
Content Snare: Leaving a job to build a SaaS business - nicoserdeir
https://www.failory.com/mistakes/content-snare
======
justboxing
The actual site link is buried at the very bottom of the long post, so here it
is, in case you are looking to see just the site (like I was)

[https://contentsnare.com](https://contentsnare.com)

I had the same exact problem this site solves. Built a website for my Boxing
Trainer (for free) with content placeholder and a landing page video. He never
gave me the content like Services, Testimonials, Certifications etc... for
months at end, despite a lot of pestering from my end and despite servicing a
lot of happy clients who were only too glad to provide testimonials.

Then he TXT-ed me one day and said that a Gym that was looking to hire him
told him that his website looks "empty" and he was mad at me.

~~~
anitil
Apologies for the low value comment, but I loved the little comic on that
page. Precisely described the problem and makes me want to throw money at them
to make it go away, despite it being completely irrelevant to me.

~~~
jimmyrose
Haha those started because I drew up some extremely crappy stick figures to
send to a designer to do up properly. People in our Facebook group were like
"OMG THEY ARE AMAZING KEEP THEM"

Now they're on the home page

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mrfusion
The best part of this service is that it nags the clients for you and they
won’t hold the annoyance against you.

I’m thinking maybe building a similar service for managing people. Call it
tasksnare. Take all the confrontation out of management. You just set up a
task on tasksnare and it will keep checking up with the worker until it’s
done?

What do you guys think?

~~~
mikekchar
I think there are much better ways of solving this problem. I'm only really
experienced with software developers, so I'll stick to that, but I think it's
probably similar in a lot of other situations.

Measurement in processes is a kind of Heisenberg situation. Every time you
measure something, you have potential for affecting it. For example, if I go
to a developer and repeatedly ask if they are done yet, there is a good
probability that the developer will decide to be "done" just to get me off
their back. Later when you discover that important things were skipped in
order to get it out the door quickly, you will have a problem.

Because of this, it is better to have "passive" measurement. In other words,
the activity itself should indicate whether or not it is done. If we were
watching someone dig a ditch, we could decide if the ditch were dug just by
looking at it. If it wasn't done, we could get a feeling for how long it will
take by looking at how much was done so far. If we do that discretely, then
the worker is not affected.

Of course, with software, this is not really feasible most of the time. You
_could_ insist that people check in their code often and follow the progress,
but most management does not want to be so involved. Instead, it's better to
have a shared document where a developer marks that they have started
development on something and marks when they have finished (i.e. the code is
merged and is or can be shipped).

As long as the developers are good about indicating this (and, as a manager,
you should be strict about making sure this is done), then you know when tasks
are started and finished. What's missing is "how much longer". Again, it is
not a good idea to ask the developer. Instead we should rely on statistics.

Each task will take a certain amount of time. We can estimate that time. The
estimate is a random variable with a certain distribution. I'm not sure what
that distribution will be, but let's consider a case where each task is set up
so that it is expected to take about the same amount of time. The time between
completions might reasonably be governed by an exponential probability
distribution. In other words, over time it becomes more and more likely that
the task will be complete. For each task, there is an average completion time.
Furthermore, if we group the tasks into a reasonably sized iteration (say 30
or more tasks), we can measure the average of these averages over many
iterations.

As an example, say we have 10 iterations, each with 30 tasks. Each iteration
will have an average duration for the task over the 30 tasks. We can then
compute the average of those averages over the 10 iterations. The cool thing
is that no matter what the distribution of the individual tasks, the average
of the average is normally distributed. _This_ distribution has the wonderful
property that half of the distribution lies to the left of the mean and half
lies to the right.

This allows you to predict pretty closely when an iteration will finish
(though _not_ individual tasks!). In other words, you can take that average of
the average, multiply it by 30 (the iteration size) and 50% of the time you
will complete the iteration in under that amount of time. If you also look at
the variance you can calculate the 70%, 90% or whatever completion rate you
desire.

Of course, it doesn't always work -- only when your team works well together
and when they aren't pressured or pestered all the time. It's the manager's
job to ensure that _this_ happens -- let the statistics predict completion
time.

You may be wondering, "What if I want to know the completion time of an
individual task"? My answer: as a general rule, don't do that. It's a terribly
horrible idea. It breaks your team. Of course there are times when you
absolutely need to do it, in which case you can pester them in person. You
should do it so infrequently that using a service would seem ludicrous. If you
absolutely must micro-manage your team for _every_ task, then you have broken
your team and no tool is going to save you.

~~~
lioeters
This was insightful! I've read though previous long discussions on HN and
elsewhere about the relevance, meaning and value of estimates in project
management. Your comment really summed up how to approach estimating tasks in
a logical and sensible way, that I think makes sense for both developers and
managers.

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andyakb
First, I just want to say that building anything and getting paying customers
is never easy so it's impressive to see what these guys have done.

While there is definitely a large market of agencies suffering from this
problem, I don't think this is the "true" solution.

Clients hire an agency because they just want to pay somebody to build them a
website (or whatever it actually is). When approaching this, they are almost
definitely not thinking at all about having to do anything other than tell the
agency what they want.

This is the client having unrealistic expectations, but they aren't supposed
to be the experts, so it should be on the agency to be clear about those
expectations. Even if you think you're clear about the about of work required
of them, most client will drag their feet to no end on delivering the content.
This is because they have 1,000 other things to do, don't really know where to
even begin, and are getting frustrated because the reason they went to an
agency was because they didn't have the time to deal with this.

Looking at setting up endless reminders as a solution misses the reason they
came to you and loses out on a ton of value. Clients don't want to do this.
Find a way so that they don't have to and then charge for that. If a client
doesn't want to pay to have you do it at the start, give them a deadline for
the content, if they don't get it to you by then, they can either get the site
as-is or pay to have you do it for them.

What content do you need from the client? Figure out what questions you have
to ask them to create that content, schedule a call, then ask them those
questions, get a transcript, and give it to a copywriter. Then give the result
to the client along with a timeline of "if this isn't approved or edited by X,
then it is going live as-is."

I get where Content Snare is coming from, but I think it misses a much bigger
underlying point of why this is such a problem.

~~~
jimmyrose
There's more to Content Snare than just blasting your clients with reminders.
One of the most important parts is making it easy for clients to provide
content. You can do that by providing structure and visual references.

That way it's easier for them to understand what they need to provide.

When they understand what needs to be done, it often gets done.

We've found that's the big difference between the people Content Snare works
for and ones it doesn't. The ones that take the time to lay it out properly
and provide instructions get content faster. The ones that sign up, put in a
couple of pages and let it blast their clients never get anywhere.

This is why I'm in the process of creating a bunch of templates that lay out
copywriting instructions and wireframes... to get people started down the
right path faster

(sorry if this is hard to read. I'm on my phone and half was done with speech
to text)

~~~
steve_adams_86
This was the value I perceived mostly as well. I likely wouldn't use reminders
at all. In my experience, if a client isn't on the ball and can't remember or
be bothered to send content, I probably don't want to work with them.

Making it easy to send the content though, that's great. Keeping it all in one
place is even better.

This would be great if you could host it at your own domain (or can you
already?) so clients just go to your website to do it rather than a totally
different service. Just drop a widget into your own web page or something,
tell clients to go to yoursite.com/content/clientName where they log in and
start viewing. I suppose that would complicate things in other ways, but it
would be nice in general to not make a user remember yet another service and
url that's totally disparate from your own company.

~~~
jimmyrose
That's good to hear actually.

Right now you get a subdomain of contentsnare.com

I think it really needs the space of a full browser window to get the full
experience, especially if there are screenshots/wireframes in the layout.

If this was squashed down into a typical column on the website, it could get a
little crowded and hard to follow but I definitely see your point on this.

The best we have right now is the ability to share a request with a link - no
login required. So you could have a button in your client portal or a client-
specific page to open their request

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throwawayqdhd
Slightly off-topic, but if you're in the building phase, I HIGHLY recommend
setting up a placeholder website and putting up some content and getting some
backlinks.

If you have 12+ months of content and backlinks, you will have a much better
foundation for getting organic traffic once you do launch.

------
koverda
$1k per month? Is that revenue? Doesn't sound like it's doing too great.

~~~
fardo
I think a lot of developers forget, perhaps due to their current annual salary
and due to high costs of living, that a geography-independent $1K a month is
nothing to sneeze at.

For example, rent in Michigan for a three bedroom apartment is about $1,200 a
month [1], meaning your rent would be $400. Let’s say you spend $200 a month
on groceries, and spend $400 a month on insurance, gas, bills, and other
mandatory expenses.

Congratulations: you’re short term net financial neutral!

In theory, as long as your acquisition rate is neutral or positive compared to
churn, you now live for free, without a boss and without an expectation of a
40 hour workweek. In theory, you can now retire. In practice, you can grow
revenue, and nothing’s stopping you from starting business two and increasing
your “retirement’s” margin.

For the right person, these conditions are life-changing.

[1] [https://smartasset.com/mortgage/the-cost-of-living-in-
michig...](https://smartasset.com/mortgage/the-cost-of-living-in-michigan)

~~~
justboxing
> a geography-independent $1K a month is nothing to sneeze at.

Right. Also, it's not very obvious, but it looks like the creator is from
Australia, likely lives there (as the address listed in about page is also an
Aussie address).

Not sure about Cost of Living, but definitely gotta be less than Bay Area /
Silicon Valley...

James ( Jimmy?), if you are reading this, you might wanna update your about
page with some story about you (builds trust), instead of a testimonial from a
random user...
[https://contentsnare.com/about/](https://contentsnare.com/about/)

~~~
kondro
You might be interested to learn that average rents in
Brisbane/Sydney/Melbourne are about AUD$2600/month (~USD$1900) for a small 2
bedroom apartment.

Plus expensive power, fuel, telecommunications, food, etc due to oligopolies
in each of those spaces.

What I'm getting at, is that $1000/month doesn't go very far in any of our
capital cities (and most people here live in or directly around our capital
cities).

~~~
roganartu
> average rents in Brisbane/Sydney/Melbourne are about AUD$2600/month
> (~USD$1900)

Melbourne and Sydney maybe, but Brisbane is drastically cheaper. When I was
studying in Brisbane a few years ago my rent was in the ballpark of $300-400
AUD per week for 2-3 bedrooms, even at the higher end of $400/w that's only
$1700AUD/m. You can even buy a two bedroom apartment for under $300k in
Brisbane, compared to the $1m or more the same would run you in Sydney or
Melbourne.

In contrast, when I graduated and moved to Sydney for work we lived a similar
distance from the city as we did in Brisbane and yet were paying $500/w for 1
bed and much less total room.

I suspect Darwin, Perth, and Hobart are similarly cheaper. Generalising and
saying all our capitals are expensive is incorrect, though I can understand
why perceptions are driven by what happens in Melbourne and Sydney since
nearly 50% of the population lives in one or the other.

~~~
kondro
For some context. I live in both Sydney and Brisbane (and commute). There are
some slight variances, but if you’re comparing like-for-like in
apartments/living, the costs are also very similar.

And the populations of the regions around those three cities makes up more
than half the population of Australia.

------
julienmarie
Using it since last month. It really helps our fulfillment teams. Still a
young product, but it solves the need quite well.

~~~
jimmyrose
Thanks Julien!

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kondro
Cool product, looks like it solves an annoying problem for agencies!

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cm2012
As a marketing consultant, this looks really useful. Signed up. Separate note,
do you have an affiliate program? Would love to try to drive conversions for %
revenue. My email is in my profile. I specialize in targeting SMBs on
Facebook.

~~~
jimmyrose
Sure do. I'll shoot you an email but there's also an affiliate application
form at [https://contentsnare.com/affiliate-
application/](https://contentsnare.com/affiliate-application/)

------
jakoblorz
"The original idea was actually completely different to what we ended up
building."

Nearly every internet-startup, ever

