Software product

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription – In this video let's talk about maybe creating a software product because you have the technical skills so there are many many many different kinds of software you can create you can create as you know business to consumer business to business first let's give touch a little bit on business to consumer a couple of examples Chrome extensions or even WordPress plugins or other kinds of plugins they're very typically very easy and small types of software to create maybe it's still challenging to create them but comparatively to a you know enterprise level software it's way way way way way way simpler to create those and those might be good places to try to promote the main issue is that typically incumbents in these spaces plugins and extensions that are already being widely used by people it's very hard to compete with them and you basically have to you know that there's not that many ways to promote them other than and you know the Chrome extension store or the WordPress plug-in store or the main place where you look for them and if you're not coming up in search if they come if the incumbents are dominating search it's really hard to get your extension off the ground and so you might do a lot of other things so the marketing might be a problem here unless unless you come up with something novel for example like just an example I'm not saying you should do this but just an example let's say like Bitcoin is like really popular now and you go and you're like one of the first people to make a Bitcoin extension where like it literally shows you when to buy when to sell and whatever right so okay I'm but because it's Bitcoin related you're not gonna have as a competitive an environment for promotion whereas if you had maybe coupon related extension or plugin then guess what there's other plus other plugins and extensions have ten years of marketing as an advantage and so of course they're gonna out-compete you so if you can look at new and evolving developing niches this year next year you after that see what's coming around the and that's what you should jump on and especially if you have a little bit of expertise in this area so that you're not guessing what people might like on the b2b side larger software it's harder to create and the problem with software that's harder to create is that whole theory of Eric Ries and the Lean Startup kind of fall out the window and what you really want to do is embrace the ideas that we covered from Steve Blank and customer development and really talk to potential customers because it's far harder to create usually it's far harder to create software for businesses because they just have more requirements the software is more bulky and sales is a challenge because a lot of the sales is direct sales and that's just nightmarish for example in one of my first project and then I created was like I was working on search this was like circa 2008 or something like that you know I was trying to work on you know better search I was trying to use Semantic Web and natural language programming you know just understanding how computers understand language and issues with that and I was trying to sell this may be stupidly I don't know to companies to use for their internal search maybe not companies like Amazon or some of those but you know companies that follow you know that are not small but are big enough to need very robust search but don't have the in-house expertise to build it so that was my sort of like target and it was really hard to get those meetings and obviously nobody no salesperson partnered with me so I'd we really had to go and book those meetings myself have to drive had to waste the whole day driving there doing the meeting driving back sometimes you travel can be even more than than just one day so it's really not an easy thing to sell and the conversations they're not great they're like if you're it's very like hurry up and wait do you have this do you have this do you have this and then you're like no let me go build it you quickly go build it they're like well I have to get approval and then it takes them two months to get approval while you're sitting there and anxiety for two months you know you have to make your business get off the ground so it was a very brutal sales experience for me and it's also brutal too cold email cold call generate leads there's ways to make them easier but they're never that easy or that never free if it's easy if they have to pay some freelancers and it's a nightmare and the sales cycles take forever 309 months sometimes to sell to a company depending again depending what you're selling can sometimes it can sometimes be shorter but yeah it's not easy so sales are brutal and again you have to really talk to the people working in this b2b come by these businesses first and really get a consensus that yes there's a tremendous need for something and if you build it they will use it and I almost don't build anything before that because you're just gonna waste so much of your effort and who knows if you're gonna ever be able to sell it and that's exactly what killed my early business where I try to create business-to-business software that just didn't work.