Background:
I started my career as an Electrical Engineer, created 2 products, then pivoted to Software Engineering and founded a software startup.
12 Steps To Starting your a Software Company
and 3 Unit Tests to to measure your progress
Or the art of Changing Hats, Calendar Time and not waiting by the phone.
By Clay Nichols
Below are step by step instructions based on my experience running a successful small software company for the last 14 years. Below that are some milestones for measuring your success along the way. These are principles that I just followed intuitively. My partner works in the industry our software serves and so a lot of this ("stay close to the customer" sort of stuff) was built in naturally. I violated the rules about finding customers first one time and that was the only one of my products that wasn't a success (it was, in fact, a miserable failure commercially. ).
How to make Calendar Time work for (instead of against) you
I've found there's a certain amount of "Calendar Time" for things to develop. For example, it takes time for the customer to convert from a "prospect" to a paying customer, and it takes time for the effects of marketing (ads, Adwords, etc.) to take measurable effect. You can't speed up these Calendar Time events so tt's helpful to have something else to work on instead of "waiting by the phone". The steps below interlace marketing/sales and product development productively while also giving you something to do while waiting on something else.
Start.
Start an Adwords campaign to start finding out the right keywords. Make "beta trial sign up" one of your conversion metrics. A willingness to give out their email address is the closest (and dearest) thing you can ask of the visitors at this point. All visitors are not equally interested (or equally likely to buy your product). Ones that sign up to be a beta tester are much more likely to be worth your time selling to. The goal of the Adwords Campaign is to find which keywords are likely to attract customers, not simply attract visitors. If all you wanted were eyeballs on your site, you'd just advertise "free sex". But out of the nearly billion people on the internet, you want the folks who are likely to be your customers.
I started my career as an Electrical Engineer, created 2 products, then pivoted to Software Engineering and founded a software startup.
12 Steps To Starting your a Software Company
and 3 Unit Tests to to measure your progress
Or the art of Changing Hats, Calendar Time and not waiting by the phone.
By Clay Nichols
Below are step by step instructions based on my experience running a successful small software company for the last 14 years. Below that are some milestones for measuring your success along the way. These are principles that I just followed intuitively. My partner works in the industry our software serves and so a lot of this ("stay close to the customer" sort of stuff) was built in naturally. I violated the rules about finding customers first one time and that was the only one of my products that wasn't a success (it was, in fact, a miserable failure commercially. ).
How to make Calendar Time work for (instead of against) you
I've found there's a certain amount of "Calendar Time" for things to develop. For example, it takes time for the customer to convert from a "prospect" to a paying customer, and it takes time for the effects of marketing (ads, Adwords, etc.) to take measurable effect. You can't speed up these Calendar Time events so tt's helpful to have something else to work on instead of "waiting by the phone". The steps below interlace marketing/sales and product development productively while also giving you something to do while waiting on something else.
- Feel their pain
- Be the customer.
- Find a few representative customers.
- Evaluate the market.
- Paper prototype and get feedback from beta testers.
- Alpha prototype. The simplest thing that will be of net positive benefit to the customer. It doesn't need to be professional. It might be ugly. It might crash a bit. As long as it's better than what the customer uses now,it's good enough. Someone asked Seth Godin what advice he'd have for his own child on how to start a business of their own.
Start.
- Get feedback from Alpha testers. Interactive demos, etc. Look for common feedback themes.
- Find keywords that your customers use
Start an Adwords campaign to start finding out the right keywords. Make "beta trial sign up" one of your conversion metrics. A willingness to give out their email address is the closest (and dearest) thing you can ask of the visitors at this point. All visitors are not equally interested (or equally likely to buy your product). Ones that sign up to be a beta tester are much more likely to be worth your time selling to. The goal of the Adwords Campaign is to find which keywords are likely to attract customers, not simply attract visitors. If all you wanted were eyeballs on your site, you'd just advertise "free sex". But out of the nearly billion people on the internet, you want the folks who are likely to be your customers.
- Beta version. Get Beta feedback. Does everyone have trouble starting the program? Do they all ask the same questions "What does XYZ mean?". Remember: add features that help a large % of your users and harm a small % of them. Stay focused on your goal. If you're creating a Contact Manager and someone is using it for some other task they'll start asking for weird features to get their non-standard task done. On the other hand, if a lot of your users all "misuse" it the same way maybe you've discovered an unmet need. That's how Flickr started: it was originally a gaming site with the option to share photos. Turns out the photo sharing was the "killer feature". They sold it for around $20 Million. So... look for trends and make sure that the customers who are giving feedback are representative of your market.
- Let visitors to site sign up to get a trial when it's ready.
- Let some of them try the trial if you think it's ready.
- Work on Beta 2.
- Finding beta customers for whom your Pain Story resonates. They understand they have a problem and see how your product could mitigate their pain.
- First dollar - First sale (ideally to someone who doesn't already know you, but hey take what you can get) - validates the value of the product
- Stranger Money - Next 10 sales - validates your marketing. (If you can get 10 sales from strangers for $x in marketing then that's probably repeatable and there is a future for revenue from this product. Whether there is profit is another question. But if you can't get to this point, then you'll never reach profitability)