Company IT's are always looking for sweet deals, kickbacks, no brain implementation/integration and ungodly support
3. Company IT's 90% of work almost always comes from integrating various mismatched platforms
4. enduser's pain is almost never considered. decision process is almost always based on a single usecase for high level's myopic viewpoints.
All above reasons why internals in enterprises absolutely sucks. ABSOLUTELY. You would be blown over by how backwards antique sw is being used by the likes of Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Microsoft and most fortune 500 runs inside because I've worked for most of the top 10 techs. and the worst piece of crap sw: SAP. Every company has this painpoint because it/they integrate all of other barely working junk platforms. So enterprises are basically crippled by an idiot who built their initial foundation. Probably because they lacked the knowledge, took the lowest barrier to entry and big tech junk constantly in their faces and no limit to funds. This is where the big boys like SAP work their evil to get you onto their legacy platform which makes you stuck forever. Once on it, the changes you have to make to your internals are resource impossible. I remember a little while back when I went to HR in a top 10 tech. The sw a HR person was using launched a bunch of DOS window to do some execution. It was unreal.
This brings along another enterprise unicorn: Atlassian. I've been using it for years and there is a reason why they are able to create an eco around their sw.. mainly because their sw platform is so lacking. The most popular extension just to make confluence workable was a tiny little plugin a person was making millions from because confluence simply lacked some key fundamental func. So you have to wonder, how in the world did they get their foot in the door? I (prgm mgr) became a demigod of sorts after I was able to do "magical" basic func using their REST API.
Bottomline, if you're looking to get into enterprise and you have no connections, and no industry standing (your partners in crime and/or an industry leader in a specific field) you will never break in... never. This is why many startups are emphasizing by saying s/he worked at FAANG which for whatever reason makes them god in their field and should be taken seriously regardless of their position.
If you're trying to do cold calling, best to do is at tradeshows which IT people love going to. They get treated like royalties and get "kickbacks."
However now with the advent of social media, if you can make a splash with some specific viral video that spotlights your product. You could get noticed and get your foot in the door.
Another demo you can hit if you're B2B are SMB's. They usually lack the big boy's connections and are willing to take a risk in reducing cost, overhead, personnel and infra costs.
Finally, if you're B2C product, then your best and only bet is social media engagement with an influencer.
I'm sorry for you to think you'll get notice from enterprise procurement here in HN. Personally i don't think it will happen. I think most of us are either bored dev's, retired or bored non-influencers. Those people you so desperately want attention from, treats their work strictly 8-5 and do cocktail parties with visibility to sell themselves. Sorry, they are not scouring the web for best solutions. They are looking for best solutions for themselves which does not mean best for company. Think if you're trying to get T rump's attention, you have a choice: cheap fast food now with diet coke or showcase best in class enterprise sw that will save money, time and people's lives? Which do you think he will pay attention to?
However, having said that, you can make it into the fray by yes, focusing on niche. Case Study: Stripe. They focused on reducing painpoints for webdev's. Once they got traction with an army of webdev's. That got the VC's attention, VC's joined in giving Stripe connections to decision makers and rest is history. If you feel you got what people who build things need to reduce their cost/pain expeditiously. Then you need to be in that dev's viewpoint; Stackoverflow, Medium articles and all other dev landing zones; DZone etc.
Good luck.