Does Sales Safari work on an audience of developers?
Hi Indie Hackers!
Like many of you I'm a programmer trying to start a bootstrapped SaaS business. I came across Amy Hoy's Sales Safari as a way to find ideas which seems very promising at first glance.
One of the things they say is that your odds of success are lower if you're trying to serve and audience you don't belong to. Intuitively this makes sense but it makes me think - what could I possibly sell to other developers that hasn't been sold before/that they can't build for themselves?
I'd love to hear how you think about this problem!
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It works. I didn't know about @amyhoy's Sales Safari when I started Indie Hackers, but I used essentially the same method to come up with the idea for Indie Hackers itself.
Specifically, I wanted to target developers, and when I searched through conversations developers were having on Hacker News, I could see how much they valued transparent stories from other developers starting profitable side projects and bootstrapped solo startups.
I would question both of these assumptions.
1️⃣ Why do you need to sell something that hasn't been sold before? The goal of a business is to provide value to customers, not to do something that's never been done. For example, Google wasn't the first business to sell ads, nor was it the first place that let people search the web. ConvertKit was not the first email provider. I guarantee you 10 years from now, there will be wildly profitable TV shows, restaurants, newsletters, games, SaaS apps, communities, etc., that don't yet exist today, even though all of these things have been sold before.
2️⃣ Why do you need to do something that developers can't build themselves? I can wash my car myself, but I still take it to the car wash. I can clean my house, but I still hire a cleaner. I can cook, but I still eat out. Hell, I can code, but I still hire developers. Plenty of developers pay for things that they themselves could build.
I think if you can move beyond these false assumptions, you'll find it easier to create a business idea ✌️ There are some good resources for ideation on IH's Start Here page.
Hi Courtland! I thought about what you said and realized that part of what I was feeling was afraid - I've tried to come up with ideas before and those methods haven't worked and I was feeling similarly skeptical about Sales Safari. Questioning my assumptions was a good way to challenge that fear and inspired me to feel more positive about this process. So thank you! :)
Also, the talk you gave at MicroConf about 'Navigating the Startup Landscape' helped! Here's a link for anyone reading the comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHZU4fC7LnA
Great answers here. Happy to answer any other specifics about Sales Safari.
Most of our students are developers (60% or so) creating things for developers. Successful products and businesses range from software like Stunning.co to very popular books and courses to code templates and dozens of other formats in between. One of our most successful students is Joel Hooks from egghead, which also encourages their instructors to use Sales Safari to come up with new course topics.
Formats are not limited to these, though. The real key is finding a focused pain without a specific format in mind, and then having a repeatable process for coming up with concepts for ways to solve that rather than just building the first thing that comes to mind!
(Amy is my biz partner, been teaching it to developers and dev audiences together for about 10 years!)
Hi Alex! I find your blog Stacking the Bricks very useful - especially this free video on how Sales Safari works! So thank you :) https://stackingthebricks.com/video-sales-safari-in-action/
Can you please tell me a little more about the 'repeatable process for coming up with concepts for ways to solve [the problem]'? This sounds very much like what I'm looking for but haven't figured how to implement yet.
Sure! There's more than I can describe in a comment (this comes directly from a major section of 30x500, and takes several lessons, exercises, and examples to cover completely).
But here's the jist:
One of the challenges of coming up with product ideas is that if we're only using our freefrom imaginations, we're only going to come up with products that are "like" the ones that we've seen.
Worse, we're going to bias towards products that we think are the coolest, most exciting or fun to create, or even that we just see most often or recently.
That's why product "ideas" seem to come in waves through communities like IndieHackers. SaaS, Ebooks, Video Courses, paid newsletters...the more you see it, the more it's likely to be the first thing that comes up in your mind when you're brainstorming.
Availability bias is very, very strong.
The fix, as such, is something we call Fixstorming. It's a compliment to Painstorming, which is one of the foundation skills and processes in Sales Safari (and today we teach it with even more detail and structure than that classic video, but you get the idea!).
Fixstorming basically says: brainstorming is random and laden with bias. That's not inherently, bad but it is limiting, and more importantly, it sends you into YOUR brain instead of into THE RESEARCH.
At a high level, Fixstorming looks like this:
Pick a very specific pain that you've found your audience experiences, via the Painstorming/Sales Safari process.
Reverse that pain into a "dream" aka the opposite of the pain. What does life look like for your customer once the pain is gone, or significantly reduced? Sometimes this is easy and obvious, but many times it requires getting more clear about the problem, or why the problem is a problem in the first place.
Finally, systematically explore ways to get the the customer from the pain, to the dream. Systematically is key, because you need to think beyond the stuff that comes into your mind naturally.
Products - fixes - aren't just "SaaS" or "ebook" or "course" or "productized service." Products are a combination of:
In class we provide starter lists for methods and formats, and examples and practice for every piece of this system.
In practice, you take each pain and run it through every permutation of method + format you can.
Not everything that comes out will be good.
Not everything that comes out will be fun or interesting or even possible.
Not everything that comes out will be something that your audience wants.
But now you have an essentially endless list of options you can start whittling down to the ones that ARE good. The ones that sit in the venn diagram of your audience's desires and buying habits, and your personal strengths.
It lets you prioritize what you can build now, what you can build quickly, and what you can get in the hands of paying customers most efficiently.
It also gets rid of the "preciousness" of ideas, because you never have to worry about something being your last or only idea. You can always come up with more, as long as you've done the audience research and use the process.
Hope this gives you a taste of what we mean when we say systematic, and why availability bias is such a tempting but limiting factor without a process like this!
Thank you very much Alex! I really appreciate you taking the time to write this out :)
Anytime!
Hey Meghna!
I think there are a couple of things at play here:
Using Amy's numbers of 30x500, there could be a possibility of 40,000+ indie businesses that sell to 500 customers!
Even, if you are just focusing on a specific language it can still be a huge market. For example 5m php developers could support 10,000 30x500 size businesses.
Now, of course, there are plenty of devs that hate anything subscription based but I doubt that hurts the dev market being a viable option.
Then I don't see any good reason why you couldn't find 500-1000 customers in that same market that liked the way YOU did things vs the other guys.
That's the cool thing about being an indie founder we don't really need to make millions which means we get a lot more flexibility in large markets. It's kind of like an indie founder invisibility cloak!
If you think about the inde founder level up game it kinda looks like this:
Rob Walling and Amy both agree with me on this:
I've written more about all of this in the indie founder bootcamp over here!
Hi Justin!
This was very useful. It is difficult to imagine the exponential! Your explanation certainly helped :)
I have been thinking about these questions a lot recently too. My monthly revenue goal and product price point are definitely in the range you mentioned. And while you're right that it's like an indie founder superpower, it also means that you have to get your product in front of many/the right people to actually find those 500-1000 customers that would prefer your way of doing things. That's one of the things I'm working on learning how to do right now.
It's cool that you mentioned the stair step approach and making small products first. I found those recently too! Also thanks for linking nugget. It looks really interesting and I signed up for it already. Will spend some time reading through it this weekend :)
Thanks @Meghna :) BTW Please do feel free to reach out here or on the Nugget slack to discuss any parts of the bootcamp or any other Q's you have!
In addition to the good points already made here, I'd add that that much of the time developers are not spending their own money on tools. When your product is a line item on a budget that includes developer salaries, it will barely be noticed. My current project is targeted at web developers, and I'm assuming most of my customers will pass the cost onto their clients or employers.
Hi Griffin! Yes, I think I agree with you. Good luck with your project! :)
Thanks Meghna - same to you!!
IMO, yes it can.
Just one example: Pull panda (Acquired by github) is a great example of something that is an indie project only a developer would recognize.
Another Healthchecks anyone could theoretically build this but most won't bother.
IMO the bar for developer tools is high and competition can be stuff. With free open source tools and developers being predisposed to scratching their own itch means there are a lot of tools out there (as you pointed out).
If you can combine developer + some other expertise you may find interesting niche for yourself (Marketing, Sales, Design, Real Estate, Finance etc.)
A word of caution
I've found this to be particularly true of developers. Just because they are very vocal about hating something does not mean
JIRA & Jenkins being two classic examples.
Hi Ben! You're right that the bar for dev tools is pretty high. I've also been thinking about this idea of combining software with outside interests and making something useful. While I like the possibilities it opens up in terms of serving other industries, I think that it's helpful if you're building something for an audience you already know and understand.
I take your point though, and will mull on it some more. Thank you :)
As a fellow developer I always consider purchasing tools when I don't want to spend the time building it myself. Just because I can doesn't mean I will. Custom tools require maintenance and can become such a time sink.
Might be interesting to talk to some more developers, or reflect yourself, on the tools you have built for yourself but abandoned cause it took too much time or became too much of a hassle.
Hope that was at least a bit helpful!
Hi Devin! I see what you're saying, thank you! :)