9 ms·

Finding My Next Bootstrapped Business Idea

190 points by derrickreimer 7y ago

jguimont 7y ago
I would like to know your opinion on "When to drop the ball when trying to build a business?" You need to persevere, but like playing poker, you invested so much energy that it might be hard to pull the plug. Success might be just around the corner...
- derrickreimer 7y ago
  Totally! To clarify, by the "drop the ball" do you mean knowing when to call it quits if something is not working out? I recently wrote about my experience with that: https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-away-from-the-product-i-spent-a-year-building.html https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-a... My friend Justin Jackson also published a good article about this too: https://justinjackson.ca/giveup https://justinjackson.ca/giveup
  - hmhrex 7y ago
    Thanks to you, I finally read The Mom Test. It was extremely insightful alongside your written experience.
    - derrickreimer 7y ago
      That's awesome!
- holmberd 7y ago
  You are referring to sunk cost fallacy.
Alonski 7y ago
Good luck! Love listening to you and have been following your journey for a long time. I'm here to listen and watch what you build next. Who knows maybe I'll be a customer.
- derrickreimer 7y ago
  Thanks! Glad you are finding it helpful!
benackles 7y ago
Correct link: https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/28/finding-my-next-bootstrapped-business-idea.html https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/28/finding-my-n...
- derrickreimer 7y ago
  Thank you! I also added a redirect from the previous URL.
- dang 7y ago
  Fixed above. Thanks.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
realty_geek 7y ago
Hi Derrick, looking at the criteria you listed I would say you probably could find some interesting ideas in the real estate sector. I created an open source real estate website builder and though that hasn't made me any money, it got me enough contacts and insights into the sector to make me realise how much potential there is there. I am happy to have a chat if you want to know more. My plan is to launch a product in that space in the next 6 months
- f0rgot 7y ago
  Can I get in on this chat? I’ve been looking for a home in Chicago and have found at least one tool that people seem to despise - I.e., market exists, someone is trying to service that market but doing a bad job at it.
  - sourc3 7y ago
    Count me in too! I've been growing more and more frustrated with the tools in the marketplace.
    - realty_geek 7y ago
      mmm, wondering how to progress this. Would you guys be comfortable joining a WhatsApp group to discuss this?
      - ezl 7y ago
        Any platform works for me. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.
      - f0rgot 7y ago
        Count me in. Let’s start with WhatsApp since a lot of folks have it. I can pm you my #. Just need to get in front of a real computer.
      - infinitone 7y ago
        I'm interested also.
GreeniFi 7y ago
This is a great article. I’d advise any entrepreneur to read this, including myself 6 years ago.
ksj2114 7y ago
"The market must already exist". I think trying to find a brand new market is one of the biggest mistakes many founders make when trying to come up with a startup idea. An existing market indicates that demand already exists! And when "no market need" is the most common reason startups fail [1], this seems to be often overlooked. [1] https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-top/ https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-...
- avinium 7y ago
  You're exactly right, but I think the real world is even more more nuanced than that (particularly when it comes to software). Some markets just don't exist, period. Think nail polish for pet turtles. It's easy to figure this out, because every pet turtle owner tells you "I wouldn't buy this". There's no two ways about it. You know exactly where you stand. This is infinitely better than the alternative, which is selling a product that kind-of fits, to a market that kind-of exists. You've identified a problem, everyone is saying "great idea, love the design, etc" - but hardly anyone's buying. They all stall, or come up with excuses as to why they can't buy, even though they say the product is great. Both are cases of "no market demand", but the former is an infinitely better place to be. You know exactly where you stand and what needs to be done - scrap everything and start over. The latter is a very dangerous place to be. It's easy to give yourself any number of options - "maybe we just need a (UI redesign|new website|better marketing materials)". But fundamentally, the product is flawed. You haven't really found a market need. Odds are you've identified a market want. This is something that's nice for people to have (and that they might be happy to use). But it's not compelling enough to reach into your pocket and pay for. This is an acute problem in software because (a) we tend to be builders at heart, so we favour making things over identifying customer needs. (b) it's relatively cheap to build something. Other industries have significantly higher barriers to entry, meaning you (usually) need to secure customers and funding before the production/manufacturing phase.
  - derrickreimer 7y ago
    Great points here. It's very tricky to get accurate information from potential customers. The fact that there is demand for what you want to build is a necessary, but not sufficient quality -- you must dig deeper to make sure the pain is bad enough for someone to adopt your product / switch from whatever they are doing now. I have to remind myself of this constantly :).
mrskitch 7y ago
Hey Derrick! I don't have much to say, except that I really enjoyed your site's design. Good luck! EDIT: Now that I've read through your article: I'm the founder behind browserless.io. Your outline is great, and is the same rough rubric I've used before. If you ever want to chat about anything, let me know! You're totally right: this thing is hard, and having more successes/failures doesn't make it any easier sadly. Lot's of dice rolling and trying.
- derrickreimer 7y ago
  Thank you!
listenandlearn 7y ago
Hey Derrick, Thanks for the great posts and for responding to comments! Would love some feedback on choosing to raise money or not. I read this post (and many others) about having those filters ready ahead of time. The filter on raising money unfortunately I don’t have, I keep going back and fourth on that. I have been working on an app, cross platform iOS and Android, that lets people listen to articles from the web. It uses great sounding AI ML to convert the articles to audio you can listen to in seconds. I have been working on it for a few months have some good traction and a few paid users, working on it part time as a side project. I can’t help but feel that raising money would allow me to go full time and really concentrate while still affording my bills. The issue is VC money comes with strings. (Shameless plug for anyone interested, the product is here https://articulu.com https://articulu.com )
- absk82 7y ago
  Your website looks great. I didn't try the product. Can I ask how you did the design and UI of your landing page? Did you do it yourself or contracted someone to do it?
  - listenandlearn 7y ago
    Thanks for the feedback, we did everything ourselves. Two of us on this with developer backgrounds.
- derrickreimer 7y ago
  You're welcome! There are some alternative funding sources for bootstrappers that could be interesting for you: - TinySeed (https://tinyseed.com/ https://tinyseed.com/) - Earnest Capital (https://earnestcapital.com/ https://earnestcapital.com/) - Indie.vc (https://www.indie.vc/ https://www.indie.vc/) Each works a little differently. My friend Matt Wensing did a comparison of them: https://medium.com/swlh/alternative-funding-calculus-a-quant-comparison-of-tiny-indie-and-earnest-8d61d35d5ad5 https://medium.com/swlh/alternative-funding-calculus-a-quant... Hope this helps!
- The_Amp_Walrus 7y ago
  Hey listenandlearn. I like your site and app - I think they both look great. I tried out the app a few weeks ago and I liked it, although I didn't really enjoy the English accent of the reader's voice. Are you using Google's WaveNet? I slowed it down by 80% or something because I think the full speed is too fast. Amazon Polly's "Matthew" has been my favourite so far - less high frequency artifact IMO, although he sounds a little sedate. I've been working blogreader.com.au, which has a very similar concept to articulu for the last few months, but I have recently given up trying to turn it into a business. I ended up stopping because of a pretty underwhelming response from potential users. Most people I've talked to in-person don't really care about it - they might say "oh that's cool", but they're not beating the door down to use it. My site has a _horrible_ bounce rate as well - but this could just be a problem with my landing page, rather than an intrinsic issue with the product. I've found the marketing really hard, which has been a positive experience. My primary concern is that our services solve a small problem for a large group of people. Don't get me wrong, I listen to an article every day using my own service, but my friends and family don't care enough to create an account, submit an article, etc. Meanwhile, people on Google don't appear to be searching for "listen to web articles", so finding motivated users online seems quite hard. I can't comment on your marketing because I found your service in my reddit thread or /r/podcasts. I will note that Audm and Curio are also both trying to get into the "listen to articles" space. I now look back at my napkin math of "if I can get 1000 users to pay $1/month..." and realise how naieve I was to assume that getting so many users was easy. Another issue is that when a service only solves a "small problem", then people will only put up with so much bullshit - ie. the UX has to be pretty good. I struggled with this, although I found your app prety nice. In particular I like that you hijacked the "share link" functionality in chrome to allow a user to convert an article. Finally, I've found that people hate paying for content - who knew right? Perhaps your freemium model will get around this, whereas mine was a little more aggressive about getting people to pay. I'm interested in the economics of your app though. If you're paying for the text to speech service (I assume you are - if not let's talk about that!), then you're operating at a loss. What's your end game? How many subscribers do you need in proportion to your free users to make this profitable? What's your model? I think it's a really interesting problem because you're providing a nice UX wrapper around a paid commodity service, and so if you charge too much you'll be undercut or lose users to free content, but if you charge too little you're losing money. In summary I found the following problems with this kind of service: - many potential users + small problem = lots of marketing effot required - small problems = relatively high standard of UX, low friction required - people hate paying for content, but the content costs money to produce I'm really interested to hear your input on what I've said. Did you have the same issues? Do you agree with the problems I identified, or do you have a different perspective?
desireco42 7y ago
Completely unrelated... When developer makes a blog, and it has UX well done, it is amazing. Site looks good from the outside, as well as inside the source, nothing insane, but you can see quality. I am inspired now to make my own, that lays neglected for long time. Oh, now I see that he is using Elixir, Elm, Phoenix etc... All the good stuff. :) Clearly a person with great taste.
- derrickreimer 7y ago
  Thank you! It happens to the best of us, I haven't been super consistent with writing regularly. Trying to change that!
docker_up 7y ago
I find articles like this deeply disingenuous. The OP wants to basically find some problem that he doesn't know anything about, and apply whatever knowledge he has gained in hopes of building a "company" which appears to me is just a facade of a company until he can flip it to someone else who actually cares more. The idea that someone with presumably no knowledge or even any passion can dip their toe into a problem space and try to create a "company" isn't very appealing to me at all. Everything about it feels so superficial and contrived with no passion. Even the list he came up with is so low-hanging-fruit, it reads to me "I want something that is easy to build, easy to sell and makes me lots of money before I flip it to someone else, and then I can start the process again." The lack of commitment and conviction screams to me that I shouldn't become a customer because he will abandon the project, and end it with another "Thanks for following me on my journey, I'm abandoning all my customers but join me on my next adventure soon!"
- derrickreimer 7y ago
  Ouch. That's not at all what I'm trying to do. I have no shortage of passion, but passion alone does not make a viable business. My hope is that my post will help others think about choosing an idea that fits with their goals, so that it will work out for the long haul.
- twalling 7y ago
  I didn’t get that sense at all. His last bullet point is “The market should overlap with my existing audience”.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kim0 7y ago
I'm trying to launch a graphql hosting business on gqlengine.com .. validating whether there is a "market" is too hard for me to figure out it seems! If anyone is interested to partner and work with me on this, shout out at me @ak_kim0

190 points by derrickreimer 7y ago

I would like to know your opinion on "When to drop the ball when trying to build a business?" You need to persevere, but like playing poker, you invested so much energy that it might be hard to pull the plug. Success might be just around the corner...

derrickreimer 7y ago
Totally! To clarify, by the "drop the ball" do you mean knowing when to call it quits if something is not working out? I recently wrote about my experience with that: https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-away-from-the-product-i-spent-a-year-building.html https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-a... My friend Justin Jackson also published a good article about this too: https://justinjackson.ca/giveup https://justinjackson.ca/giveup
- hmhrex 7y ago
  Thanks to you, I finally read The Mom Test. It was extremely insightful alongside your written experience.
  - derrickreimer 7y ago
    That's awesome!
holmberd 7y ago
You are referring to sunk cost fallacy.

Alonski 7y ago

Good luck! Love listening to you and have been following your journey for a long time. I'm here to listen and watch what you build next. Who knows maybe I'll be a customer.

derrickreimer 7y ago
Thanks! Glad you are finding it helpful!

benackles 7y ago

Correct link: https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/28/finding-my-next-bootstrapped-business-idea.html https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/28/finding-my-n...

derrickreimer 7y ago
Thank you! I also added a redirect from the previous URL.
dang 7y ago
Fixed above. Thanks.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

realty_geek 7y ago

Hi Derrick, looking at the criteria you listed I would say you probably could find some interesting ideas in the real estate sector. I created an open source real estate website builder and though that hasn't made me any money, it got me enough contacts and insights into the sector to make me realise how much potential there is there. I am happy to have a chat if you want to know more. My plan is to launch a product in that space in the next 6 months

f0rgot 7y ago
Can I get in on this chat? I’ve been looking for a home in Chicago and have found at least one tool that people seem to despise - I.e., market exists, someone is trying to service that market but doing a bad job at it.
- sourc3 7y ago
  Count me in too! I've been growing more and more frustrated with the tools in the marketplace.
  - realty_geek 7y ago
    mmm, wondering how to progress this. Would you guys be comfortable joining a WhatsApp group to discuss this?
    - ezl 7y ago
      Any platform works for me. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.
    - f0rgot 7y ago
      Count me in. Let’s start with WhatsApp since a lot of folks have it. I can pm you my #. Just need to get in front of a real computer.
    - infinitone 7y ago
      I'm interested also.

GreeniFi 7y ago

This is a great article. I’d advise any entrepreneur to read this, including myself 6 years ago.

ksj2114 7y ago

"The market must already exist". I think trying to find a brand new market is one of the biggest mistakes many founders make when trying to come up with a startup idea. An existing market indicates that demand already exists! And when "no market need" is the most common reason startups fail [1], this seems to be often overlooked. [1] https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-top/ https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-...

avinium 7y ago
You're exactly right, but I think the real world is even more more nuanced than that (particularly when it comes to software). Some markets just don't exist, period. Think nail polish for pet turtles. It's easy to figure this out, because every pet turtle owner tells you "I wouldn't buy this". There's no two ways about it. You know exactly where you stand. This is infinitely better than the alternative, which is selling a product that kind-of fits, to a market that kind-of exists. You've identified a problem, everyone is saying "great idea, love the design, etc" - but hardly anyone's buying. They all stall, or come up with excuses as to why they can't buy, even though they say the product is great. Both are cases of "no market demand", but the former is an infinitely better place to be. You know exactly where you stand and what needs to be done - scrap everything and start over. The latter is a very dangerous place to be. It's easy to give yourself any number of options - "maybe we just need a (UI redesign|new website|better marketing materials)". But fundamentally, the product is flawed. You haven't really found a market need. Odds are you've identified a market want. This is something that's nice for people to have (and that they might be happy to use). But it's not compelling enough to reach into your pocket and pay for. This is an acute problem in software because (a) we tend to be builders at heart, so we favour making things over identifying customer needs. (b) it's relatively cheap to build something. Other industries have significantly higher barriers to entry, meaning you (usually) need to secure customers and funding before the production/manufacturing phase.
- derrickreimer 7y ago
  Great points here. It's very tricky to get accurate information from potential customers. The fact that there is demand for what you want to build is a necessary, but not sufficient quality -- you must dig deeper to make sure the pain is bad enough for someone to adopt your product / switch from whatever they are doing now. I have to remind myself of this constantly :).

mrskitch 7y ago

Hey Derrick! I don't have much to say, except that I really enjoyed your site's design. Good luck! EDIT: Now that I've read through your article: I'm the founder behind browserless.io. Your outline is great, and is the same rough rubric I've used before. If you ever want to chat about anything, let me know! You're totally right: this thing is hard, and having more successes/failures doesn't make it any easier sadly. Lot's of dice rolling and trying.

derrickreimer 7y ago
Thank you!

listenandlearn 7y ago

Hey Derrick, Thanks for the great posts and for responding to comments! Would love some feedback on choosing to raise money or not. I read this post (and many others) about having those filters ready ahead of time. The filter on raising money unfortunately I don’t have, I keep going back and fourth on that. I have been working on an app, cross platform iOS and Android, that lets people listen to articles from the web. It uses great sounding AI ML to convert the articles to audio you can listen to in seconds. I have been working on it for a few months have some good traction and a few paid users, working on it part time as a side project. I can’t help but feel that raising money would allow me to go full time and really concentrate while still affording my bills. The issue is VC money comes with strings. (Shameless plug for anyone interested, the product is here https://articulu.com https://articulu.com )

absk82 7y ago
Your website looks great. I didn't try the product. Can I ask how you did the design and UI of your landing page? Did you do it yourself or contracted someone to do it?
- listenandlearn 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, we did everything ourselves. Two of us on this with developer backgrounds.
derrickreimer 7y ago
You're welcome! There are some alternative funding sources for bootstrappers that could be interesting for you: - TinySeed (https://tinyseed.com/ https://tinyseed.com/) - Earnest Capital (https://earnestcapital.com/ https://earnestcapital.com/) - Indie.vc (https://www.indie.vc/ https://www.indie.vc/) Each works a little differently. My friend Matt Wensing did a comparison of them: https://medium.com/swlh/alternative-funding-calculus-a-quant-comparison-of-tiny-indie-and-earnest-8d61d35d5ad5 https://medium.com/swlh/alternative-funding-calculus-a-quant... Hope this helps!
The_Amp_Walrus 7y ago
Hey listenandlearn. I like your site and app - I think they both look great. I tried out the app a few weeks ago and I liked it, although I didn't really enjoy the English accent of the reader's voice. Are you using Google's WaveNet? I slowed it down by 80% or something because I think the full speed is too fast. Amazon Polly's "Matthew" has been my favourite so far - less high frequency artifact IMO, although he sounds a little sedate. I've been working blogreader.com.au, which has a very similar concept to articulu for the last few months, but I have recently given up trying to turn it into a business. I ended up stopping because of a pretty underwhelming response from potential users. Most people I've talked to in-person don't really care about it - they might say "oh that's cool", but they're not beating the door down to use it. My site has a _horrible_ bounce rate as well - but this could just be a problem with my landing page, rather than an intrinsic issue with the product. I've found the marketing really hard, which has been a positive experience. My primary concern is that our services solve a small problem for a large group of people. Don't get me wrong, I listen to an article every day using my own service, but my friends and family don't care enough to create an account, submit an article, etc. Meanwhile, people on Google don't appear to be searching for "listen to web articles", so finding motivated users online seems quite hard. I can't comment on your marketing because I found your service in my reddit thread or /r/podcasts. I will note that Audm and Curio are also both trying to get into the "listen to articles" space. I now look back at my napkin math of "if I can get 1000 users to pay $1/month..." and realise how naieve I was to assume that getting so many users was easy. Another issue is that when a service only solves a "small problem", then people will only put up with so much bullshit - ie. the UX has to be pretty good. I struggled with this, although I found your app prety nice. In particular I like that you hijacked the "share link" functionality in chrome to allow a user to convert an article. Finally, I've found that people hate paying for content - who knew right? Perhaps your freemium model will get around this, whereas mine was a little more aggressive about getting people to pay. I'm interested in the economics of your app though. If you're paying for the text to speech service (I assume you are - if not let's talk about that!), then you're operating at a loss. What's your end game? How many subscribers do you need in proportion to your free users to make this profitable? What's your model? I think it's a really interesting problem because you're providing a nice UX wrapper around a paid commodity service, and so if you charge too much you'll be undercut or lose users to free content, but if you charge too little you're losing money. In summary I found the following problems with this kind of service: - many potential users + small problem = lots of marketing effot required - small problems = relatively high standard of UX, low friction required - people hate paying for content, but the content costs money to produce I'm really interested to hear your input on what I've said. Did you have the same issues? Do you agree with the problems I identified, or do you have a different perspective?

desireco42 7y ago

Completely unrelated... When developer makes a blog, and it has UX well done, it is amazing. Site looks good from the outside, as well as inside the source, nothing insane, but you can see quality. I am inspired now to make my own, that lays neglected for long time. Oh, now I see that he is using Elixir, Elm, Phoenix etc... All the good stuff. :) Clearly a person with great taste.

derrickreimer 7y ago
Thank you! It happens to the best of us, I haven't been super consistent with writing regularly. Trying to change that!

docker_up 7y ago

I find articles like this deeply disingenuous. The OP wants to basically find some problem that he doesn't know anything about, and apply whatever knowledge he has gained in hopes of building a "company" which appears to me is just a facade of a company until he can flip it to someone else who actually cares more. The idea that someone with presumably no knowledge or even any passion can dip their toe into a problem space and try to create a "company" isn't very appealing to me at all. Everything about it feels so superficial and contrived with no passion. Even the list he came up with is so low-hanging-fruit, it reads to me "I want something that is easy to build, easy to sell and makes me lots of money before I flip it to someone else, and then I can start the process again." The lack of commitment and conviction screams to me that I shouldn't become a customer because he will abandon the project, and end it with another "Thanks for following me on my journey, I'm abandoning all my customers but join me on my next adventure soon!"

derrickreimer 7y ago
Ouch. That's not at all what I'm trying to do. I have no shortage of passion, but passion alone does not make a viable business. My hope is that my post will help others think about choosing an idea that fits with their goals, so that it will work out for the long haul.
twalling 7y ago
I didn’t get that sense at all. His last bullet point is “The market should overlap with my existing audience”.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

kim0 7y ago

I'm trying to launch a graphql hosting business on gqlengine.com .. validating whether there is a "market" is too hard for me to figure out it seems! If anyone is interested to partner and work with me on this, shout out at me @ak_kim0