
Software Engineer to SaaS Founder - a13n
https://hackernoon.com/software-engineer-to-saas-founder-c16154013e12
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SeeDave
Pretty good article, and it's hard to argue with any of his advice... but it
seems a bit prescriptive and I would have liked if he had included some
examples, lessons learned, etc.

Otherwise, and with absolutely zero gratuitous negativity intended, I get the
impression that he wrote this piece to pitch Canny.io as opposed to genuinely
wanting to help other entrepreneurs.

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a13n
Hey Dave, thanks for reading!

I honestly think if I had read this article 2 years ago, I could have gotten
as far as I am now in half the time. That's huge, and I genuinely think these
words can help others.

I mentioned Canny at the top of the article because I got feedback that I
should in order to show my credibility around talking about the subject.

If it didn't somehow benefit Canny, it wouldn't make sense to spend the time
writing it. It definitely wasn't my only motivation though.

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SeeDave
Fair enough, and I'll probably regret making that comment sometime in the next
year or so.

I probably spend way too much time on HN, random VC Blogs, Medium, and
consuming other startup-ey content so it would probably be healthiest to
interpret the comment as a reflection of my own skepticism/impending burn-out.

That said, Canny looks pretty cool. Hope it goes well :)

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DavidParmelee
Great article in general. User or customer research definitely shouldn’t be
about idea validation. “This feature is good, right?” is a loaded question
that would give responses that don’t reflect what your market really thinks.
People who ask it find out what they really thought when they launch to
silence or experience high churn.

I love how you address value in pricing, too! And how you identify that there
are lots of good states between dead and $100MM per year. I know several
entrepreneurs who see their SaaS as more of a lifestyle business, and high six
figures / low 7 figures gives them a very good lifestyle.

This is the first time I’ve heard of Canny, and the product has an interesting
premise. As a user researcher / design strategist who was a developer before,
I’d like to see it have a way to map the users giving feedback onto user
personas or customer personas instead of treating each user like they’re all
the same.

That would make Canny a lot more powerful, in terms of prioritizing features
and showing companies how to make higher-value decisions, like redesigning
their product, realigning their content, or splitting their product (for
different pricing tiers or in general).

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a13n
Ah yeah! We really want to do "feedback segmentation" where you can plug it
into Salesforce / Intercom / Segment to see what your "enterprise customers
are saying", or etc.

Thanks for reading :)

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exelius
Yeah, a lot of engineers look at business and think "Well, it can't be that
hard..." And it's not -- but you don't have as much control over things as
most founders pretend to, and you're really at the whims of your customers.

I think you're right, a lot of engineers start with a solution in mind and
that's the wrong way to go about this. Sure, you can spend a month building a
prototype to validate your idea, but if your idea is something that nobody is
willing to pay you for, it's not going to make a good business.

That's what the phrase "do things that don't scale" means -- go out, find
something that someone is willing to pay you to do, and do it at a discount so
you can work the inefficiencies out of the process. If nobody is willing to
pay you to do it manually, it's not a market worth chasing.

The vast majority of products are simply new implementations of an old
idea/service with some enabling technologies under the hood that allow you to
do those things with less overhead (thus you can undercut your competitors for
a sustained advantage).

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a13n
Thanks for reading! I definitely left FB thinking I had a good idea, spent 3
months building it to find out people didn't reallllly want it. It sucked.

Definitely wish I could go back and do that differently which is what inspired
the post.

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exelius
Yeah, if you go and ask customers, there are a lot of things people will say
they want -- but only a few they're willing to pay you for. My rule of thumb
is that if the problem is in the first category, it's a feature of a product.
If it's in the second, that is the potential product.

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dkarapetyan
> Your idea doesn’t matter. What matters is what the market needs: What
> problem will real people/companies pay you to solve?

False. There is a famous quote by Ford about markets and faster horses. Point
being the market doesn't know what it needs or wants until someone actually
makes it because typically people just want more of the same but faster and
cheaper.

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a13n
Hey, author here. I think we're actually in agreement.

I'm saying you shouldn't ask people what they want, you should understand
their problems (they want to get around faster), and then design a solution to
solve them. Real people/companies will pay you to solve their problems.

The important part is that it's about problems, not solutions.

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NuDinNou
Nothing much, probably just an ad for The Lean Startup

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a13n
Nope! I have no affiliation with The Lean Startup.

