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Contenda’s founder explains why you shouldn't dwell on scalability
by
rmondo
https://www.gorelay.co/t/why-you-don-t-need-to-be-enterprise-ready-or-scalable-as-yet-and-other-notes-on-crafting-b2b-software-with-contenda-s-founder-lilly-chen/743
Nathan Latka does a lot of "before vs. after" SaaS interviews and there seems to be a lot of SaaS software that starts with small businesses and naturally goes into enterprise a year or two after the initial interview. I'm not sure how trying to "force" going enterprise is going to work for an indie founder without a huge sales team.
She says:
"while it certainly takes longer to build beautiful software, the floor for hitting that quality bar is now also much lower and accessible. Because there are a lot more engineering tools being made."
If it's easier and faster than ever to deploy something, then there must be more competition too. So, if anything, is the pressure to stand out with a beautifully designed product arguably not greater than ever?
I see what you're saying. I think her main point is that there's not much point in investing a lot of time trying to perfect a product before you ship. It makes more sense to seize the opportunities provided by dev tools that allow you to shorten the development cycle, so you can ship a product asap and continue to "perfect" it once you have more data (and ideally, are monetizing it).
Absolutely agree. I wrote about this not too long ago on here about how so many startups are killed by trying desperately to create the perfect product that fits the market.
Honestly the best solution for most bootstrapped startups (or even funded for that matter) is to focus on finding a great idea that they can presell to their target audience. If they have an idea that is new, interesting and valuable to their potential customers then getting money from them is going to be easy even without a product.
From there you can create any product you want.
Take The Bullet Journal for example. Sold a new belief about how to be productive. Got lots of traction and then created a wealth of products (book, course, mobile application) to help believers implement that belief system in their lives.
Literally cost the guy nothing to get started. Business now doing over $8 million a year with (from what I can see) no employees.
Yeah, if she's getting to $100K AVC with 5-6 design partnerships on entry-level infrastructure, it's safe to say a fancy design shouldn't be a priority.