[happytiger]

This is great. I love it when there’s honest post from a builder.

The explanation for failure is clear to me. None of these products as they are constructed are customer-lead. They don’t start with product market fit. As crazy as it hounds the number one reason startups fail is a lack of customers.

You love building the technical solution. You want to have market success.

But your passion is probably not talking to the customer, gathering requirements, or doing promotional talks and webinars.

You need a product or marketing focused partner to handle that side of things. I’ve always looked at the ideal team as being three roles: ops, product and maker. The details, the customer and requirements and the build team each are critical to getting product market fit and that’s just everything when it comes to this stuff. I would just focus on finding a partner in crime because your are obviously a wonderfully talented engineer.

[rcurry]

A friend of mine who is an entrepreneur likes to say the trick to starting a successful project is to “find someone who is bleeding and has their wallet out.”

[danjac]

The successful SME owners I've known have worked in an industry for some time, and have found (often by accident) a profitable niche or pain point. If they needed to build something they've done it themselves with a "For Dummies" book on their lap or hired a student or junior dev for peanuts, but the technical side is very much an afterthought. One or two I know started with just an Excel spreadsheet and a Rolodex of contacts (or the modern equivalents).

Sure their "solutions" were a pile of technical debt held together with duct tape and a prayer, but they got profitable to the point they could afford professional developers to build something more sustainable.

An experienced developer should be able to out-compete these guys out of the park - they would be able to build a solid solution, or at least an MVP with a good foundation, on day 1. But it's quite rare to find a developer with both coding experience and the insights and contacts in a specific industry. Often when I see a developer running a successful SAAS, here or on Indie Hackers, they tend to be selling pickaxes and shovels back to the developer industry such as web analytics, IDE plugins, books, etc. because that's what they know.

[kingcharles]

This was one of my dumbest failures:

http://www.dudefactory.com/

(it has no SSL cert, it uses Flash which is 110% dead)

It was launched at the height of AIM/MSN Messenger/etc. I thought we could charge $1/£1/€1 per picture.

Two things: none of our target market had money (you could pay by SMS as well as card, but no-one was doing that), and the avatars just weren't attractive - the women wanted ones that looked like dolls, not weird cartoons. Tried pivoting to AdSense supported and make about $30 a month IIRC.

[astrange]

This is https://picrew.me which is popular enough.

[kingcharles]

That's neat, thanks for the link.

[arsenico]

You were just so ahead of the whole NFT curve.

[kingcharles]

Yeah, 20 years later and Paris Hilton would have been showing off her Dudette on talk shows.

[lifeisstillgood]

Someone posted a link today about the 4 Ps - which dredged up a few synapses from my college days and the realisation that all the post-2000 advice people have been trying to learn has always been known

- Product

- Price

- Placement

- Promotion

[clairity]

as much as the MBA is maligned in tech/startup circles, ~90% of startup "learnings" is taught in business school, mostly in marketing classes, because business is mostly marketing (and the 4 P's are the pillars of marketing).

[tnolet]

Came here to say something like this. I’m a tech person. You have to teach/force yourself to love listening to and talking to customers’ problems. The programming comes later.

[altdataseller]

By ops, do you mean sales vs devops? If so I would agree.

[taormina]

Ops as in operations. That might mean selling, that might mean hiring, that might mean something else, but "the rest of operating a business". COO. "Devops" is a subset of the maker making it work.