[dangrossman]

These lessons won't apply to 99% of startups, but they're what I've learned work for me:

Sell to small businesses. Not consumers (too hard to convince them to spend money), not enterprise (too much work for me; I hate sales).

Make something that will earn the customer money, or save them money. If it can earn or save them more than you charge, it's easy to sell, and they'll be happy to pay for it. That covers a surprisingly large number of potential business ideas any developer could create on their own. One of my first successful ones was just a WordPress plugin to add Amazon-style review/rating capabilities to any site, before anyone else had commoditized that. It saved money (versus hiring a developer) and earned money (most of the customers were affiliate marketers building product review/comparison sites, and their sites earned them more commissions when they had good-looking user reviews on the product pages). I made $250K from that plugin before selling the business on Flippa.

Make it easy to get that value out of your product as soon as possible. I do a free trial. I expect users to at least "get" how they can earn or save money using the product before that trial's over. The most important aspect to that is to get onboarding right: good lifecycle e-mails, a good first-login experience, and walkthroughs or something else that guides new users through the product. That's also what minimizes the customer service load.

If you have a good product, the customers will come. Well, maybe you'll need some AdWords ads to get the first ones; that's what I did. Now there's 2-3 signups a day that are just referrals from existing customers. It's enough to stay ahead of subscription churn.

Oh, and pricing is important. I doubled W3Counter's MRR by changing the plans around and adding annual billing. Improvely's MRR grows as the customers' businesses grow since pricing is tied to the level of traffic their sites get. The value they get out of the product grows with that too, so everyone's growing together and happy about it.

[bhayden]

Out of curiosity, and I don't mean this at all in a negative way: Why do people pay for W3Counter when Google Analytics is free and seemingly a lot more powerful? Do people really find GA that intimidating?

[dangrossman]

W3Counter's more fun. It's bright, colorful, nothing's buried multiple menus deep. Whole classrooms sign up for it every year while learning to build webpages. It gives your site a hit counter so you can watch the visit count go up every time someone new checks out your site. You can "spy" on those new visitors, seeing where they came from, watch them move page-to-page, stuff GA doesn't do with its aggregate-level batch-updated reporting. New site owners love that stuff. I also first created it years before Google bought Urchin and made GA.

[bhayden]

Unless I'm misunderstanding, I am fairly certain GA does everything you just describe. They have a real-time menu option and I can see my users going from page to page. I can see the number of people on my website right now (21).

I guess the bottom line is your platform is much more approachable and easier to understand. Thanks for the response.

[dangrossman]

Following individual users around (something W3Counter lets you do) is fundamentally different than a real-time aggregate dashboard of the same users (something both sites have). A dashboard is interesting to a business. Friend-watching is interesting to ordinary people. "Oh, I just got a new visitor from Facebook in Camden. I have a friend in Camden, that's probably Jessica! I wonder what she's looking at? Oh, she just opened the guestbook page and has started writing something!" is fun for someone running their first blog.

[bhayden]

Thanks for the responses, this sounds cheesy but you're an inspiration for the goals that I'm working towards right now (making SaaS products for small businesses). I will start working on it full time in about 4 months (with ~2 years of living expenses saved up). You give me hope that it's not just a pipe dream :)

[Cyph0n]

Thanks a lot man! I'm currently in the brainstorming phase for my dream startup/business and your advice came at the right moment, especially the comment about targeting small businesses!

[147]

Hey Dan,

Got a ton of value out of your post. Just wondering one thing, how much of Improvely did you build before you started running ads?

[dereking]

Thanks buddy great advice!