

One Year, Six Products: What I’ve Built and Learned - tlipcon
http://alexlod.com/2012/07/10/one-year-six-products-what-ive-built-and-learned/

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halayli
Here's my suggestion.

Pick a niche market. A market that you don't have to create and a market that
is already lucrative. At this point you are not building a product to test a
market/theory because it already exist, and proven. Then build something
that's better than what's out there and compete on features/pricing because
you can obviously build products fast and this can give you an edge.

Personally, as much as I like building products for consumers I learnt (the
hard way) to avoid them (for now) because they will most likely fail for
reasons like: audience is hard to reach, requires viral-lity most of the time
for people to hear about it and use it, and requires a very well polished UI.
Not to mention that they whine and expect things to be free. :)

Before you create a product, answer these two questions accurately: 1. How
will I reach my audience? 2. Am I solving a real problem? (don't kid yourself)

~~~
alberich
But how would one compete with already established competitors when it comes
to domain knowledge? I mean... picking up a niche market may be easy, but then
you must know it better than those who are already there.

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halayli
You have to pick a niche that you think your knowledge in this domain is an
advantage over the current competitors or allows you to compete at the same
level. Don't think you'll ever enter a market where you'll be on your own with
no competitors and everyone is paying you. That won't happen. If this happened
then you are creating a market and soon after you'll have competitors.

Don't be afraid of competition. Competition is at the core of running a
business.

~~~
alberich
That is the kind of thing I would like to see in case studies. I always see
articles about starting the next facebook or something, the 'sexy' startups.
But when it comes to building stuff to niche markets like, say, agriculture or
logistics, theres not much said.

I'm actually trying to find something for myself, though acquiring the domain
knowledge is something the puzzles me. How do one gets, as was suggested,
immersed on a given field, knowing that no one will pay you just to learn.

I studied computer science, but this just teaches one how to use technology to
build stuff. Now I'm on the weird position of not knowing what to build :D

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HeyLaughingBoy
People often pay you to learn, but that's not the point. To answer the
question you posed in the earlier post about domain knowledge: you focus
smaller and smaller until you find something where you can become an expert in
a reasonable time.

e.g., "agriculture" is not a niche. Breeding management software for Silver-
laced Wyandottes is a niche. You reduce the huge term "agriculture" by going
agriculture->poultry->poultry husbandry->poultry breeding->breeding-
chickens->breeding-Silvery-laced-Wyandottes.

Now, is there a market for that product I picked out of the air? I don't know,
but I suspect, based on my knowledge of the field, that there could very well
be. And you could _own_ it if you wanted to.

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alberich
thanks for the explanation, I liked your example :)

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ironchef
I'm kinda baffled by memcachier. Who is your target market? I would think
everyone who uses memcache would be frightened by WAN latency to your service.

~~~
bryanh
I'm going to have to second this as well. Memcached is one of the simplest
services in the world to set up as well.

Maybe if you solve the problem of cache invalidation...

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tagawa
Very interesting to read about each product and the lessons learned. Looking
forward to the follow-up article.

I'm a bit concerned about how long the writer can continue, though. There
isn't a single mention of sales or income, both in terms of actual results
(which is fair enough) and hoped-for goals (more worrying). Is the aim to get
by with funding and deal with revenue later? Sounds high risk to me.

~~~
alex_lod
Here's the follow-up:

[http://alexlod.com/2012/07/11/one-year-six-
products-16-tips-...](http://alexlod.com/2012/07/11/one-year-six-
products-16-tips-for-new-entrepreneurs/)

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jayzee
Good post but surprised by his understanding of cash-flow positive: _Being
cash-flow positive is...when your costs not including salaries are lower than
your revenues_

~~~
JacobAldridge
Well spotted. Many businesses fall over by misunderstanding cash flow,
especially in the early days when they don't have much incoming cash.

Terms like 'costs' and 'revenue' have no place in cash flow forecasts - it's
all about cash in and cash out (including salaries, assuming they're paid). If
your product costs are less than revenue, you have margin (sometimes called
profit, but that's not quite right either); but if you have to pay lots of
costs before you receive revenue, you can hit a cash flow wall no matter how
large your margin is.

I had one client who re-sold physical products. They were paid by the buyer on
14 day terms, and had to pay their provider on 30 day terms - so they actually
got paid two weeks before they had to pay for the product. Margin was low -
but cash flow was ridiculously positive.

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swalsh
Pivoting is great, but sometimes you have to give it some time. You need to
pivot strategically. Almost every startup experiences a curve, first you
launch. Maybe you make some news sites, growth goes up. Then people promptly
forget about you. Usage plumits, and you fall in to a depression. You don't
come out of the depression until you 'make it'. Starting a new projects puts
you right back at beginning.

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alex_lod
Here's the promised follow-up article, One Year, Six Products: 16 Tips for New
Entrepreneurs:

[http://alexlod.com/2012/07/11/one-year-six-
products-16-tips-...](http://alexlod.com/2012/07/11/one-year-six-
products-16-tips-for-new-entrepreneurs/)

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martinshen
It's amazing how many products you've built this year. I love these
retrospectives on your year (with lessons learned). I think I'll do one soon
too.

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dmix
> Unfortunately I can’t talk about it because it’s still in a closed beta

This makes me a sad panda every time I hear it.

A good way to spot a first time founder is to see if they're concerned about
competition before they even launch the product.

~~~
scottchin
It looks to me like he built the product for someone else as a consultant. So
maybe he's under some NDA with the person that hired him.

~~~
dmix
Yep, to clarify I was referring to the client not to the OP.

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josephcooney
So if I build a website for a non-existent product to test the waters that
counts as 1?

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glimcat
It counts for more than doing nothing.

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dr42
I'd strongly advise looking at other areas than the memcache cloud service.
The whole point of memcache is to be incredibly fast to prevent having to do a
much heavier weight process, like making requests to databases.

While you offer locating the memcachier product within some datacenters this
is such a narrow offering, and for something that's already mind numbingly
simple to automate anyway.

While 'cloud' anything is hot right now, this just doesn't solve a real
problem.

I think you're rushing into building something, without looking at the market
and what problem you're trying to solve for customers.

If you'd had a good mentor they would have saved you a lot of hours wasting
time in ideas that are obviously doomed, they neither solved a problem, nor
provided entertainment.

Except one you discarded, the celebrity photos from twitter. With a great
front end, and preferably an iPhone app that served up celebrity photos in a
magazine style format might very well have legs. People seem to love
celebrities, and they seem to love looking at what they are getting up to.
This app would have the advantage of twitter's speed at disseminating
information, and people like knowing first so they can send the photo to their
friends and show how cool they are.

Forget the tech for a moment, think about psychology - what human need are you
targeting, then think about the business, the market, how you'll reach them
and finally the tech. I hope this helps.

*edited for spelling and typos.

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sporx
my 9 year old makes a lot of little stuff like this too; lego constructions,
sticks woven together, playing card pyramids. Pretty cool stuff...

