Ask HN: What's the biggest challenge you face in your business now? - federiconitidi
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eesmith
Finding customers. Which, to be clear, is a very common challenge.

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slucha
I have created a MVP for a service that identifies your anonymous website
users by company and thus generates inbound leads. If you are in B2B let me
know if this might be of interest to you? Email in profile

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eesmith
Which means either you add tracking data to the pages, or you look at the IP
logs.

Along the lines of mister_hn elsewhere here, I don't do tracking. I had to
insist that my web developer disable cookies, and Google Analytics. So that's
out.

I look at my logs. Many are to google-proxy-66-102-6-174.google.com and the
like. Many more are for local ISPs like
host208-179-dynamic.233-95-r.retail.telecomitalia.it .

But even if I can get a company name out of it, that's not a lead. Which of
the 20,000 people in the company should I contact?

To preserve my anonymity, suppose I make software to improve headlight beam
designs in cars. (I don't know if that's a thing, but why not?)

Most of my clients will be car companies, or car part companies. Of which only
a small number of people will work on that task.

So, if I get an inbound link from Renault, which of the 181,000 people should
I contact?

Going to my business, it seems I shot myself in the foot. I have a no-
cost/open source version and a commercial version which is significantly
better (faster, more capable, etc).

The no-cost version, available via PyPI and elsewhere (that people unknown to
me did) has decent market penetration, based on conversations with people at
meetings. But they don't know about the commercial version.

I am far from the first to find that packaging/distro sites, which sit between
the user and vendor, make it very hard for users and vendors to know about
each other.

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tixocloud
I’d see if you can follow Snyk’s go-to-market playbook - sounds like you have
users and you have decision makers. We’re in the same boat.

You know your target customers but perhaps you also need to understand how
they buy software. For us, a website and the usual inbound tactics are great
but our target customers will expect sales reps, account execs, etc.

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mister_hn
Being safe from ad tracking and identity spoofing.

The biggest challenge is getting rid of fingerprinting and password-guessing.

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federiconitidi
Could you expand a little more? How does this impact your business?

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mister_hn
If you have to protect your information and don't want that others access
them, you need some safe mechanisms to prevent password leaks.

On the other hand, being tracked all the time alters the information that some
"algorithm" present to you while surfing on net, for instance Google Ads and
Search

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billconan
content marketing, build traction

