This is the third in a series of posts trying to explain what I think went wrong with my attempt of selling online code-generation services, that I end up shutting down due to the lack of clients. In previous posts, I recommended to Choose a cool technology to sell but do not try to sell to developers.
My third advice is to make sure you test your target market really exists. And let me emphasize the word “test”. Obviously, I believed it existed. And I even commented it with “family and friends” and they all confirmed my idea was great!. But I didn’t go beyond that. I thought my gut feeling and those encouraging comments of some close colleagues was enough to justify my “huge” time investment in the complete creation and deployment of the services. No test, no prototyping, nor pretotyping either.
My services were directed to individual developers interested in accelerating their development process by using models to bootstrap the web applications they were contracted to do. As it is now obvious, such group of developers do not really exist. From all my conversations with MDE vendors, I’ve now realized that most successful MDE companies are targeting business people instead of pure developers and big companies instead of freelance developers or small companies.
And when the market does not exist it’s not a matter of adding more features, lowering the price or spending more on marketing (good marketing helps but doesn’t do miracles). The sooner you realize your market does not exist the better. Just get over it and move to your next idea.
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. More about me.
Yes. But how do you test/prototype market existence if you don’t provide something to test? Particularly in IT field…
I like the concept of pretotyping for instance. However, I agree you may need to build a little to test the market but it’s important that you realize that if people are not responding it’s maybe because there is no market for that (instead of assuming that it´s because you´re missing a critical feature that will bring a lot of users, and enter into an infinite loop with this)
To “pretotype” you need to first market your idea… but how do you know you’re doing your marketing right? Marketing for geeks is even harder than identifying a market.
I think your perception of “pretotyping” being a good idea comes from the fact that you didn’t try it. You would soon find out that testing a market is equally hard than building a product. You would probably quit your idea thinking there was no market, when after all what was wrong was your “pretotyping”…
Tricky situations…
I just saw this post/your business as I was looking for a way for people like me (light UI dev, who doesn’t like terminal screens), to easily build custom db driven django websites fast from the cloud (SaaS), in a “right-brained” fashion.
What you built so far, hit a portion of what I was looking for so I’ll try it out in the near future.
I think you were on to something but there are a few different angels to test.
To test this kind of thing, create decent quality explanatory videos for 3-5 services each solving a major problem for developers.
– Market the landing pages w/video on google PPC.
– Spend $200-$500 per campaign, each to their own landing page.
– Offer Beta Signups ($$$ only).
– If people are willing to pay for a solution, you have found a problem worth fixing.
You can do this in a few weeks before writing a single line of code which will allow you to fail fast or realize your on to something.
You should read/listen to: The Lean Startup, Do More Faster and/or The Launch Pad and you will never make that mistake again.
If your interested in exploring a few similar business ideas send me an email 🙂 I’m more of a business developer / UI guy in need of a strong tech developer.
Thanks Robert, I moved my entrepreneurial interests to a completely different domain, see http://neliosoftware.com