Roadblock. Seeking advice.

[BMT1987]

Hi folks,

I tend to type a lot because I'm excessively detail oriented, so I'll break down this post into the following sections so that the TL;DR; folks can still jump in and hopefully respond where they seem most interested.

-My Product
-My Roadblock
-Potential Courses Of Action
-What I've Learned

My Product:

As eluded to in my intro post, this post is about my MVP product (and a roadblock I've encountered with it) that I've created to address a need I saw going unaddressed. My product is essentially an online market survey tool. Parties join the app, then can see each other's market data. This eliminates the need for their employees to play phone and email tag with multiple market participants every week. This process as it stands now (if they're not using my competitor's product; more on that shortly) wastes about an average of half a day if not more of an associate's time. My app will drastically reduce that. But in order for the product to be valuable, I need to get users on it first. Anyway, I built this product after collaborating with one of these market participants (seeing them as a likely customer) that I saw was using a very subpar solution. But when I first started out, insofar as I could tell, I had no competition. Unfortunately, after 1.5 years of work or so (I could've done this admittedly much faster had I buckled down and focused harder; blasting through the desert of desertion) and having the MVP ready and deploying it to production a couple months ago, I discovered that I do indeed have an entrenched competitor who makes a pretty solid and more mature product (though not perfect from what I've been able to gather).

My Roadblock:

And to make things even better, my market participant partner who helped me with the design of my product, is now using my competitor's product. I've spoken to four other market participants in the area, and at least two are using this competitor's product as well (despite me thinking I was going to have an initial immediate market size of about 25 participants judging by the subpar solution I saw folks using (total addressable market however is probably somewhere in the order of 50,000+)). Anyway I'm not mad at the partner participant -- I understand it's just business, although I will say I'm pretty annoyed with the situation and am feeling pretty despondent/demotivated over continuing this thing; not sure if I can compete at this point. Turns out, I should've gone after this market participant's ownership instead of just the participant themselves, because that way, the ownership (the people who'd have the power to actually pay me and the ones dictating that the participant use this competing product) would've at least been aware of me and what I was working on, so that'd at least give them pause before deciding to go with the competitor's product.

The major roadblock I now see with my product, is that if I were to somehow push this product and somehow get some folks signed up on it, if they encounter another market participant with the competing product, whose product wins out in that transaction? Both products allow market participants to share their market data, but if my client sends a share request out to a non-client, or vice-versa, I'm afraid that my product will lose its value proposition because with two competing products, people may well be back to playing phone tag and email tag like they were already doing with this subpar solution (a shared Excel spreadsheet that anyone can edit).

Potential Courses Of Action:

1) Should I even bother trying to push the product still? I've only spoken with five market participants so I imagine a lot of folks will say "that's not nearly enough data to get a market sentiment". Out of the five I've spoken to, I had one participant who wanted a demo but then had to cancel and we have yet to reschedule. Three are using my competitor's product. Another expressed some initial interest but was going to forward my outreach to her boss and they'd let me know if they were interested in a demo. I have yet to hear back. Also, these people are end-users, but they're not the ideal customer because they don't have authority to pay me. I'd have to find some way up their chain of command so I can speak with someone who actually has the power of the purse. I'm not really sure how to do that.
a) A friend of mine who owns his own successful business said I should compile a list of 1000 small to medium sized market participants, and start going through the list to try and demo my product to them and get folks on it as he said small and medium size businesses have a different mindset when it comes to increasing their more entry-level employee's efficiency than big companies. I'm open to the idea but I'm concerned about The Roadblock.
b) An additional value-add to my product that my competitor doesn't have that I've been tinkering with, is essentially creating a targeted web crawler (which is how search engines like Google work; a program that crawls through websites following all links and indexing the information) to aggregate market information from available sources to use as an integrity check against what people were reporting in my system. My competitor doesn't have this. Also, if I were to do a good job of this, if my product doesn't sell -- this specific value-add feature/benefit web crawler may well be able to stand on its own, and be of value to my competitor. In other words, I could potentially sell it to them if I could find my way in the door to do so.

2) Find a completely different business idea to pursue. A cousin of mine mentioned to me some serious issues she has at her medical employer who got acquired by someone else -- sounded like there were several business opportunities there.

I apologize for being all over the place here but if someone could give me advice on how I ought proceed, I'd greatly appreciate it.

What I've Learned:

1) Find the person who is authorized to pay you and keep them in the loop no matter what! Even if they're not going to be your end-users.

2) Selling is really effing hard. Even when you're selling something "for free", a lot of people have inertia due to change aversion or whatever, and are thus slow to change their ways even if their existing ways suck.

3) Always assume you have a competitor even if you haven't identified one! Turns out I did have an established competitor but I couldn't find them via a web search because instead of "market survey" they fell under "business intelligence" for my target industry.

4) I've learned a lot of specifics about how to deploy an application to Azure (Microsoft's cloud platform). I've worked with Azure before but not from the ground-up on a new app. Most brownfield development already has the foundation (such as cloud platform) established, and thus a brownfield developer often doesn't have to provision new cloud resources. So this undertaking has been hugely beneficial to my career even if I never succeed in any of my personal business endeavors.

5) I also learned how to create a proof-of-concept/MVP application significantly faster than how I did with this project. Granted, I kind-of learned this from my new day job that I started a few months ago after FTE #6 as detailed in my intro post. I wish I'd been exposed to this knowledge earlier as it might've saved me a lot of time, but c'est la vie. For the technically-inclined, basically, if developing a web application, go about creating your UI first and use a minimal API to return hard-coded JSON data from your API endpoints. Don't waste your time developing a full-blown web API and underlying SQL database until you've got a few potential clients interested. This will help you knock out a prototype VERY quickly that you can get in front of potential clients to gauge market interest.

6) No business person gives a shit about your code quality. As a developer, you should care as you know high-quality code is easier to maintain and change, but don't let this paralyze you and inhibit you from getting something delivered.

7) I used to think I was extremely introverted if not outright antisocial, but several people close to me who've had quite a bit of time to observe me have noted this isn't the case -- they've stated that I have the ability/desire to really understand what people do and take an interest in it from how they've seen me interact with random folks working in coffee shops, farmer's markets, etc. I'm glad these people in my life have helped me realize this as I like to think it'll help me in my business endeavors.

 

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[nothingness]

7) I used to think I was extremely introverted if not outright antisocial, but several people close to me who've had quite a bit of time to observe me have noted this isn't the case -- they've stated that I have the ability/desire to really understand what people do and take an interest in it from how they've seen me interact with random folks working in coffee shops, farmer's markets, etc. I'm glad these people in my life have helped me realize this as I like to think it'll help me in my business endeavors.

This is the best thing about entrepreneurship. The self growth and self discovery, that's just not possible when working for someone else.
I have no expertise in the rest of your post, so good luck!

 

[MitchC]

I only have a fairly simplistic answer as I have no idea about anything in this space but I think it will be helpful.

You need to try and sell this thing to some customers before you give up, that’s the only way to know. That’s all I would be focusing on doing right now if it’s ready.

In these sales meetings you may start to learn areas where you can beat your competitor or what these customers want.

Maybe you could really niche down and serve a specific segment of this market rather than try and serve everyone.

Either way you learned a lot. And your idea is now validated.

As a side note out of curiosity, has your competitor raised money? This sounds like the kind of business where someone who raises money and moves really fast to get a hold on the market will win.

@Rabby may be able to offer more experienced insight?

 

[BMT1987]

...Maybe you could really niche down and serve a specific segment of this market rather than try and serve everyone.

Either way you learned a lot. And your idea is now validated.

As a side note out of curiosity, has your competitor raised money? This sounds like the kind of business where someone who raises money and moves really fast to get a hold on the market will win.

With regards to the competitor -- yes, I imagine they must've raised money somehow. From what I could gather, their company has been in existence for ~7 years, and even worse for me, their founder was initially in the exact market I'm trying to target. My market is software development, and not specific to any one industry. He was some executive-level person in the biz if I recall correctly.

But I've got a couple advantages he and his company don't.

1) As much as I hate my main competitive advantage being price, that's something they'll never be able to beat me on. Their company has over 1000 employees, and thus they have WAY higher overhead. My idea for the time-being is a side-venture, so I can win a war of attrition.

2) Nothing in the world really scales all that well beyond a certain point. My competitor likely has all the bureaucratic BS that most people hate about big companies. I'm a one-man army and so I ought to be able to be more immediately responsive to my clients' needs (at least while I'm small and/or don't have many customers). Since I control the entirety of my business, I can crank out new features and bug fixes and deploy them whenever I want. Big companies with multiple developers and stakeholders will without a doubt have slower/longer development cycles.

My next plans are similar to what you've suggested in your first sentence; for the time-being I'm going to 1) cut my target price since I have to in order to be competitive (not a problem at all) and 2) I'm going to niche down the software to focus on one specific problem, before trying to move up the value chain with it to try and solve more problems (like adding business intelligence/analytics and such). I can cut my product's price down to a fifth of theirs plus I don't have a big setup fee (or any setup fee for that matter).

I've also got a feature in the works that from what I could gather, my competitor doesn't have that would give me a competitive advantage besides being inexpensive.

AND an important update today: my original market partner that I was working on with this thing -- we went and did dinner today to discuss things in general. There's a big (yet local) conference for market participants in my state in a few weeks that I'm planning on attending with one of them (or by myself if I have to) so hopefully I can drum up some interest there from folks to try my product who aren't already using my competitor. I'm gonna be on the lookout for a potential cofounder who can help with sales too, and I'm also going to learn much more about this industry from the speakers there so that hopefully I can observe some problems and connect a few dots to see if there's some other problem that I could solve for these folks in the event I'm out-competed on this one!

Also, I was able to confirm that if a market participant were to reach out from my system to my partner participant, that they'd have no problem using my system in that case -- they just can't use it as their main go-to system with all their other participants since the decision to use my competitor was out of their hands; it was forced on them by their bosses (shame on me for not reaching up the bloody hierarchy to make someone up there aware of what we were working on).

But it's a good relationship with this market participant still. They apparently felt really bad when the decision from their bosses came down quite literally out of the middle of nowhere one day because they all thought "...shit, this is what BMT1987's been working on...". But I told them I wasn't mad at all because I understand that it's just business. And frankly if your bosses tell you that you need to do something with something specific (*THAT THEY'RE PAYING FOR*) -- you need to freaking do it if you want to keep your job, so I wouldn't want them to risk their livelihoods for my entrepreneurial hopes and dreams anyway.

So with this all said, I've got one more feature to work on in order to make my system interoperable with non-system participants. It shouldn't be too hard to complete. That plus the feature I referred to earlier that my competitor doesn't have could give me just a tiny enough edge to work my way into this market. Oh yeah and my partner participant suggested I make a demo video that I could share with prospective clients showing how to use the system (VERY GOOD IDEA). All hope ain't lost yet. I hope to give folks positive updates over the next several weeks.

If anyone has any ideas though on what I could do to better my position (this is a SaaS software product I'm working on) to compete against a much bigger competitor, please do share!

 

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[Rabby]

I only have a fairly simplistic answer as I have no idea about anything in this space but I think it will be helpful.

You need to try and sell this thing to some customers before you give up, that’s the only way to know. That’s all I would be focusing on doing right now if it’s ready.

In these sales meetings you may start to learn areas where you can beat your competitor or what these customers want.

Maybe you could really niche down and serve a specific segment of this market rather than try and serve everyone.

Either way you learned a lot. And your idea is now validated.

As a side note out of curiosity, has your competitor raised money? This sounds like the kind of business where someone who raises money and moves really fast to get a hold on the market will win.

@Rabby may be able to offer more experienced insight?

@BMT1987 I wouldn't necessarily recommend finding a different thing and switching lanes. In fact, I usually say that the point where you're sure it's time to give up is usually when a thing starts working. But even if you give up, you might get the call in a few days to help someone with the problem you've built a solution for... really it depends on how many people know what you've built.

Just because there's a competitor and they're good doesn't mean you're sunk. Often it means there's a real market, and maybe you can differentiate in that market. Or, it means you're now an expert in the area and can consult on solutions that include your product, or what you thought was a competitor's product, or something else. The key thing being that you're somehow solving problems for a customer. That's always important... the customer, whoever they are, needs to make and deliver their product. Support that, and help them make it easier to manage, and you'll provide value.

Try not to spend years on a product without getting enthusiastic feedback and letters of intent from hundreds of clients. I say that with the greatest empathy, as I have built several things and then realized I was wrong about how to sell them. But the social, salesey aspect of entrepreneurship is really important. You can actually make a superior product, the best thing in the world that fixes all computer bugs AND cures cancer, but if you don't talk to enough people about it, it never takes off.

The thousand person list isn't a bad idea. Even if the product itself doesn't take off, getting to know a few of those 1000 people, and having them know you as "the person who knows about this kind of software" has a good chance of paying off.

 

[BizyDad]

I agree. You have proof of the marketplace and the ability to compete on price.

Don't discount it as far as you were thinking. And include a setup fee that's half your competitions. But offer to waive that fee as an enticement for people to sign up. This way people feel like they're getting an even sweeter deal.

But eventually, once you have traction, people won't be shocked if you start charging set up fees, because you had publicized them all along.

At some point you're going to have to hire people. And you're going to have to be able to pay them regularly, so you definitely don't want to discount everything too far.

It sounds like you've got a thousand person operation you can build. Get to selling, then get to differentiating.

 

[BMT1987]

Sorry for the delay responding folks. I was in SLC last week and didn't bring my computer since my car was packed to the brim with stuff already.

Try not to spend years on a product without getting enthusiastic feedback and letters of intent from hundreds of clients. I say that with the greatest empathy, as I have built several things and then realized I was wrong about how to sell them. But the social, salesey aspect of entrepreneurship is really important. You can actually make a superior product, the best thing in the world that fixes all computer bugs AND cures cancer, but if you don't talk to enough people about it, it never takes off.

The thousand person list isn't a bad idea. Even if the product itself doesn't take off, getting to know a few of those 1000 people, and having them know you as "the person who knows about this kind of software" has a good chance of paying off.

This conference I was planning on attending apparently requires I sign up for at least a year membership for $325.00 in order to attend the conference. I have GOT to think that this would be a great place to get to know people and possibly get some users onto my SaaS (if I can't do it here then I gotta think my idea is more-or-less sunk). I'm spending ~$80-$90/mo on the product itself (the cloud infrastructure to host it) despite nobody using it. Should I cough up the $325 for a one-year membership to this conference/industry organization?? I might be able to reach out to my market-participant contact and see if she has a way of getting me in there without me having to pay for a membership, although I have no idea if this'll work; my theory is I won't be able to get around this paywall.

Don't discount it as far as you were thinking. And include a setup fee that's half your competitions. But offer to waive that fee as an enticement for people to sign up. This way people feel like they're getting an even sweeter deal.

I like this idea a lot. Thank you!

At some point you're going to have to hire people. And you're going to have to be able to pay them regularly, so you definitely don't want to discount everything too far.

I am *really* hoping to avoid this. Or if I must hire people, keep the number of employees to a minimum. Once I get people using this thing, the customer base should be able to grow organically as I have a mechanism built into the SaaS for that (minus the billing part; but I have no paying customers right now so implementing billing functionality seems like it should be a tertiary concern until this thing starts growing and I need to start charging more than a few customers).

 

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[BMT1987]

Oh yeah with regards to attending this conference next Thursday that I need membership in this industry advocacy organization for -- base membership for the year is $325 but then apparently I gotta cough-up $125 for the admission to the conference itself. Do folks think I should do it? I think I probably should, even though I'm not thrilled at having to spend money on something when I'm not sure if I'll benefit (guess I'm doing this with my SaaS idea already anyway though so I may as well; lol ).

 

[MitchC]

Oh yeah with regards to attending this conference next Thursday that I need membership in this industry advocacy organization for -- base membership for the year is $325 but then apparently I gotta cough-up $125 for the admission to the conference itself. Do folks think I should do it? I think I probably should, even though I'm not thrilled at having to spend money on something when I'm not sure if I'll benefit (guess I'm doing this with my SaaS idea already anyway though so I may as well; lol ).

If you’re not willing to spend $450 to try and sell it I don’t know why you even bothered making it

 

[Rabby]

Oh yeah with regards to attending this conference next Thursday that I need membership in this industry advocacy organization for -- base membership for the year is $325 but then apparently I gotta cough-up $125 for the admission to the conference itself. Do folks think I should do it? I think I probably should, even though I'm not thrilled at having to spend money on something when I'm not sure if I'll benefit (guess I'm doing this with my SaaS idea already anyway though so I may as well; lol ).

You're better off spending the money on the conference than you are paying $90 / month to host a cloud application that nobody is using. That sounds high for an app that's sitting idle tbh, but the point remains... don't optimize the app, meet the people. Take a screenshot and/or video of the app in action, and show that to people. Perhaps then you can get a deposit or a contract from someone and use it to pay for the app hosting.

There's no way to know if you'll get any sales from the conference, but if you don't you will still learn more than you would by hosting the application for zero customers right?

 

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[BMT1987]

If you’re not willing to spend $450 to try and sell it I don’t know why you even bothered making it

Yeah good point; plus MJ put a post here that seems kind-of related. People do stupid stuff like waiting for an hour in line for cheaper gas, but time-value of money and whatnot would make it so you're better-off going elsewhere and paying more for gas than wasting your time (which is everyone's most precious commodity). Why wouldn't I bet ~$450 one time for the decent potential of a lifetime of revenue?

I was thinking with regards to this conference that besides networking and potentially getting clients for my app, I may well gather completely new ideas for what folks in this industry need. Thus, I'm gonna sign up this week. I'm working on a couple additional features and want to get at least one finished before signing up. The first feature makes my app more reliable (there's some special stuff you gotta do to take into account "transient errors" that the cloud sometimes produces just due to being... the cloud), and the second feature is more of a hard-requirement to make me competitive with my big competitor out there. I'm almost done with feature #1, and I don't think feature #2 is going to be too hard to implement either. I gotta knock this out and deploy this sucker before 3/24.

You're better off spending the money on the conference than you are paying $90 / month to host a cloud application that nobody is using. That sounds high for an app that's sitting idle tbh, but the point remains... don't optimize the app, meet the people. Take a screenshot and/or video of the app in action, and show that to people. Perhaps then you can get a deposit or a contract from someone and use it to pay for the app hosting.

There's no way to know if you'll get any sales from the conference, but if you don't you will still learn more than you would by hosting the application for zero customers right?

It kind of is, but I'm using Azure so perhaps that's where you're getting your numbers from (I've heard AWS is cheaper). This includes an App Service Plan, two SQL databases (one for DEV and one for PROD), plus an SMTP-as-a-service provider (for sending emails and whatnot from my app), and a small file system (only $0.29/mo so not even worth mentioning). After double-checking my past few invoices since I've had all these services, the bill bounces between $83.50 on the low end and $94.67 on the high end. And I just double-checked and realized that my SMTP-as-a-service plan is currently free; only 100 e-mails per month. I figure this won't be a problem until I get a decent amount of customers. Then it ought to run me about $10/mo.

With regards to the conference, you're right about how much I'd learn. At a bare-minimum, even if I don't get any clients, the networking could be extremely valuable plus I ought to be able to get a better idea of what people need in the industry need by networking listening to the speakers and such. This may help me generate new ideas for products and services.

 

[Rabby]

It kind of is, but I'm using Azure so perhaps that's where you're getting your numbers from (I've heard AWS is cheaper). This includes an App Service Plan, two SQL databases (one for DEV and one for PROD), plus an SMTP-as-a-service provider (for sending emails and whatnot from my app), and a small file system (only $0.29/mo so not even worth mentioning). After double-checking my past few invoices since I've had all these services, the bill bounces between $83.50 on the low end and $94.67 on the high end. And I just double-checked and realized that my SMTP-as-a-service plan is currently free; only 100 e-mails per month. I figure this won't be a problem until I get a decent amount of customers. Then it ought to run me about $10/mo.

Likewise, I've heard people run into cost issues with Azure. AWS too, but perhaps less frequently. I don't know how much of it is fixed costs vs scaled costs on Azure. But on AWS, I can spin up a POC service that costs like 30 cents per month (not counting domain registrations). I can run a business with thousands of users and multiple automation systems for less than $300 per month average cloud hosting costs. Some of that is optimization, but some of it is also just not being charged very much (if anything) when resources are idle.

 

[BMT1987]

Likewise, I've heard people run into cost issues with Azure. AWS too, but perhaps less frequently. I don't know how much of it is fixed costs vs scaled costs on Azure. But on AWS, I can spin up a POC service that costs like 30 cents per month (not counting domain registrations). I can run a business with thousands of users and multiple automation systems for less than $300 per month average cloud hosting costs. Some of that is optimization, but some of it is also just not being charged very much (if anything) when resources are idle.

Azure has an offering for PoC stuff (SQL DB for just under $5/mo and there's a free App Service instance as well) -- but I wanted my SaaS product to be ready to hit the ground with clients which is why I picked a cloud instance that can handle low-level production loads. This is all before I knew that my market-participant partner had gotten marching orders from their owners to use my competitor.

 

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[BMT1987]

Okay business update for today. I created a post about getting a permanent business address here, and I registered to become a member of this industry group so that I can register for this tech conference. I'm a bit irritated at the moment because it looks like my account has to go through some manual review process before it gets fully approved (though without a doubt my membership payment was automatically approved ).

Anyway... I'm going to call this local industry organization tomorrow to ask them about my membership approval so that I can register for this conference since registration ends this upcoming Tuesday.

Other than that, I completed the "reliability" or "resilience" feature to my application yesterday. It's nothing exciting for my users, but it allows my application to essentially retry executing some pieces of code upon encountering transient errors (for non-programmers, essentially random errors such as a connection getting dropped, etc.). Apparently this is quite the necessary thing when dealing with the cloud. I think I've only encountered one or two transient errors when working on my SaaS application, but a lot of end-users wouldn't think to manually retry their action so I figured this kind of error-handling was necessary.

Next-up is to try and add in this feature so that other market participants can enter their info into the system even if they're not part of it so I can be competitive with my competitor. I gotta try and have this done by the big conference Thursday (assuming my industry association account gets approved). I think this ought to be doable.

 

[BMT1987]

Okay so a couple days ago, I was able to get registered for this conference which starts tomorrow. It sounded at first like I was going to have to be a sponsor, but by calling the organization and explaining the situation, they were nice enough to help me bypass their website and get me registered for the event.

This feature I wanted to complete, after thinking long and hard on it, is actually going to be more involved than what I originally thought it would be. It's not a big deal, but I'm definitely not going to have it done for the conference tomorrow. I have produced some code for the feature though over the past few days. Anyway, regardless of it not being done for the conference, I at least have an MVP worth demoing to see if folks are interested.

If nobody's interested, then at least hopefully I'll make some good contacts in the industry and I'll be able to fish for ideas by listening to people's problems and the speakers on the lecturing circuit there. I'm not gonna lie -- I'm actually rather stressed out about all this, despite simultaneously looking forward to it. I'm not sure my market participant partner is going either which is a bit of a bummer as it would've been great for introductions, but this will force me out of my comfort zone to meet folks myself. I'll report back tomorrow after this thing is over with and let folks know how it goes.

 

[BMT1987]

Alrighty so good news and bad news from the conference. Good news is I got the attention of a director-level person at a market participant (e.g., someone who has the authority to write me a check). It looks like they're pretty decent sized as well (which means more $$$ for me) judging by what I could find online about them. On the downside, it was just this one person as the other folks I spoke with (two, in total; also kind-of pathetic on my part but I was trying to qualify people before mentioning my product as I didn't want to seem like a douchebag pushy salesman especially to folks who already had a solution they were content with) already had a solution that my product provides. It was either my #1 competitor, or it was data they aggregated from other disparate systems they use to get their market survey information. I also learned of another competitor that's doing things a bit differently from me -- they're straight-up screen-scraping.

I was working on an experimental screen-scraping feature to bolster my app as well as I know the top-dog competitor doesn't have that, but in the interim I'm working on adding the one remaining feature I need to at least be competitive with the top-dog competitor.

Also more bad news -- the top market participant in the industry I learned through a friend of mine who works for them, apparently signed a contract with my number one competitor. That's huge $$$ for my competitor. But again, they're a big established company, and I'm not.

This decent sized company, the one with the director whose attention I got (wants to connect on LinkedIn and learn more about my offer) -- they use the #1 competitor at *some* of their market participants, but only a few of them. After I asked her what their concern was about using them for all market participants -- boom, price-point.

So I can definitely compete there. Also my friend who's in middle-management at the #1 market-participant company said although my big competitor is pretty decent for their needs, he basically told me exactly how I could design something that'd be a game-changer; namely it ties in with the experimental screen-scraping feature I was working on.

I suppose considering this, I shall continue my work. It's definitely an uphill battle though. But that-said I need to attend more if this industry conference's events and get to know more people in this industry in order to attempt to move my product, so thinking even further on this -- I definitely can't give up yet.

 

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[BMT1987]

Okay so since my last update, I attended a lunch meeting with a bunch of market participants and learned of another established competitor, so I'm legitimately wondering about my ability to compete now. I think there's still a shot with smaller market participants, but meeting them has been a challenge. I also met another vendor or two at this lunch meeting where I uncovered some other customer needs -- someone would like to integrate with another software product that *everyone* in the industry uses (unfortunately licenses for this industry software's API runs between $20K-$30K/yr, although it looks like that license is more geared towards people who own their own SaaS product that they'd like to integrate). I'm hoping I can contact this big software company to inquire about a lower-cost license for individual market participants and other vendors who don't own a SaaS product, but would like to integrate with their software to produce their own dashboards and other integrations.

I also found out that at least one market participant would love to have their own full-time software developer but they don't have the budget for it -- I wish at the time I'd inquired further but didn't think about it. Anyway if they can narrow down their scope into discrete projects, I could pick that kind of thing up for a nice side-hustle although the ability to scale custom software development/integration isn't really there outside of me running my own firm with multiple developers that I hire out to customers. Running my own big firm isn't really something that interests me a whole lot although I'm not completely opposed to it. My real business goal is to eventually financially free myself and my time; something that can't really be done if I own a firm.

Anyway as for my project update -- I'm working on finishing one final feature to make my product competitive with... the competitors which is allowing people who aren't part of the system to perform market surveys at the request of folks who are members of the system. It's been more challenging than I initially anticipated because my whole system was designed with authentication in mind e.g., in order to use it, you had to be registered and authenticated with the system. So now I'm having to find ways to bypass that without creating a bunch of security risks. On the bright side, I've done that already with one area of the application. I'm continuing forward with the other areas and am hoping to meet more people in the industry and hopefully some smaller market participants at a big conference this Wednesday that I can get interested in this product.

If worse comes to worst, I've got at least one other idea on the backburner that I was already playing around with a couple weeks ago, but had to force myself to stop since it seems like all entrepreneurial advice is to focus on one thing at a time (which makes sense). I'm also gearing up to reach out to my cousin who I learned last year has an idea for something in her industry that she's confident she could sell. Regardless, I'm going to make sure I do a lot more market research this time before going full-throttle into a business endeavor as it could save me a lot of time and money. But as I said in a prior post (I think?) -- even if no revenue comes out of this product, I did at least learn a lot that only helps me in my day-to-day career as a software engineer, so the personal growth factor of engaging in this project has still made it worthwhile.

 

[BMT1987]

So today's conference was... okay. There wasn't as much opportunity to network as I'd hoped, and I didn't get to meet any of these smaller market participants like I was anticipating. The one redeeming thing is that I was able to introduce myself to someone who's a director-level person who worked with the director-level person I had mentioned several posts ago. That first director despite being interested in what I had to offer unfortunately literally left for a new job opportunity at a company in a different industry about a week after I met her, so I wasn't able to really follow-up there.

This new director seems interested in picking up where the prior director left off with me though, so that's good. Plus she's local so it ought to be easier for me to invite her for coffee or lunch or something so I can get a better understanding of her concerns with one of my competitors and hopefully I can demo my offer to her.

Otherwise I went around the tradeshow and introduced myself to other vendors and did just general market research looking for ideas. One fellow mentioned he'd actually just like a basic educational product for his staff since none of the schools are teaching anything about insurance, taxes, or retirement these days, and then another person in the general contracting business was spit-balling ideas with me and there definitely seemed like we came up with a solid idea for helping different interested parties track money in a transaction (think big insurance payout that has to be spent on what the payout was for; there's usually quite a few people involved in that transaction and a lot of money switching hands and people arguing back and forth on who paid what, when, etc.). The downside is as I went to other contractors on the showroom floor, they seemed to not have the problem this first contractor was talking about -- that or I regurgitated the idea poorly.

Anyway... I'm still sticking with my current idea for now until I 1) finish the one remaining feature that's truly needed to make this competitive and 2) try to market and sell the crap out of it since I haven't really engaged much with #2 yet. I'll admit though my motivation has kind of waxed and waned with this due to my (in)ability to generate interest. It's kind of stupid of me to feel this way I think though since I most definitely haven't reached out to enough people about this product, so I try to keep that in mind. I did think from my initial market research however that sales would be a bit easier than it's been (boy was I naïve; sales is freaking difficult)!

And although I don't think many people are following my progress thread, for those who have -- I wanted to apologize for going a month or so without updating this thread. I've had updates to give, but I'd been busy either working directly on the product or doing other life-related things (rather, my girlfriend having me do other things; lol). Balancing life plus business endeavors is hard.