Wow. AMAZING advice Jason. I took Amy Hoy's 30x500 course, which opened my eyes to how a 10% month to month growth rate can be crazy in just a few years. The chart shown in a recent post of hers is mind boggling: http://unicornfree.com/2012/3-years-of-bootstrapping-half-a-...
That's the "estimated" (all open trials) revenue growth for Freckle over its whole life time. Look how stagnant it was, then slow, and for how long. And compare that to now :)
NB: real billing, trailing a month behind any given date, is 5-15% less than the estimate (due to trials not continuing etc).
Hi Amy, going to ask you the same questions that many have asked before: you developed products in a more or less saturated market, how do you come to the conclusion that the world needs your product? (considering that there are nice looking time-tracker and customer support out apps out there).
It's nice to see entrepreneurs like you, coming out openly with business figures. Helps newbies like me, to go on and keep focus only on the product. Unabated by tiny bubbles we see in funding side of story - aka "herd mentality".
I'm going to assume that it's because you're new here that you have a chip on your shoulder. Understandable.
But, simply by looking at how long it took her to get to that revenue number, why would you think her program is "get rich quick"? Years is not quick, in Internet, Business, Internet Business or any other metric of time.
Thanks. I'd hope if I were a liar trying to convince you to buy my "get rich quick" program, I'd make up a better lie than 3 years, haha.
FTR: just under 30% of the revenue last year was from my class, but that's primarily because A) infoproducts pay bigger lump sums, faster than subscription income and B) we haven't yet publicly launched Charm (http://charmhq.com) which will drop very soon. Charm has already added ~$24k/yr to our baseline even while being invite-only. Pretty much all the revenue from my class was rolled into funding product development for our SaaSes. It's my Be Your Own Angel tactic.
Amy publicly announces the prices and enrollment for each class, so you could have easily tested this hypothesis. Last year, the posted numbers would put 30x500 class revenues somewhere around $160k (give or take a few grand depending on how many used discounts) — so as Amy says, a supermajority of her income must come from other sources.
That story from Amy, is super awesome stuff. Not many have made it to that point - 3 years - however.
On the other hand, all this discussion seems more like a silver lining towards disruption in angel investing space too. Sublime for entrepreneurs, disastrous for others may be.
Not many have made it to that point - 3 years - however.
This is true, but there are only 2 reasons I see:
1. Choosing the utterly wrong product. Smart people like us are drawn like moths to the flame of "great ideas," rather than "things which could help people and be really profitable." Something I teach against in my class, called Idea Quicksand. My philosophy about this is explained the first 3 free samples available on http://unicornfree.com/30x500
2. Barring "great ideas" which aren't businesses, people give up way too soon. They have no idea that it takes so long, and they don't prepare for it, and they think they've failed when they're really just normal. Which is a huge part of the reason why I blog & show up here.
> Choosing the utterly wrong product. Smart people like us are drawn like moths to the flame of "great ideas," rather than "things which could help people and be really profitable."
I think about this a lot. Much like a writer, developers do the best work objectively when they "write what they know". What this means in practice is that the market is flooded with products that are at the union of common developer knowledge. That is why there are so many products for consultants out there. Basecamp, Freckle and Projector are all examples of this. Obviously there's always room for a new product, especially when you have used many of these products and decided exactly why you don't like them so you can come up with a uniquely better product.
But when I get outside of the tech bubble, I see that the majority of the business world has pathetic technical vision, but a lot more money. Now obviously you will never be a Facebook or a Twitter in an established market, but if you can combine some domain knowledge with cutting edge tech skills, there is a lot more low-hanging fruit than fighting over early adopters for the latest tech toy.
I see that the majority of the business world has pathetic technical vision, but a lot more money.
Careful. They may have more money in aggregate, but a lot of them don't buy tech solutions, don't want to change, aren't actually business-minded (e.g. always looking for improvements). This goes double for local biz like bars, restaurants, salons, and stores, and triple for education and nonprofit and NGOs.
I'm also finding hard to motivate myself to make something for people that are very different from me (I have a file sharing solution catered to small businesses in France). I imagine it's easier when you care naturally more about your end users.
When all my friends think this market is super-saturated, what I find out is that most of these small business people are just happy to use emails and the occasional FTP.
I don't mean selling to them, I mean disrupting them. You can steal a lot of people's business right out from under them simply by bringing the efficiency of technology. But you need the domain knowledge, that's the barrier to entry.
