What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

Marketing.

The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales.

No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/.

In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever way to 10x, or make it go viral. A big motivator was Paul Graham's "do things that don't scale" post [1]. So we just sat down and talked to people.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them.

One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed and improving SEO. A couple of years later, the site is now earning $10k+ a month .

"Commoditize your complement"

I had hosting issues in many of my companies and consulting projects, running from "WTF is this AWS bill $10k???" to "WTF did our 10gbit/s download just kick Heroku offline?"

But people can only appreciate the things I build for them if they are hosted well. So I took the obvious next step and purchased a small struggling hosting company. We then introduced nicer tooling that imitates the AWS and Heroku APIs if possible, to make using their servers as easy as possible for me. And now I can offer managed hosting to all of my consulting clients. For them, it's slightly cheaper prices and (in contrast with AWS and Heroku) they can just call me when things don't work. And for me, it's reliable high-margin revenue.

Creating an on-premise version of our product for enterprises (as opposed to a pure SaaS version)

Turns out there is still a lot of money in selling technology to large enterprises that they can host and run themselves on an annual licensing model.

We were initially afraid of the long and high-touch enterprise sales cycles, complex procurement processes and enterprise integration requirements (complex permissions, LDAP auth, audit trails etc.) and thus wanted to do a simpler SaaS version with a monthly plan.

But I learned that if you start on the enterprise angle early, you can get some incredibly sticky customers with five, six or even seven figure annual license payments and very predictable cashflows you can raise or borrow against.

Invest in SEO early. And I mean invest all the way, including all the different structured metadata into all of your pages to get your website to appear the best on search results [1]. The long tail and residual effects of it get pretty insane.

[1] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

Charge for our product.

I'm the founder of Scrimba.com, an interactive code-learning platform. We went almost two years from when we launched our very first free course until we launched our very first paid course. In the meanwhile, we planned the "perfect" business model and also pivoted to a Teams-based product for a while.

Had I just dared to put up a pricing wall in front of our second course instead, we'd have gotten the signal we needed from the market much earlier. Once we started getting revenue, everything else became a lot easier (what to invest more in, which courses to prioritise, what to do in general).

Ran a web agency from ‘08-‘13, grew it to 20 FTEs fully remote then sold it.

A few accelerants:

1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the US.

2) Started replacing myself by hiring multiple managers, which helped when I sold the business as it was no longer just about me.

3) Converted long-term clients to pre-paid retainer billing with helped create predictable workloads and revenue streams.

I used to immediately launch on Hacker News, Reddit, Product Hunt, etc. the moment I finished my side projects. The problem I found with this approach is

1. Often times the product is a leaky bucket, and you experience a massive spike in traffic and very quickly see your growth asymptotically approach zero.

2. These platforms often times also are filled with people waiting to abuse your platform. For flurly, all of my original fraud problems originated from my product hunt launch.

Thus for GraphJSON, I went with a different approach. I shared my progress on my twitter account and mostly had my builder friends use the product. Over the past 6 months, the product has continually improved due to the constant feedback of this community. Word naturally spreads and so does the growth.

I’ll give the exact opposite of what you ask, just because we could easily have chosen not to do it.

Our business was initially built on analysing data from a commercial provider and selling those insights to customers. The provider required that both we and each of our customers paid a high license fee. It became pretty clear that the provider was moving towards lots of tools and value added features on top of their data that would directly compete with us. At that point we had the choice to either work hard to keep differentiating our stuff, or do the crazy thing and attack their moat by collecting our own data. I will admit I was somewhat doubtful that we could pull it off, it was insanely ambitious for a company that was four people at the time against an incumbent that had been around for more than a decade. Ultimately we worked with another small provider to create a data spec, acquired them and all their human collectors, and now we sell our tools on top of our own data, with its own unique selling points. We went from a fun hobby to a fairly prominent player in our industry. Our competitors have gone on to consolidate and do some exciting stuff too so I hope we were a bit of a kick up the bum there.

I think we could easily have chickened out or waited until we were bigger and the outcome would not have been nearly as positive. So I guess the lesson is sometimes that you have to picture the endgame right from the start, and pursue it as aggressively as possible, instead of with baby steps that might feel safer or more natural.

Be ruthless about hiring and your team. Think about recruitment early on to work out how you can get the right people to do the jobs. As someone said, "if you think hiring a good person is expensive, try hiring a bad one". Plan for how to get rid of people who are not working out (easier in some countries than others).

Be super focused. It is easy to chase the money in similar but different directions and then you lack a coherent business strategy or brand. We burned time building a hardware-based version of our product, which we didn't want long-term, because a customer had money. Took about 3 months of the entire company's time and we never saw any of that money.

Honestly evaluate your product/service constantly, but especially in the early days. Is it really something that can be sold or is it low-value and low-volume? Do people want it or need it?

You need to believe in your product enough to charge the right amount (usually more than you are charging) otherwise you send the wrong message to customers and possibly cannot afford to support it if it becomes popular. Think in terms of what you are saving your customer rather than how much it seems like it should cost for a e.g. piece of software.

I would disagree with some of the comments below. Marketing is important but not necessarily early on and not necesarily involving hiring someone. Same with SEO. Can be useful but very market segment dependent. Instead, the one skill of the CEO is to see what is working and what isn't and to deal with it. If you can see a funnel with nothing coming in the top, maybe you do need marketing. On the other hand, if you get the leads but can't close anything, you either have a product or a sales problem.

Not being afraid to lose to learn…

Reach out to customers with the MVP and just incorporate the feedback until the feedback changes from “we can’t use it because…” to “we need this integration” to “we need this pricing”

Me and my two co-founders are asking ourselves this all the time, and in retrospect every strategic change could have happened sooner if we had learnt faster and kept “doing things that don’t scale” as PG famously wrote years ago. The funny thing is that we think we are doing great in that regard only to realize again and again that we have to iterate faster and stop the urge to prematurely optimize for scale.

Our latest learning that we retrospectively should have seen earlier is to get rid of our fear of becoming consultants. We come from a consultancy background and have seen to many startups around us wanting to build products, but taking on consultancy assignments leaving them no time to build their product. We have been so determined not to fall into that trap, realizing now that we have missed out on some great opportunities when selling to enterprises.

Charge more! My product[1] was originally free, then $49, then after a year I started to bump up the price more aggressively. It's now $249 and I probably should have started with that. Devs either aren't willing to pay for boilerplate code (happy with open-source options) or $249 is nothing to them if it saves a week of dev time. Last year I hit my goal of $100k in revenue :)

1. https://divjoy.com

Establish what "trust" is. The play-by rule-book.

My approach has mostly been to get out of the way of what I don't know and hold on whilst having blind trust.

Like riding a horse, hold on and give direction of the course with balance of freedom to run. Give more freedom and get more trust and enjoy the exhilaration, however hold the reins too tight and you will be fighting all the way.

Walk the tightrope so to speak. Know if you give too much freedom it will buck you off and run for the hills, however, if you can maintain the balance of direction and trust, good things will come.

One go I had was a communications service provider in the naughties that went from zero to 20 mill revenue in one year and it did alright in the end, but with hindsight, I can see so many better ways that almost everything could have been handled.

In my opinion, the main problem that most businesses experience is TRUST. (On every level)

Without it there is no business. Business by definition is about more that one person so trust is imperative.

Is trust equally mutual within your business? Can you quantify that trust? Can other staff in the business? And the customers? The board? The shareholders?

If it is there with all parties than the world will be you oyster!

If not, well that is just business. (But you should mitigate it to take care of your own future)

Wicked growth makes the green eyes shine... Greed comes through the cracks everywhere. Not sure what can be done about this. Company Constitution? Culture?

These are just ramblings of a semi-serial pseudo-successful entrepreneur. I apologise. I don't know any answers but I do know that 'trust' is one of the crucial key elements of a successful business. Trust between every party.

Find the balance of trust between ALL steak-holders and get it ALL in writing. +2cents.

I became a specialist. In my industry there are a ton of general consultants. Some make millions, most get by.

When I chose to specialize, not compete with the general consultants, but make all of them clients, that’s when business took off.

Not my own business but from my experience at the B2B SaaS company I work for –

Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will start eating your lunch unless you take that leap.

It doesn't matter how smart your engineers are and how fully featured and bug free your product is. Unless you have a stellar sales team with the right leads who are pushing it on people with all their might, it is going nowhere.

Marketing, sales people, and such are all great but if you don't have product-market fit yet, you're beating up a dead horse here by focusing on growth. One of the first things I do when starting a new SaaS is setting up an event tracker (think mixpanel). At this stage, you barely have any users so no need for fancy analytics stuff. I just stare at the event log until I figure stuff out. Why are they not clicking on that button? Why are they skipping this card? Lots and lots of problems can be discovered and tracked by this way.

After all this, if I have a weekly user retention hovering around 30%, I can't be more happy. Then it's time to grow.

1. When we started to specialize in a vertical and created the narrative and the product for that vertical. This is esp. true in domains with many legacy players.

2. For some reason or the other, we have always had delays in announcing our fundraising rounds: both Seed and Series A announcements were delayed by 3-6 months. The moment we announced, we got a step magnitude more inbound customers. Lesson here is to not be a perfectionist and be willing to share the company/product publicly earlier, so you can incorporate customer feedback early.

PS: If it helps provide context for (1) above, our domain is fraud prevention; and we focused on payment fraud for Fintechs/Crypto instead of going after generalized fraud prevention across all categories like ecommerce.

I've been writing and selling my own software on the web full time since 2005. On the whole it was a 1000 small improvements to the software, website and marketing that improved the sales day by day and year by year. Rather than a blinding flash of inspiration that tripled sales overnight. But probably the single best improvement in sales came when I 'segmented' my event table planning product from a single price to 3 different price points, with the top one 10x the original price. Some details at: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/02/28/how-i-increased-sa...

I added a simple self-made affiliate system. It had two implementations. One allowed to purchase 10 or 20 "accounts" in bulk, resell for any price you want. And the other one meant that if two other people signed up for a free account, your account was moved up to the second level (basic, premium, pro). Once one of your referred accounts upgraded, then your account was moved up to the highest tier.

I implemented that over a weekend and it took off dramatically after that.

If just being self-employed counts and raising the bottom line counts as "take off": I should have made my services much more expensive much sooner.

I less than 40% percent of potential customers balk at your rate, it's time to give yourself a raise.

1. find the right business partners

2. launch before its ready

3. getting our value proposition down to one sentence for each user type

4. seo instead of vanity marketing

5. freemium model instead of free or paid

6. listening to customer feedback

7. deliver tangible results to paid customers before fundraising

8. "do things that don't scale" to compete with large competitors who are focused on IRR and monetization

Add enterprise-y features without alienating small/middle market customers, and then charging out the ass for it. People are very happy with it, too, as long as we provide good support.

Launch (instead of waiting for the perfect product)

For us it was Show HN. But can be anything - Product Hunt, Redit, etc.

Interview your customers and ask them what their biggest problems are, and why they like you.

Find and interview people who aren’t YET your customers and ask them why they aren’t.

Abandoning Macintosh for Windows. Released software for Mac in 1989, but sales stayed flat. Finally released for Windows in 1994, and sales took off. Time and money spent on marketing + engineering had a 10x better ROI under Windows. Gave up on Mac in 1999.

for freelancers / consultants: counter-cyclical marketing

start your marketing sprint when you already have a s##tload of work. otherwise you will always have a cycle of "too much work <> no work" + lots of stress because of that.

you need to start hussling way before the "no work" phase. and that timespan always overlaps with the "too much work" phase.

Creating on-boarding training discussing the nuances of different parts of the business. I use teachable now since it's powerful and inexpensive in my opinion at 99 bucks a month. I know this already sounds like a paid promo for them but It's not. I run a blood testing company and we have 150,000 customers who are keen on improving their lifestyle and health. I've been running digital operations since 2004. And I WISH i had been smart enough to document each tiny nuance, tip, how to and share it. Makes learning faster, keeps new team members engaged and happy since they are more comfortable they are in turn less likely to quit, and you don't have to hold everyones hand as much or at all. I could write a book on other things. but 1 other massive improvement was selecting mission critical stats to come inbound to me automatically in slack. i.e. site down, checkout errors, sales revenue comparable to previous period, customer tickets, i never have to go look for it. I connected it all to slack in one way or another and i see it first thing each morning. It helps me spot issues before they become big problems and it feels like i can see around corners because you get the pulse of the business.

Hope this helps. if you need some more help just email me jp AT jean-pierre.com

fun fact: This is my first real comment in Hacker News, I figured after seeing so many articles that helped me over the years, I'd give back. Thank you Hacker News and Y Combinator for all the great stuff over the years.

Moved up market and started selling to enterprise. Go where the money is.

Stop obsessing with VC money. Focus on winning customers' hearts and souls. Do things that don't scale (but bring food to the table). Most importantly, keep your optionality, which is the ability to pivot to whatever the market needs, not YOU or YOUR TEAM or YOUR INVESTOR needs.

Marketing, mostly SEO. Sooner you plant some seeds, sooner the results will come. And I like the compound effect of it.

Marketing is very important. Keep in mind, people need to learn about your app before they install it, not after.

Sales is only important if you're doing B2B, and even then I would be cautious, because sales people are sly. If you aren't careful, they sooth your board and suddenly you will be replaced by one of them.

I took a couple of sales training courses. One was an intro course for non-sales staff, and the other was for B2B selling with a longer sales cycle. Both very much helped with the social interaction side of selling, and the second one was very useful for structuring marketing approach and material.

Founder's Peronal Brand

What I mean here is that surley marketing,Creating MVPs and all the other software development lifecycle principles matter but whats most important now is having faith in the leader building it and that surely depends on his or her's personal brand,if he or she has a good personal brand, then getting that loyal set of early paying loyal customers or your company's true evangelisers or your employee's personal idol or your investor's faith - everything gets scaled up when your name is a respectable name in the market Example Kunal shah from Cred - even though his product is still not halfway near to a profitable stage, people trust that this is possible because Kunal is building it or example elon musk, people know about tesla or paypal or spacex more because its elon's companies rather than having a good awesome product or marketing strategy (i agree tesla is awesome though xD)

Be it getting the faith of your stakeholders, customers or team or just getting a respect from the market and at least the fact that your entry in the market becomes 90% more easier if you have a great personal brand and like its said "people trust people more than anything else and you achieve that trust by getting a respectable personal brand first and then shaping it out on the products you make or startups you incubate or invest in"

And as said in india, investors invest in founders till serie a rounds rather than the product xD

So I would go for personal brand of the founder is something which many founders don't think its important but is actually really helpful for a longer run :)

Hired a business consultant. Built systems for sales, marketing, etc. Had real goals. Everything about growing a business is hard. The easier part was the actual consulting work. Still hard. We sold after building for 9 years with a good exit.

We’re ~17k MRR right now. Being doing it for almost 2 years.

What made us take off is I and my cofounder running through our savings. I did it for ~15 months.

One thing I had to start doing earlier is not trying to get everyone buy our product (we sell news articles published online as a source of data for insight mining) [0]

I’ve lost so much time on people who’d never be able to use what we have unless we completely change our product.

And yeah, marketing is super important. And, it’s going to take some time.

[0] https://newscatcherapi.com

I think for me it has been a couple things:

1. Focus: Adopting management by objectives and concentration exclusively on them

2. Hiring: Spending more time finding top talent through referrals and being more prepared for interviews

Marketing. Raise prices.

Honestly, the two best things you can hire once you have some minimal traction are the best lawyer you can afford and the best accountant / business manager you can afford. The third bit of advice is just something you should tattoo inside your eyelids: cash is king.

Now, on with the first two.

"Hiring the best you can afford" doesn't mean hiring the best brand (Skadden. PwC etc). Find the person with the best technical expertise relevant to what you're pursuing. They're often stars from those shops who've gone out on their own -- just like you did.

Why? Don't you want to spend your money on a star engineer or great marketing?

No. Because you're in this game to win. And winning these days (whether going for an exit or, you know, an actual profitable business) needs you to have at least the following:

(1) Not make (or, more likely, not know how to avoid) stupid mistakes or ill-advised moves legally. (2) Not screw up the administration of your business

Even if you do everything else right, errors in either 1 or 2 can prove fatal. Like, literally, you will lose everything.

Good lawyers are like good soldiers these days. You don't go to war without soldiers. And you don't do modern business without the best legal help you can get. Even in the most advantageous, optimistic, friendly scenario, run it by an attorney who knows their stuff. First. During. Last. Or wander onto the battlefield with people who outgun you. You've been warned.

Next: good business administrators are worth their weight in gold. It is a distinct skill and some people really are called to love and be good at book-keeping, accounting, cash flows etc. Do not screw yourself on taxes, audits, book-keeping, invoices slipping through cracks, agreements not being fulfilled or anything in the "admin of business" that keeps you from staying laser focused on you do well -- which is not business admin.

Finally -- remember, business is business. Repeat it to yourself early and often. Business is business. The VC who seemed really friendly and just "gets you"? Business is business. That particular contract term that just doesn't sit right with you -- but the person on the other side keeps telling you not to worry about it? Business is business. Your cofounder is your best friend but now they're not pulling their quota? Business is business. This isn't being machiavellian. It's that everyone will be applying it to you.

Ultimately, good lawyers and good business administrators will ensure that you remember "business is business". Don't leave things to chance. Don't trust. Don't be emotional . Business is business and if you're not controlling your agenda, someone will be controlling it for you.

There's enough sh*t in business you can't control. At least stay in control of what you can.

Like other people mentioned, starting to market is the main one, but I think the bigger one was charging more for the product.

I was charging close to nothing for our original product, and I can't tell you how many people would argue with us or try to haggle. As soon as we increased our pricing, we started landing bigger companies who just paid without any question and required little to no support.

The memes are true about this sort of thing.

My answer is marketing, it is vital, and it would have been much better if we started marketing earlier.

Data segmentation. Segmentation of existing customers to find similar customers. With a reasonable number of paying customers there is always a sub segment who find you valuable. Wish we had invested more time finding more customers similar to that segment early on.

Add a payment option / add "buy" button.

https://bruzu.com was hobby project for months until I added plans. Now we have few customers nad I am taking it more seriously.

Founders personally selling

Can't outsource this or even hire for it in the early days

Has to be the founders

Experimenting with how we price the product and how we bundle/package our plans.

With all other metrics in the business staying the same, it had a massive impact on cash flow and (eventually) profitability.

High-value B2B product.

Magazine ads! Postcards! Care packages!

It can be hard to stand out digitally. It's easy to stand out in a world of junk mail and generic scenic-beach-view-with-just-a-small-logo magazine ads though.

Founder's personal brand What i mean here is that many a times customers employees and investors believe more on the founder's word and promises than the product or revenue model or anything else, so to make the world believe that even though not everything seems clear now but will be eventually or just getting those early set of loyal evangelisers for your application or your community, the founder's personal brand and his or her's personal brand in the market matters more For example - Kunal shah of cred or Ranveer Allahbadia of Monk E or Karan from Unacademy or Elon Musk per say, their companies get that initial set of customers or branding or even money per say, just because their founders have a respectable personal brand in the market As its said " you don't invest 100% in the product always, you invest in the leader building it "

You can take coverage from News publishing sites through sponsored content. Here is the site which you can consider https://www.connectedtoindia.com/.

Read this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LE4SR32/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Automation, Change control management, IAM

use www.useairlock.com for follow up with prospects. Certainly accelerates pipeline closing.

keep a clean code base

Marketing

To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner:

"The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people are still waiting for customers."

Let's say I've have been having kicked my ass more than I can count on some beliefs I've had, but I yet have to regret working with him.

I second this one…

I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.

Added rocket engines to the base

Not exactly "business" from a company perspective, but:

Learning Solidity. I've been in crypto space for a long time, always wanted to learn Solidity to write contracts, but always postponed. Played with some toy code in the past years and that was it.

Recently got back in the scene and saw how many new business opportunities it opens and how financially feasible they are now I hate myself for not going more serious in crypto and Solidity in the past years.

Anyway, later is better than never. (Which applies to pretty much everything in life)