👭 How can we help each other avoid the biggest mistake? 👭
The biggest mistake startups make is building the product before validating the idea.
I just saw a popular post here on Indie Hackers that summarizes YC's top criteria for a successful idea.
What's your idea? Post it below and I will provide feedback based on YC's top criteria.
Here is an idea my cofounder and I are validating:
Problem: PagerDuty alerted you, now what?
✔️ Popular:
With 22.3 global software developers and 43.7 million customer
and success workers, teams need to respond to service outages
quickly and effortlessly.
✔️ Growing :
Incidents and the need to better respond to incidents will increase
because of digital transformation, more remote work,
shift towards DevOps culture, silo'd teams, shift towards cloud,
and most importantly, customer trust.
✔️ Urgent:
Startups need an incident response protocol before an incident
happens. Once a customer's trust is lost, it is hard to gain it back.
✔️ Expensive:
Annual incident response cost for a team of 10 can go as high as
$465,319. The cost of losing a customer because of an outage is
priceless.
✔️ Frequent:
On average, an employee deals with 32.4 incidents per month,
taking over 2 hours to resolve an incident.
For the solution of how we are solving this problem, check out 👉War Room
Now your turn! 👇
What's missing here is who am I? or who is having that problem in your opinion as your target?...
How many are on-call? 10k? 100k?
You didn't define the target properly yet.
No idea how any of these things talk about people on-call or the issue of the alerts they are getting.
No startups don't need this normally
This is only a concern for companies already getting substantial income in a way...
Your bloating this to an unrealistic thing, this is total sales hype
Over how many employees? which employees?...
I call BS
I've been in so many companies and situations
I can tell you a story about 100 people being on call and getting paid and getting pages <2 times a year on avg
And I can tell you about NOC/OP people getting 5 alerts per hour but only during work time and having full written instructions on what to do with them
IDK if you just make is a sales/investment pitch, but it doesn't sound like you know your customers, problems or how to word them...
Responding to your landing page solution
I don't think you know the problem space you are going for or the customers you are targeting at this point...
Context: I've been on-call for almost all of my career over different companies and teams, I've done large ent. and I've done small startups...
Also this is such a bad niche, people so underappreciated PD and don't believe how much they need to pay for such a tiny thing... So your branching off a thing that's considered super low value from the start (not the activity, the product), maybe reformulating the marketing around the product would make it better...
"The biggest mistake startups make is building the product before validating the idea." - I disagree. IHers tend to buy in to gold standard idea validation but its just not as easy as that. Take your idea above - I have participated countless times responding to PagerDuty for a site that was not responding and I still can't really tell you if you will be able to sell into that market or not. (However I can tell you the kind of features you would need to have a shot at it.)
I will fully admit that some startups make mistakes around idea validation. Uclusion ended up going all the way to Pulse with our first take on collaboration before coming at it from a different angle. But even now I don't know for certain which angle is more sale-able and therefore "validated".
Thanks for your reply David!
From the sounds of it, it seems like you think a problem can be experienced but that doesn't mean that it is worth solving. I completely agree. Which is why it is even more important for founders like us to test and re-test our assumptions.
Uclusion seems to take a very targeted approach at building a collaboration tool for developers and leaders. What was the most effective angle you took to ensure it was problem worth solving?
I'd love to hear more about the features you have in mind :)
I'm actually impressed by your web design. Really nice dark mode @alicelovescake
Currently doing a research around dark mode website, would be awesome if you're open to start a conversation on Twitter. Here's my link :)