How I won the fight to get to the stable and profitable product

My fight to get to the stable and profitable product

This post is just a short reflection on my way to a solid product that all clients enjoy and says that it delivers more value than the pricing states. But it’s not about the pricing this time.

In 2017 I started a small venture with the goal to create a simple to use Live Chat software that clients could install on their websites and in this way connect with their leads or customers straight from the website. The business model is simple, charge for resources that are used to mediate those conversations.

It seemed that everything is simple and easy. Basic product for basic needs. I called it SignalZen.

The MVP took a few months to develop. I launched it for free and some clients liked free stuff so it was going in a positive direction. However, not to my savings budget positiveness.

Soon I figured out that the hosting providers that I chose require a lot of cash to hold all those websites connected. I also noticed that the software that I created was developed in technologies that give development speed but not efficiency. This seemed like a situation without a quick exit for me personally. But the business was going further anyway.

Sole entrepreneurship tip: Optimization from the first days

The optimization process for me was psychologically hard to dedicate time for. I was pushing it further from my routine just to have time for more important activities: new features and business development. From today’s perspective, I made a mistake by being the sole founder and burning lots of cash for something that I could’ve avoided. Strategic mistake.

The real optimization trip began just after a few years when I got a kick to the ass from some other Live Chat provider who wanted to acquire the product. They found the technological side interesting but not their business goals match.

Anyway, I had to spend around 1 month just to split the product into services that are using different technologies depending on the use case. Some of them I left for efficient development and another part of them I left for real-time experience costing more in terms of maintaining them but fewer resources demanding.

That saved around 60% of the initial hosting costs that I had just in the beginning. Pretty much a costly mistake to make.

Finding market-fit is not straightforward

Like I’ve said, when you are just starting, everything seems simple. Basic product and basic market needs. For software developers that want to expose their products and to get into a market of any relatively simple software business is easy. But it’s not easy to conquer the market because you don’t have access to capital and people. Also, you may not have proper knowledge of how to do it even if you’d have the two. I understood that I need to bootstrap and learn about the market myself.

This is where comes precious feedback from people with experience. I heard the advice of one client who was into the software business himself. He told me to focus on one thing that I do perfectly, basically to find a niche. I heard this before, but hearing it from someone else in business makes reflection more intense. And I did it.

Instead of selling Live Chat software for all kinds of clients, I started focusing only on the segment of the market that wants to use Slack as a platform for talking with their website visitors. BTW, if you haven’t tried it, you could experiment with this, because it really makes people's lives easier.

Re-orienting the product wasn’t hard and creating the integration with Slack as well. The niche has a few more products competing, but SignalZen is advancing faster and getting more and more attention each week. These moments are nice to experience.

Due to expanding costs, the pricing was changed to reflect this particular niche pricing just a bit lower than the other products. Clients started buying.

Tip about people: good intentions don’t mean good results

It’s clear that building software requires a lot of energy and time. However, sales do not close themselves. Clients don’t come from anywhere, marketing has a huge portion of the success factors pie.

As a software developer, mentor of software engineers, and with leadership experience in IT companies, I know that I can have control over the product but the marketing side of it is a new journey. I’ve started it and can not regret it. I had to do it.

My attempts to find a partner in marketing weren’t exactly fruitful, although, they transformed into a partnership of another kind that is beneficial for the business. But lacking leadership in marketing, made me read good books and articles about SEO, Content marketing, and other useful content that helps to navigate and experiment with selling more and more.

Tip about outsourcing: there is this money smell

There are some jobs to do when you’re bootstrapping a business that you’d rather delegate to other companies or people. This time about companies.

I had a chance to have a situation with an SEO agency. It felt misleading to lose control of how things develop and have no idea how they should. So you give some trust and some cash.

What happens next, you expect to see results by the time you are promised, but there are no results.

Then you start to dig deeper into the outsourced topic and you figure out that the given trust was a bad decision. Black-hat SEO and backlinks for $5. Seriously?

The lesson is simple. Before delegating, read a book or relevant information on the Internet about the topic so that you would understand what people ought to do for the right price.

Some lessons learned, what about now?

Outsourcing, finding the right people, market fit, and costs. This is most of the time about organizing your priorities and learning down the road.

Although a few topics covered seemed negative, there is a positive ending for this post.

It’s about the current state of the product that was carried through all these getting lost pain points.

Today I feel strong and happy about the technological state of the product, marketing efforts, and my knowledge that was exponentially multiplied compared to the beginning.

We have plans to expand the niche to more integrations, more nice features and it’s all stable, and profitable. We have operations in more than 10 countries, all clients recognize our efforts firstly to be responsible for their experience and also they can get nice gifts that we call new features.

Moreover, the product is shaped by all clients that each day give feedback on how they could make their experience better by having one or another feature. I believe that this is the key to making the product and business successful. You need to listen, analyze and implement solutions that could be used not by specifically one client but by everyone using the product.

This is a process that gives stable happiness each day even though sometimes you need to spend lots of time creating stuff. Back in 2017, there were almost no clients and no one could give feedback. It was hard to navigate where to put efforts, but now it’s the opposite. There is always something that you can improve by knowing feedback.

As they say, it’s a good start!

Do you recognize yourself in this post?