This is all good stuff, but it kind of misses out on one of the things I'm most interested in and which I feel is holding me back the most: I'm terrified of marketing and trying to attract customers.
There I said it.
I've got a hundred ideas of things I could do, and I know how to create every one of them - but no idea how to validate the market or go about finding custom.
2) Build the product. Make a sales page. Offer a 30 day trial on all accounts.
3) If someone signs up, you have 30 days to figure out billing.
Couple of points:
- No, this is not a great method. Getting out of your house and talking to real people is always better.
- Any effort is better than nothing. And unless you have a product in the wild which someone could sign up for, you are doing nothing.
- If you have time to comment on HN, you have time to build an MVP
Also checkout Gumroad.com. Its about the easiest way possible to bill people. Once you've sold a few units, then you can worry about finding a better deal.
One is that you are, like a lot of people, modestly averse to doing something novel that seems hard. (E.g., "I could never run a 5k." Actually you could; you just don't know how to get there from where you are.) That's a solvable problem. The main trick is to get started; oonlynce you are doing research on customers, the hacker part of your brain will have data and something to start optimizing, so you'll be fine.
If that's you, try something like Lean Startup Machine. I volunteer as a mentor for it, and the team context and short timelines force you to get out there and start bothering random strangers. Who it turns out are not bothered at all, and are happy to talk. Once you get good at it, it's even fun. From there, read a few of the Lean Startup books; they're full of techniques.
The other thing you could mean is that you are literally terrified of dealing with potential customers. That is also not unusual. Programmers skew shy. The main reason I spent most of my teenage years learning to code was that I was awkward and people were scary.
If that bothers you, go see somebody about it. Call up a few therapists and have a meeting with the ones you like. If you find somebody solid, dig into the social anxiety. I know it goes against the hacker ethos to spend 20 hours dealing with a professional when you could spend 200 or 2000 hours trying to solve the problem yourself. But in this case, I think it's worth trying to get quickly to the think you really want to do, which is make and sell some things that people are excited to buy.
I used to have that problem too. I forced myself to go on the street to start talking to potential customers. Many days I just wandered from gas station to gas station talking to people while they pumped their gas. It's just a mental hurdle. You can totally do it!
Here's a way to start: pick the simplest one that you can do the quickest, then find a group of people near you and go and present it to them for free. It's a great way to give yourself a deadline, crystallise some concepts, and find out that everyone does villify you as much as you thought they would :)
It's also a good way to guage interest and road test the content.
How do I do that? Sorry if I sound pretty simple but having never done it before there's a barrier to break. I didn't use the word "terrified" lightly. Where are these groups of people that aren't just friends and family, that I can present products to?
Throw a niche/type of product at us, and someone will have some good ideas. It's hard to say without knowing what sort of thing you'd be building though because a tool for helping recruiters won't go down well at the local Linux User Group for example ;-)
I've always been amazed at how poor companies are at simple timesheet tracking. For example, the company I'm at now is a s/w dev company and we are still expected to fill in bloody Excel forms for managing time spent on specific projects/customers. We also have to fill in holiday forms in Excel, with the result that people (including my manager) never know when I'm on holiday until they are surprised by the Out of Office email reply.
So - a simple time tracking system, then. I would probably make a SaaS version online, and one which you could purchase and install locally yourself (or pay me to come and set up for you). And we can assume that it's going to be the awesome of awesomeness.
I'd probably write enough of it to make a minimally viable product that looks juicy and could take to customers. How would I go about finding these potential customers? Do I have to go door to door in my local area? Google Ad-words?
See, the reason it's interesting to learn that is most of the things I do are aimed at developers, so finding developer groups is really easy. I'm not experienced in the general business networking world but there are certainly things like local chambers of commerce, freelancing groups, and general networking groups to attend.
patio11 has more insight and practical advice on this sort of stuff than I can offer. A recent comment of his, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657402 .. although I imagine jumping in head first to creating a local event is probably not what you want to do (yet).
Time tracking is a fairly competitive market. There are hundreds, probably of thousands of solutions that you will be directly or indirectly competing with.
On the other hand, the market is very large and there's lots of room for different companies.
I haven't seen a variation so far that doesn't annoy me.
Set some basic goals for yourself like meet a new person each week. Get some cards.
If you're really starting from zero in terms of networking, go to a meetup and start talking to people, then aim to spend a year practising networking. You'll find out what constitutes quality in terms of networking soon enough.
Also check out Ruben Gamez's course on mixergy.com/premium called "networking for introverts", and his interview is good too.
In fact, just go watch mixergy :)
If you'd like to have a longer discussion about networking feel free to email me iain@workingsoftware.com.au
I used to think networking was for losers, but done right it's surprisingly non-spammy, fulfilling and lucrative!
I know of a couple socially awkward men who did the following:
1. Cut a hole in a box.
Actually, no. Wrong concept. That's not it. Let's try again.
1. Go to Central Park on a summer afternoon.
2. Ask 100 random strangers out on a date. No fancy approaches or bullshit
pick-up lines. Just start a conversation, and ask before a minute's
up. Oh, don't ask for a phone number (you might get a fake, or
non-returned calls, and that's worse than a flat-out rejection).
Ask for an actual date.
3. Your median outcome will be zero; some people get lucky
and get 1 or 2, but don't count on it ...
4. ... but you've now been rejected 98-100 times and you're still alive.
Learning to sell ideas is a similar process. You're going to fail a lot, especially if your ideas are any good (because they threaten established power-holders). Just keep going. You'll fear rejection less as time goes on.
Here's an idea: Read this free ebook: The Flinch
The idea is simple: your flinch mechanism can save your life. It shortcircuits the conscious mind and allows you to pull back and avoid danger faster than you can even imagine it’s there. But what if danger is exactly what you need? What if facing the flinch is the one best way to get what you want? What are you afraid of? Here's how to find out.
I don't like this, since it imposes externalities -- in the form of wasted time and an uncomfortable end to the conversation -- on the hundred random strangers you pick.
You're typically introducing a positive, not a negative. Most people enjoy a quick chat and find being asked out flattering even if they're not interested.
> Maybe if it's a rare occurrence, but I think it would get irritating before long if a lot of people took the advice of asking out random strangers.
When you pick an obscure tactic, the whole point is to trade on the fact that others aren't doing so. If by chance that particular tactic does get popular, you simply pivot and pick another obscure tactic, or move to a field where there are fewer players.
I hear ya Phil, it's tough. In addition to what dools said (great advice), pick the idea you care most about. Typically people who don't move on an idea actually don't care about it enough to get their hands dirty and get in front of customers. Also, I've had a few friends use Kickstarter as a tool to validate their ideas.
I'm terrified of marketing and trying to attract customers.
Every time your boss annoys you with a "How's it going?" status ping you are forced to sell yourself. Granted, there isn't immediate income on the line, but the status fluctuations have ultimate income-altering effects, sometimes with severe nonlinearity (i.e. your slight annoyance at a not-enough-to-do boss's fourth-in-a-day status ping ends up rippling into you getting fired).
That's not to say that consulting isn't harder, because it is. There's an established (if hilariously corrupt and inefficient) market for full-time employment. The consulting market is a broken word-of-mouth mess. And you constantly have to fend off the parasitic type of client that wants more leverage over you than he should, by rights, have. (That is, he wants to pay you on an as-needed basis, but have the reputation-impaling power of a boss.) That sucks, for sure, and it's one of the reason why medieval-style reputation economies deserve to die.
The fact is, though, that you're already constantly selling yourself as a corporate employee. If you have 27 good months and fall down in the 28th, you'll probably be fired, or at least harassed in some permanent way ("performance improvement plan") that makes it useless for you to keep coming into work; your career there is over. In that context, you're already a freelancer, even if an employee.
Sure, freelancing is terrifying but I've seen enough to look past the selling points of employment and realize that it's a form of freelancing that is (a) less selective and therefore easier to get, but (b) designed to pay you just enough to survive, so you can't save for lean times, in the way that a genuine freelancer does (and must).
There I said it.
I've got a hundred ideas of things I could do, and I know how to create every one of them - but no idea how to validate the market or go about finding custom.