The real cost is your time. Projects always take longer than you expect, especially if you haven’t done it before (the business part). Product is the easiest and has limited risks if you have decent dev skills.
Enterprise is also one of the hardest markets, not only technically, but also getting clients (3-12 months from first contact to money in the bank is normal). Enterprise is also a game where they don’t buy the best software, a lot of factors play a role in getting enterprise clients. It’s doable but definitely playing a new game on hard/insane level.
Focus on the problem that you solve for the business, without a very strong case for that and be able to gain a champion within the company you are selling to, it’s near impossible. As you can see its more about sales, and connections, and less about product.
I’ve been in your situation before serving enterprise SaaS as a two-person company for 5 years. It was very hard and I would not do it again. Then again, once we got clients they were easily paying $30k/yr with long term contracts in place. High risk, high reward.
If you are starting out you have different levels of risk you can take. Since your real prime-time years are at stake, are you going to play this game on hard right at the beginning? I’d suggest to start on easy, get more experience, and as you grow, level up. Once you have a couple $$$ in the bank, do bigger projects with higher risk/higher reward ratio.
That’s what I wished someone told me 10 years ago.
If I were you in this situation now, I’d first warm up those connections, as they will play a crucial role in your company. Is it something they want or need? Is the pain they are experiencing so hard they are willing to prefund the project? If you think so, try convincing them to get either dev money beforehand (hard) or have them sign a binding (hard) or non-binding (doable) agreement to pay xx amount when the software is ready. Include what features/problems you will solve in the agreement.
Your ideas about profit sharing are too complicated in my opinion.
If you are not able to convince them to prefund or either sign an agreement, for me personally this would be already too high risk. Unless those connections are decision makers and you play golf every month with them ;)
That’s what I would do in your situation and my 2 cents.
Wish you all the best of luck, not want to discourage you, but sharing my own experiences in a somewhat similar situation. If you need advice, help, or just wanna bounce some ideas, always willing to help out fellow entrepreneurs.
My experience too. Although I mostly order from Amazon Germany. The barrier for selling from Germany is also higher as you need additional tax registrations in Germany since this October.
I come from a non-traditional background. More than 10 years ago I started a niche community that grew at its height over 1.5M/monthly visitors. Everything custom built in PHP.
Then I co-founded a SaaS analytics service which we ran for 5 years.
In 2017 I started a solo project while learning Node.js, Vue.js, Postgres, microservices, to keep myself updated.
I decided that I wanted to join a team after going solo for a while and to progress my professional career. However having no CS degrees I lack foundational programming skills. I only know the stuff that I come in contact with so during interviews, sometimes I can't answer seemingly basic programming questions. I always focused on implementation and having limited time, didn't look for the why.
I'm falling between junior and senior experience and I feel companies have no clue what to do with me.
At the moment I'm learning advanced JS concepts, programming paradigms, data structures and algorithms, and plan to open source a project that shows all that. Showing my portfolio with projects is not enough for the roles I'm looking for.
I probably lack interviewing skills. So thanks for creating hatchways, I might use it in the future. From a hiring perspective, hiring full time based on a couple interviews is super risky. I actually like to work freelance/intern before committing myself - culture works in both ways. This is obviously a privileged position if you have time or money.
I like the idea of the hiring manager/interviewer being more of a coach during the process, and tailoring the process towards different personalities/situations.
If the pain point you are solving is big enough, people will accept buggy and slow products regardless. Sometimes its better to ship, especially if you are testing product market fit. A bug free, slick, with awesome tech used, is worth nothing if no one is willing to pay for it/solves a big enough problem.
A lot of solid advice. I’m surprised you learned so much in just your first year. It took me way longer for certain things to realize. Thanks for sharing!
I have been a passive user on Quora for a while now. At one point several years ago it forced me to sign up for reading an answer. This sucked.
However, I started receiving weekly digests, which included interesting questions and answers. I enjoy reading those digests and learned a bunch, professionally and personally from life experiences from other people. I never interacted until this year. It's good Sunday afternoon reading material for me.
Since I started answering questions this year (I became a top writer in certain topics), I've seen the other side too. I usually do not answer questions for pleasure only. I sometimes plug my business at the end of the answer but always make sure I answer the question and add value. I usually spend 1-2 hours on a question and I make Quora specific graphics to support my answer. Sometimes I do need to do extra research so this is where the 1-2 hours come from. I can see not everyone can spend this amount of time if it's not your business. The way I see it, people don't mind if you plug in your business if you provide value first.
Generally I'm a bit more positive than the average commenters here, as I received invaluable knowledge which changed and also solidified some of my own views. I've never compared Quora with SE, probably due to my use-case as to soak up experiences from other people instead of a source as factual information.
The value Quora provides for each individual depends on the selected topics when signing up and what you click-through in your digests. Somehow I ended up with interesting life experiences topics and never technical topics. I like airplanes but no aviation expert, but somehow I ended up receiving experiences from travellers, pilots, and crew. I find those experiences amusing to read.
I suggest to try to read and follow some of the niche topics outside programming, I think that's a better use-case for Quora.
So many useless services and so many who believe this year will end in a bullrun. If you ask them why, they can’t give a good answer, or it’s “because last year we had a bull run in December”.
I believe in Bitcoin and blockchain, overall I think last years run was good for mainstream understanding, but adoption and technology didnt keep up the pace of all price speculation. We correct, we cry, we slowly recover. Not this year, and not next year.
It's very very likely because of the Bitcoin Cash fork. It has become a pissing contest between Roger Ver (Bitcoin ABC) and Craig Wright (Bitcoin SV). While Craig trolls and threatens the Bitcoin ABC side by "bleeding them dry" in a hash war.
Jihan Wu, founder of Bitmain quoted:
“I have no intention to start a hash war with Craig, because if I do, by relocating hash power from BTC mining to BCH mining - BTC price will dump below yearly support; it may even breach $5,000. But since Craig is relentless, I am all in to fight till death!
The war is related to Bitcoin as the price of Bitcoin tanks because in a hashing war, both sides are likely to rent hash from the Bitcoin mining pool. This is being settled in Bitcoin, sold on the market to cover electricity, and thus suppressing the price of Bitcoin.
Since Craig is trolling around, threatening a price of $1,000 per Bitcoin in a full out hash war, people are selling before it gets even more ugly.
Another downside which reinforces the price suppression is for Proof-of-Work systems (where miners are rewarded based on their computing power), there's an unfortunate feedback loop in price drops. As said by Colin, founder of Nano currency, Low price -> low mining rewards -> turn off some miners to lower cost -> lower hash rate -> longer transaction confirmation -> lower price.
More details can be found in my Quora answer about this.
Elon Musk won. This was his ultimate plan, to move automakers from fossil fuels. They all made fun of them, execs from traditional automakers, but here they are.
The stories features was also stolen based on data that regular competitors would not have. Facebook used Onavo VPN data from users to see how features affect usage of Snapchat. They can also see which apps are very viral or sticky, which is why they bought Whatsapp for $19B.
I like the keyboard. Programming for 10+ years and swithching sometimes to Blue Cherry MXs. What I dont like is the touchbar. Completely worthless and in the way.
There is definitely a problem with the dust though, two keys already start to act weird and I keep my tech stuff clean.
There are two use cases at the moment that I can think off:
1. Proving origin and authenticity of a product through the supply chain (car parts, branded bags, wine). In China for example wine companies lose billions because of counterfeit wines.
2. Alternative currency for unstable countries - like Venezuela where everyone lost confidence in Bolivars due to massive inflation.
Current valuations are hugely inflated and doens't make sense. However, most people are there to earn a quick buck. They don't care about working products. There are many coins that do nothing and are outright scams but are worth billions just because everyone is willing to speculate.
I also feel a lot of people came from Forex trading where trading with leverage is normal. With the volatility of crypto's, leverage is not necessary anymore so that you can't get margin called.
I think its an exit scam. He will not be able to sell coins without upsetting his following, because he sells and then announced it on his channels. This will be followed a major dump and his followers will lose significant value during this dump.
Perfect cover up to liquidate his assets while covering his ass. No person seriously into crypto (especially with his amounts) does not keep it in a hardware wallet.
Amazon FBA businesses, dropshipping, blogs but that will take a while for SEO to kick in, Amazon affiliates, and other affiliate programs but you’ll need traffic to do that.
Enterprise is also one of the hardest markets, not only technically, but also getting clients (3-12 months from first contact to money in the bank is normal). Enterprise is also a game where they don’t buy the best software, a lot of factors play a role in getting enterprise clients. It’s doable but definitely playing a new game on hard/insane level.
Focus on the problem that you solve for the business, without a very strong case for that and be able to gain a champion within the company you are selling to, it’s near impossible. As you can see its more about sales, and connections, and less about product.
I’ve been in your situation before serving enterprise SaaS as a two-person company for 5 years. It was very hard and I would not do it again. Then again, once we got clients they were easily paying $30k/yr with long term contracts in place. High risk, high reward.
If you are starting out you have different levels of risk you can take. Since your real prime-time years are at stake, are you going to play this game on hard right at the beginning? I’d suggest to start on easy, get more experience, and as you grow, level up. Once you have a couple $$$ in the bank, do bigger projects with higher risk/higher reward ratio.
That’s what I wished someone told me 10 years ago.
If I were you in this situation now, I’d first warm up those connections, as they will play a crucial role in your company. Is it something they want or need? Is the pain they are experiencing so hard they are willing to prefund the project? If you think so, try convincing them to get either dev money beforehand (hard) or have them sign a binding (hard) or non-binding (doable) agreement to pay xx amount when the software is ready. Include what features/problems you will solve in the agreement.
Your ideas about profit sharing are too complicated in my opinion.
If you are not able to convince them to prefund or either sign an agreement, for me personally this would be already too high risk. Unless those connections are decision makers and you play golf every month with them ;)
That’s what I would do in your situation and my 2 cents.
Wish you all the best of luck, not want to discourage you, but sharing my own experiences in a somewhat similar situation. If you need advice, help, or just wanna bounce some ideas, always willing to help out fellow entrepreneurs.