Most stories in business are either about the huge successes or the fabulous trainwrecks of failures. I get it. It feels weird—unwarranted, even—to tell a meandering tale where there’s no clear lesson learned. You want something straightforward you can pass on to the reader as this one shining piece of advice so they have a clear path forward, or at least know what to avoid.
The problem is, these narrow stories don’t always reflect the reality of having a business. Not everything is either a total success or a complete failure — there are many shades of gray in between.
Mine, CaptureKit, lives in the gray area. When I explain it to people I meet, I don’t call it a business, because that doesn’t feel quite right. I only have two customers, so at this point it’s more like an idea that launched but hasn’t really been validated.
But here’s where it gets interesting: it turns a profit and I don’t necessarily have to put much effort into it.
Shades of gray
Okay, what is it then? A business? An MVP still waiting for validation a year into its life? A failure, because it hasn’t attracted any customers beside the two I practically launched with? I don’t know. It’s a little bit of everything.
The story of CaptureKit is an unusual one, to say the least. I didn’t come up with it myself. A friend asked me if I wanted to start a little business because he knew this one company and they were in dire need of a service that helps capture data from scanned documents, such as paper surveys, etc.
They knew about the incumbents, but those didn’t really work for them. Licensing tools with bad UX for hundreds of thousands of euros with expensive, mandatory training wasn’t really what they had in mind. More modern cloud-native products that break down if you have a lot of handwritten text to capture were also out of the question, so there was a real need and an opportunity for the product that I ended up building.
Initially, I thought I’d had struck gold and quickly estimated in my head how big the market must be for something like CaptureKit. I dreamt of working on it full-time and making a good living.
A year in, I’m disillusioned, to say the least. Sure, I’m frustrated that I didn’t acquire any customers in its one year of existence, but on the other hand, I’m also not losing money on it. Clearly, it could be worse.
Maybe you’re screaming at your screen right now, wondering what I did in the past months; why I didn’t acquire any customers. Well, it’s not that I didn’t try.
I did what pretty much everybody does when they launch a product. I set up a landing page that described what the product does, had a testimonial showing that it works and delivers value to somebody, and added a way to get in touch with me. Crickets.
I did the obvious thing and tried to leverage my network. Surely, there must be someone I know who either needs this thing themselves or knows somebody who does. Nope. I cold-emailed similar companies trying to build the product I’d already completed and told them about CaptureKit. They should be happily waiting for me to pitch them something already in its beta phase, right? Of course not.
But let’s face it: that hardly ever works. People don’t care about your product; they care about solving their problems and my cold-email didn’t give them the confidence that CaptureKit could do that. I rightfully failed and learned my lesson.
At the same time, I joined the Sales For Founders course that was created by Louis Nicholls. It’s a great resource. I learned a lot — specifically, writing effective and engaging emails — and I keep learning from him and fellow students every day.
I took my lessons and I revised my cold-emailing strategy, focused on their pain rather than my product, and tried to schedule calls with them to first and foremost learn what I had been missing and potentially pitch them my solution somewhere down the road. At first, again, nothing. But this time I know I couldn’t give up so easily, so I followed up. In the midst of a resounding silence, I got one reply: a CEO who was out of the country for a business trip. He said he’d get in touch with me once he got back.
Wow, he was clearly busy and still took the time to write me an email? That sure says something.
I waited roughly three weeks and, of course, didn’t hear back from him. I wrote him a third time and lo and behold, he agreed to talk to me. Lesson learned: follow up. People’s lives are busy, especially when they get back from a trip and things have been piling up while they were away.
Finally, we had our call. Unfortunately he didn’t want to talk about his company's problems but only hear my pitch, and I wasn’t confident enough to steer him back to learn more about his pains. He really only wanted to assess if CaptureKit could solve an extremely specific problem they were facing. It couldn’t and it won’t, but at least I got some sort of reaction.
The bitter truth
And that brings me to the most painful thing: you launch something and nobody cares. Your friends will obviously tell you it’s a great idea and they can imagine that lots of companies will need it and buy it. Yeah, my thoughts exactly! One year ago, that is.
But outside of your friends and family, nobody cares about your meticulously crafted emails or perfectly practiced pitch. More than likely, you won’t even get a “we’re not interested.” It’s soul-crushing and absolutely wrecks your motivation to carry on with the work.
Remember how I said I have two customers? Yes, the friend who gave me the idea has a business partner, who referred a second customer: a debt collection agency (thank you, Christian and Martin 👋).
Naturally, I tried to explore debt collectors as a potential market segment once I secured that lead — if one of them is using my product, surely there must be others. There are roughly 1,000 debt collection agencies in Germany alone, so 1% of the market should be doable, right? I sent out 50 emails and got at least a handful of responses...all of them rejections. Still, it felt like I was making progress. Sort of.
Turns out, debt collection is, for the most part, an industry that didn’t keep up with tech trends or market innovations. Most of them still use analog, paper-based workflows with the odd spreadsheet sprinkled in here and there. Modern agencies like the one that uses my service, on the other hand, are few and far between. Once I figured that out, I realized I’d pretty much captured the available market in Germany with my one client.
Next, I tried to widen the net and reach out to different markets and see who else CaptureKit might resonate with. I wrote to event agencies and museums to assess if they needed help with evaluating visitor surveys, and to marketing and fundraising agencies that send out surveys in the mail. So far, no luck.
To be fair, I didn’t send out enough emails to definitively rule those markets out. But I feel a bit worn out at this point.
So here I am, still not knowing what the right market is for my product and having a long way to go to find it. CaptureKit is stuck somewhere in between stations and I don’t have enough motivation to grease the wheels.
The struggle is normal, and you’re not alone
I’m planning on playing the long game on this one, so I think I’m going to step back for a bit, recharge my batteries, and get back to it when I’m feeling it again. There’s no rush, no deadline. It can take as long as it has to, and I feel that sometimes it’s better to take a step back and let things unfold in their own time.
Maybe this all sounds a little sad, but that’s not how I see it. I learned a lot from working on this. New technologies like Serverless, React, the AWS ecosystem (I used to be a mobile dev), business lessons, and even a few life lessons. I really can’t complain and I don’t intend to.
Sometimes it helps to know that others go through the same problems, have the same doubts, and, more often than not, don’t know what the right way forward is. If you're in a similar place right now in your indie hacking journey, just know that you're not alone.
I would say launch mobile app to gain traction and signups. here you can gain B2C customers and even B2B customers. ( trust me )
launch in many platforms as much you can like Windows Desktop store, office 365 plugin, Google Suite plugin to gain customer traction.
B2B:
Your customer base should be banks, the office that needs automation, schools, paper corrections and more API ( this business model never fails you ) you can sell it to fintech startups, companies. This is really a good idea and peoples might not purchase your solution lack of privacy/security, so support them with the on-premise version of your code ( make a docker set up and run locally within their office ) and license it.
write many blog post about automating verticals like invoicing, expenses and even more ( I've been into invoicing development company in past ) Blog post will really help you out to reach organic customers ( you never thought use-cases may appear soon )
Thanks a ton for the inspiration @guru_shiva! Especially your assessment of B2B segments gives me quite a bit to chew on 👌
Re on-premise: I can't easily make that work. It's 100% serverless and relies entirely on the AWS ecosystem. I would need to re-write this completely.
You're spot on about content marketing. That's something I haven't done yet and should really get into.
The invoicing development company you were working for, how did you solve the data capture problem? Was this something the company did, or were you solving problems further along the value chain?
Thanks again for your thoughts! 🙌
Thank you for the reply.
Yes for on-prem, it takes time to move everything offline with few outbound network calls.
In my previous company, only partially data capture problem is solved by ML algo and others are done by manual Data entry operators. This is how we solved the problem. we didn't think further to automate.
I think like you should sell verticals like bundling scanning business cards, debit card readers, flyer readers that's how you should blog and sell the solutions. ( Afaik no business peoples search technically to scan )
Got it, write about solving entire workflows (verticals) rather than scanning in particular. That's good advice @guru_shiva
Thank you for sharing your story! Healthy to adjust expectations and calibrate one's internal measuring stick
Fully agree with the very good comments of Guru below.
Also, are you sure that you've taken out the full potential of your web-page? As it stands, the first impression is very beta, although the product, as you describe it, seems functional and in production?
Although product features are very clearly textually described, the only visual of the product is the small thumb-sized picture that doesn't really seem to show the product from its best side? Communicating a generic example of how the product fits within a paper-to-digital workflow could perhaps also be a point to highlight and communicate early on (i.e. more process focus rather than features)
Thank you for the comment @JulesM! Oh, I'm 100% sure the potential of my webpage is barely scratching the surface of what's possible :)
My thinking was that I better focus on early adopters. Not companies that expect a highly polished app because right now the app has a few gaps here and there and the design of it is functional to say the least.
The problem is, the incumbents have millions of features that I can't possibly compete with and I don't really intend to. That said, the webpage (at least in my mind) functions to turn those companies away because I could only dissapoint them at this point and let those through that are willing to put their bet on a small and maybe scrappy bootstrapped solution. Does that make sense?
I definitely see your point regarding features and more focus on process/workflows and thus pain points. Thanks a lot for your perspective!
This story will definitely have a beautiful happy ending Philip.
Our startup needs this.
https://mevapp.com
We are building a CRM product called MEV Suite which helps users to manage Contacts, Yo send and Automate Messages via SMS, Email, WhatsApp.
One of the tedious part of our weekly work, is for clients that have their customers contact in a sales book (paper) we do alot of work entering data for clients that requests this , we basically setup a data entry team.
Recently we set out to learn about exisitng solution or possible tech stack to read accurately data from paper and documents and insert into database.
My 1 cents for you, line up partnerships with database sort of products companies.
Your solution is Business facing as much as consumers.
I will take a look at your current product and find a way to connect.
Cheers.
Awesome @math1007! I would love to talk with you about it. I recently launched another product that tackles this problem from another angle: imgregex.com. I'm pretty sure we could figure something out to either supercharge your data entry team or automate this process.
"Most stories in business are either about the huge successes or the fabulous trainwrecks of failures." You are absolutely right and it's so wrong. No wonder lots of entrepreneurs are stressed and discouraged to keep on with their startup. I read somewhere that 90% are failures, but in the media only show up the successful ones because that's what people want to see, something extraordinary.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It's the extraordinary things that get people's attentions. Unfortunately those are only a fraction of business outcomes.
I think there must be many others with the same problem. They are the ones selling their software on Flippa or similar sites, after being unsuccessful in scaling them.
I would advise you to do one thing instantly: get rid of the BETA term. It discourages most businesses to pay for your service. Most companies don't want to pay for a BETA product... this is something we experienced ourselves years ago as well.
I also would encourage you to work on the site. Make it look like a professional product, and if possible let them try the product. Extend the page with pricing and social proof.
After your site looks like a working business, you'll be able to sell. Nobody wants to be your first customer, so they shouldn't know that they are the first :D and the packaging has to be excellent to be able to sell, especially via cold email.
Hey @RolFic! That's interesting. Did customers tell you they don't take your product seriously if it's called beta or did you notice an uptick once you removed the term from your product?
As mentioned in the reply to @JulesM's comment, I was and am a little hesitant to pull the trigger and code up a super professional landing page. I don't really know what the right niche is and if I wanted to have a professional landing page I'd need to have that in stone. Otherwise the positioning ends up being soggy (shout outs to Kurt Elster.)
I do get your point that nobody wants to be your first customer, but some mind less than others as long as their pain is solved. To me, having a great landing page is a form of optimization. It should be done once you have the basics in place.
You've probably seen this too. Sometimes the shittiest landing pages or products convert. As long as the early adopters get a hint of your product being able to deliver they buy or get in touch. As a bootstrapper I kind of have to rely on this group of people. Companies that give the underdog a chance, even though the messaging is not super on point. Otherwise I end up putting some more months into putting the finishing touches on the product and putting up a professional landing page only to potentially find that my positioning is still wrong.
I would really love to get your perspective on this. Am I completely off-base here?
Jesus Christ, what a brutal read. But it does mirror my own experiences trying to sell in a B2B market. Let's face it... B2B is just hard. Prospecting, follow-up, demos, calls, more calls, presentations, case studies, etc. etc. It's doubly hard for a new product that doesn't have an established track record yet.
Why would people trust you at all? Why would they have any sort of confidence to move forward with you? At least in my case, that was the bottleneck. I found a bunch of people who said they needed what I've built but simply can't trust a solopreneur to handle it.
PS I'd still keep looking for small little niches that might find your product useful, I'm sure the market is huge, and go for the smallest company or individual who'd pay you to use this. Just one. Work with that person as much as he'd give his attention to you, craft the product into something that's usable and actually creates value just for one person. And then take it from there.
That's your #1 priority now.
That said, the fact that you've found 2 customers is a very encouraging sign. B2B is just hard. Particularly if your customers don't spend a lot of time at the computer to begin with; they're naturally skeptical of tech, let alone new tech.
You're right on point here @simplisticallysimple. Trust is the one and only currency on the internet and it's hard won with people that didn't grow up in our generation and later.
I'm basically doing what you're saying. I'm working very closely with my biggest customer and giving them my full attention. The only thing that's holding me back is this: I don't want to over-commit and build everything they ask for. Every company has very specific ways they handle different processes and I don't want to end up tailoring the software so much to them that it becomes incompatible with others.
Your product have huge market bro. My father works in government department in India. And his works involve surveying the towns and villages and filling forms on paper then reuploading it as excel sheet. But it is in Hindi and not in English. Maybe you can try adding more languages.
Yeah, there are lots of government agencies in Germany that deal a lot with paper documents too. It's very difficult to sell into these departments as they usually have a ton of requirements. Right now I mostly tried to sell into the German market, so I will first branch out into the English speaking market and will see how that turns out.
I'm happy you turned it around with your other project. I was hoping to do the same with imgregex.com. Just to have something else to work on for a while :)
Wow bro. Heart touching story. I was also going through similiar journey. But i have started working on my other project. But my last project journey was similar to yours. Cold emails then no reply. Multiple rejections. Setbacks. That's how life works man. But certainly I can't complain as you said. I have learned a lot from that journey.
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