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by lettergram 871 days ago
It really depends on what you’re selling.

I found a cofounder who knew the space super well (one of these folks). It’s a niche market, for people who manage massive budgets. We can probably save millions per year right out of the gate, so it’s an easy pitch.

“Hey, we designed this for you. Here’s how we save you $X per year. Plus here’s some references. We want $Y and you’ll save $Z net.”

Now, I chose this field because I had tried other side projects and businesses.

Worst one I had was a website called easy-a.net - we FOIA requested universities for the grades for every class for 5-10 years. We could then predict people’s grades & how much effort it’d take for a given semester based on a small sample of real data from that user.

Anyway, we had idk 250k students using it across 10-12 universities. Was crazy to see my whole campus try it out and I basically tossed it together in a night. That said, made no money. Trying to charge was pointless — college students don’t pay. Loved the product; no real net revenue (broke even)

I’ve done that a few times with problems I’ve had. And simply put, I didn’t want to do sales this go around (though it’s still necessary). This time I just picked super high value customer & figure out how to maximize value to them.

I started with who I wanted to help, then figured out their biggest issues.