Intro, Why my first business failed.

[anon25]

I live in a third world country, so the numbers might appear low when converted to dollars. But adjusted to COL, I was making almost same amount as a full time job for software engineer would pay. My primary motivation for starting a business (while also freelancing alongside) was to be able to afford my college fees and my living expenses and not have to take a boring clerical job.

While freelancing, one of my clients mentioned how hard it was to grow an Instagram account and how current Instagram growth companies sucked. I created a bot that reasonably avoided bot detection and followed growth techniques as mentioned by guides on the internet. It generated 10-12 new followers per day. While not astronomical, these were all real people actually intrested in the account.

My business went through different stages of failure. I was charging 300$/client and additional 25-50$ for updates depending the severity of bug fixes. Instagram would update something in their website and my bot would break, leading to angry customers. Subsequently, my client size shrank from 12 to 2. These were entire agencies serving multiple client with my product, which went on to hire developers in their countries to work the product themselves. The final nail in the coffin came from Instagram which came after my payment partner that supported international payments and asked them to shut me down. In total, I made 5000$ from the business which ran for an entire year.

Reasons I failed:

• The Control Commandment: I put all my eggs in the same basket. I was always at the mercy of other people. I voilated the control "C" every step of the way, from the product to how my payment and orders were fulfilled.
• I was focused on making the maximum amount of of money instead of providing the maximum amount of value. I would never give any discounts or demo of my product. I though a youtube video would be enough to sell my product, but looking at it from a customer's prespective, only people who really need the bot would have bought it.
• Instead of a buy once and use forever model, I should have started a subscription based model. This would've ensure consistency in revenue and everyone would get the updates instead of paying seperately for it.

If you guys have any more reasons or suggestions or lessons to be learnt, please let me know. I have taken up an internship in my final semester of college and will probably take up a job in a small startup to learn more on how they work. I'm also currently working on another social media product, which follows all 5 commandments. I am ensuring the commandment of Control by diversifying my service. Instead of targeting small influencers, I'm now targeting bigger influencers and making products that solve their operation overhead.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Ernman]

An interesting read. I'd also suggest that part of your failure was that you were NOT providing any real value. I know it may seem like helping people grow their INSTA accounts has value. But betting on a hack to grow any social media account, as opposed to actually having an interesting story, vid, pics, doing the work., is fools gold - for both you and your clients.

At least you made some money off of them. You also likely learned some interesting coding tricks. But of greater importance I hope you learned that there are vastly better ways to create value than trying to hack a system. Especially a system with a lot of resources dedicated to defeating the hacks you, and many others, try to create.