How many entrepreneurs do we have here?

[brianhood]

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The purpose of this thread is to share interesting entrepreneurial stories with each other.








I don't think being a metal producer is the best long term career plan(as much as I love it). Although business at my studio is great now(this, my 5th year, has been my most profitable year so far), there is no guarantee I'll have a sustainable amount of income 2-3 years from now.

I'm constantly looking for new business opportunities to get into while I have the cash, and I'd love to have a thread on here to see which of you have your hand in other businesses.


I'm looking forward to reading your stories!

Here is what I have to share:

Currently I'm working with a developer to create a custom B2B SAAS(business to business software as a service) for an niche industry with over 15000 business with plenty of cash to spend(not naming the industry for now).

There are currently two main competitors in the market doing what we're trying to do. Each of those two competitors were created in early\mid 2000's, and appear to have not been updated since then(they are ugly as fuck, as well as overcomplicated and not at all intuitive). I have no questions that we will be able to capture the percentage of the market we are going for.

Our current plan\structure:

The 15,000 businesses in this niche market has over 30,000 employees. Our pricing structure is $25\month per employee(this is cheaper than main competitor in the market). With just a 5% market share, we would be bringing in $37,500\month.


We are currently planning out the details of our software, talking to and meeting with professionals in the industry we are targeting to gather input on what they want\need in the software. We will pre preselling the SAAS to businesses with this offer: "20% off for life, and we will never raise the price on you. You also have creative input with us 1 on 1 from day one while we develop this software".


So far we have presold to one business with 3 employees(3 employees at $25\month with 3 months in advance=$225). This is before I've really gotten any sort of presentation together for preselling. We will actually start looking to presale this in January. Once we've presold to at least 20 employees($1500), we will start development.

The point of preselling is to A. Validate that this is actually software that someone is willing to buy, and B. It goes towards our development costs.

I'll update this more as things progress.

So far this has been a fun side project, which has slowly turned my studio into the side project. I just hired an engineer to track bands for me so I have more time to spend on this project.

 

[HeadCrusher]

I've been looking into various ideas for quite some time but don't have anything running yet. I did a lot of research though so I do have a huge background of some sort.

Brian, your business sounds very interesting. I think it's great that you are validating first. Too many people don't do that. I think I have an idea about which business related websites you frequent/which people you follow from that alone.
If you really find a VA for $5/hour please let me know how to get a hold of them. The market changed drastically since a certain book came out in 2007.

 

[brianhood]

I think I have an idea about which business related websites you frequent/which people you follow from that alone.

Hahaha I'm sure you do, if you follow those sorts of things!

If you really find a VA for $5/hour please let me know how to get a hold of them. The market changed drastically since a certain book came out in 2007.

There are TONS of freelance VAs at that price point. The issue is sorting through the bad ones to find one that works for you.

https://www.odesk.com/contractors/?...dual&pt[]=Affiliated&amount[]=Min&amount[]=10

You can obviously spend a bit more money if you want to work with a VA firm. The benefit of that is A. They're usually pre qualified, so you know you're not working with an idiot, and B. If they're unavailable to work, you can easily get someone to fill in while they're out.

 

[HeadCrusher]

Haha, genius, I never thought of looking up VAs on oDesk. Always thought of it as a Designer/Developer site. Silly me... %) Can you recommend anyone specifically?

 

[sprack]

Just left a friends startup that got acquired and had a similar M.O. being all SaaS. Some things I'd add after riding that from near beginning to acquisition:
- Know your market and what you're selling them. If you get outside funding and then pivot, it gets stupid hard to get the next round. Pivot early.
- Work out the cost structure and revenue stream down to pennies or less. Investors want to know how thin your margins are and time to profit.
- Be persistent. Lots of assholes on the money side. You'll eventually find one that understands your product/market.
- If you're working with an investment group, be prepared for them to fuck you by sharing some of your cool ideas with other startups.
- If you're on the technical side, work on scaling as much as time to market. Customers will dump you overnight if you have any real downtime.
- We did public cloud for all the infra. It can get really expensive fast if you don't build for it.
- Cache like a mofo. Scaling the backend is expensive and hard. And it gives the appearance of responsiveness.
- Build it like you expect parts to go away. Critical parts. Netflix has the right idea.
- If you're on AWS use spots.
- Get a good attorney you can trust.
- Only hire positive people that want to work. The bad ones will suck the life out and cause collateral damage. Fire them or better yet don't hire.