freagle

Read “The Mom Test”. You should never ask people if they will pay for your product

The alternative is wasting your time building something no one wants. If you’re going to fail, fail to implement. It’s easier, faster, and costs less. If you fail to sell, you can spend literally years building something that will never make money. The reason the developer wants to start a business is to make money, not build something that works without money

Yoooo, fediverse ecom?! I love that idea.

And it’s totally doable. Ecom has been going through a “headless” revolution for a while now, meaning way better APIs and metadata.

There’s A LOT of problems in the ecom world around product images, availavle inventory, and metadata accuracy, but it’s definitely worth exploring.

Selling something that doesn’t exist yet is the key. A programmer is asking us how to start a business and talking about building something. The answer is not to build right now and instead do the sales work. The programmer and the salesperson are the same in this post, and alignment is guaranteed. The most important thing is sales and the programmer needs to focus entirely on the sales discipline.

And even more important, everyone’s experience with sales people is missing the most critical part of entrepreneurship - selling before a product is even defined! It’s not even about selling something that doesn’t exist. It’s about discovering the pain the customer is before deciding on what to build

Literally the only thing that matters is sales. Sales people make money regardless of whether the product is good or sometimes regardless of it even exists.

Programmers think the game is to make something good. It’s not. It’s telling people to pay you.

Spend all of your time talking to people about what problems they have and then ask them which problems cost them money or whether they would spend money to solve a problem.

Most of the time, if you tell people your idea, they will lie to you about the idea being good, but they will never spend money on it. So don’t try to find the idea that people like. Find the problem that costs people money.

And that’s how you make a business