i should mention i'm from los angeles california by the way
first of all why should you trust me i am the founder and CEO of juicer . i owe
embeddable social media aggregator
so what the hell is a social media aggregator essentially would you throw
out you to do is to connect all of your brand of your personal social media
accounts and it will automatically pull in any new post you have and you give
you a little snippet of code simply can put in your website so it'll display all
of these posts and beautiful feed
so here's an example this is actually from the Golden Globes com you guys with
the Golden Gloves is but it like sort of like a crappy version of the oscars in
the US but still very popular and actually this this feed itself
about 20 million views over two day . but you can see the different social
media types you get twitter facebook Instagram etc so it makes it really easy
to connect all these accounts and embed them into website it also often plan to
use their live events and concerts
you know with hash tags so people can you can see a sort of aggregated to be
anywhere you are and participate in a conversation and every once again
so firstly why would you want to start your own business all
as William all its best side
freedom is the number one and most obvious reasons start your own business
for a couple examples they spent the last two months of the last six living
in Los Angeles where I live
the other four months I spent traveling around the world
I never set an alarm I get to work whenever the hell I feel again and I get
to live wherever I want as well
secondly also pretty obvious is that the amount of ever you put in is linked to
your pay and a full-time job there's no incentive to work to the best of your
ability necessarily apart from worried about getting fired so general you will
work to a level that it will keep you from getting fired
but there's no incentive to go above and beyond also your salary is significantly
less than the value you provide your employer and so what this means is that
you are good deal for your employer or you cost less than you are bringing in
for the company and this is especially true for developers who can easily work
earned the business they work for millions of dollars and i'm willing to
bet that your salary is a millions of dollars
finally no one's ever gotten rich working for somebody else
not the being rich is important and it's certainly nice but it's really nice to
realize that your earning potential is limitless compared to the five percent
yearly raise you can hope for at your job or ten percent raise you can hope
for from get this from switching on
obviously there's a few guys like a finance and that sort of thing and make
over a million dollars here but most developers them
so firstly i'm going to talk about my history prior to juicer just so you guys
can get an idea of how what led me to starting juicer
so I guess that are a degree in microbiology and i started programming
because i wanted to build a product and i couldn't convince anyone else to do it
for me and i was a college student so I don't have any money to paint one so i
got turned on the rails and I build the product
well really what i did was i slowly learned how to program built in rails
didn't really know what I was doing
finished it through it all out sorry overbuilt it a lot better and then sort
of launched a little bit
send it to some of my friends and i think i got maybe about a hundred people
to sign up for it but with that led to was one of the people who signed up with
somebody I don't know and he said hey like the site you build can you build me
a site as well and i have five thousand dollars to pay you with at the time I
said mommy I'm sure but inside I was screaming because no one has ever
offered me five thousand dollars for anything in my life at that point and so
I felt the guy is like and after that somebody else contact me and you know
slowly but surely this is turned into a lucrative for some lucrative side career
as a freelancer
so I I started realizing the in my free time I had a full-time job this whole
time as well and just building sites when I good or when people wanted me to
start doing a little more consulting work a little bit more serious sort of
realizing i guess and whenever I had free time I would build random various
products in my what you know whatever sort of idea that came to my head
so the rest of this talk I guess is going to be structured with sort of i'm
just gonna talk about what would like to do sir where did I come up with the idea
and how do I build it and you know how do i promote it and how do we get to the
point where at the same
I'll talk to about the point we're at today to at some point as well
so the first thing you need to do when starting your own business has come up
with an idea and this is arguably the hardest thing of the whole process
coming up with the idea of a juicer worked was I had a string of freelance
clients for a long time who asked me to put a social media peed in their website
they wanted to aggregate all of the different social media accounts and put
them on the website so the first time a client asked me to do this i googled
social media bead and i found a service they did this already and I said great
I don't have to build it myself somebody else can do it so i found a service and
services called teams and they charge ten dollars a month to put a social
media bead on your website so i got the clients to sign up for it and they doing
on the website name is great and I had clients after client and the client
would ask me for social media feed on their website so i always brought them
back to 10 times those ten ten ten ten dollars a month it's great
and then in about half way through 2014
I had a freelance client who was that hey I want to watch me pee on my website
is a great let's go to 10 and i went to tent i have probably been there about
six months or style and I found that they had raised their prices from ten
dollars a month to two hundred fifty dollars a month to mention - they've
sent raised their prices to five hundred dollars a month and they may have raised
even higher at this point so the client obviously this idea that we can pay for
that we're not going to pay that much just have a social media and be on our
website but can you build it for us
I light bulb went off in my head I said not only I can build this but what I'm
going to do instead is I'm going to build a service and you guys are sign up
for it
so that that's sort of where juicer came from and i had my first client before I
you know a single line of code
so now i'm going to talk about a couple of different ways
a couple of different ways you can come up with ideas hopefully the first and
most obvious is to solve your own problem
and so you guys are all developers then you've probably seen a myriad of
developer tools out there the sort of been started as products that will
hopefully make your life easier
so this is sort of the most common route taken with developers is solve a problem
you have
and this is great because you're very close to the problem so you have a good
idea of what the solution should be the problem of course with this is that it's
very crowded market there's many many developer tools and I think developers
are especially used to being a bitch sort of startup ideas and product ideas
and we're a little bit numb to it
the second way to do this is to solve a problem for others
so what what i mean by this is somebody who has a problem that's not a problem
that you share
so for example maybe you decide you want to build a restaurant reservation
management tool you guys presumably don't own restaurant so this isn't a
problem that you have specifically which can be great because you can really sort
of tap into markets that don't typically get the sort of attention that
oftentimes like developers down
but of course the problem with this is that you're further away from the actual
problem and the only way to really get to the core of what the problem is that
you're trying to solve is to talk to your customers and oftentimes the
constant with the customers think they want and what they actually want are
very different and sometimes have trouble communicating that
and thirdly which is sort of the route I took producer is this other problem for
something up so i have many many clients who all wanted social media feeds and so
I knew that this was a market that existed because somebody out there
needed multiple people i don't need it
so at the very least i thought i could sell these two other developers who have
the same
the same problems I do is that their clients are asking for social media
feeds for the website but they they can pay five hundred dollars a month to
these so when you come up with an idea i think is very important to start small
and what I'm talking about here is starts start with a small idea
so you want to build something that only a few people need but those people
really need it
so I didn't build a social media aggregator because i thought everyone in
the world makes the social media aggregator but there are certain
businesses that would like to include something like that on their website and
so I thought I would build something like that because i know there's lots of
businesses out there that have this need
but they don't have five hundred dollars months to throw the problem so I mean
so the next point I'll make is that I don't even get something to make it
better to make something that a few people loved a lot of people like so
what I mean by this is sort of the same thing I was talking about before is
focus on a leash and a small niche is good and it seems counterintuitive
because you when you focus on each it doesn't really seem like there's
anywhere to grow but i'll remind you that Microsoft started as a by creating
a basic interpreters were at the altar computer and seventies so looking like
this up now and they started with extreme
the next thing when coming up with an idea is to not worry about competitors
and I think the normal reaction when you see somebody else is already doing an
idea that you have
it's not to bother I think it's very important to ignore this feeling betters
me a couple things competitors mean that there is a market already so that if
somebody is doing the authority it means that there's a need for this out in the
world
Apple isn't the first company to ever make a computer by any means but they
did the best and are they're arguably the most successful computer company in
the world and juices started out with just a single competitor which was 10th
but it turns out there's a lot of companies out there that do which is it
does like me way more than you think there's got to be 50 plus in the world
and if I known that when i first started i probably would have been extremely
discouraged but luckily I was pretty lazy and didn't do very much research
and I mean so what if i had it was it's entirely possible that i wouldn't have
bothered but i'll tell you what it doesn't matter because there are a lot
of competitors out there but users doing just fine once you come up with the idea
i think it's very important that you name it and it seems very counter
intuitive as well but there's a few reasons you want to do this one is
because when you come up with a name for your product that makes it real
it makes it more real in your mind and you can start taking a little bit more
seriously
number two we get to the next step which is built it you're gonna be typing my
name a lot
when you program it so it's good just so you don't have to go do some search and
replace it if you decide you're changing them later
and finally it's good to have a do domain they have already purchased that
way when you want you can launch immediately and you don't have to sort
of lawful over what we're going to name in or what domain we're going to get
something is very important to sort of do these these relatives seemingly
simple tasks first before you write a single line of code
so the next step and the part of the you guys will excel at is build it so i
should note here that I'm not an especially good developer but what I am
good at is sort of starting a project from scratch and seeing it through to
some sort of deployables safe
I'm not going to talk too much about how to actually program because it's very
highly dependent but I
if you guys don't have a lot of practice or starting a probably starting the
project from scratch and getting it to a boil state then i highly recommend just
giving it a shot and trying it out because I know like you guys were pretty
big companies you probably a very specific tasks we work on you don't
necessarily get to work on the whole application
so the first thing I'll say about building it is
start small again OH - OH the next thing start small quite a bit and what you're
building here is the smallest possible possible product and you've probably
heard the term before MPP which stands for minimum viable product and what that
is is a product that provides the the most small atomic unit of usefulness and
obviously defining that is very hard to do
depending on what it is you're trying to build but I think it's really really
important to keep it as small as possible and so when I build juicer
I I built it in rails and I built using javascript and I knew you had to do a
couple things because I had a client telling me specifically what I needed to
do you need to have facebook twitter and instagram integrations and it needed to
be able to embed in their website that's all the client cared about but I needed
to do a few more things so that the client could then sign up for it so it
had to have a web interface had a complication and had to have a stripe
integration so that I could accept payment for my customers and has it that
was all I did
next thing I recommend is to design it yourself and I know this may be a
horrifying but to some of you but I promise you it's not too bad you all
learn how to be developers so i can assure you can all learn how to be
designers as well first I'll give you a couple of recommendations when it comes
to designing things but my number one thing is no bother with photoshop just
design in the browser using CSS if you guys don't know CSS you can also learn
that very quickly and easily use a couple basic design concepts like white
space and alignment
I won't go into too much detail about how to design something well because I
don't know honestly but you can make something look decent announced and this
is really important I think to design it yourself because it will really get you
into the nitty-gritty of how it should work
and what's the ideal user blow and how high did you decide to work overall and
it will really help you connect to the user your customer
hopefully and give you a sense of what they have to do to get your service
toward the next thing i'll say when one building it is to start download
deadline
I think this is really important because it's really easy to keep working and
adding features and doing more and more and really putting out the concept of
launching because i don't know about you guys but its developers the thing I'm
most comfortable doing is programming and all that other stuff is not
programming and the more I can keep programming the better in my mind
so for a few general rules of thumb I'll say if you have if you have a full time
to dedicate to your business that you're starting give yourself two weeks to get
too many people in that sounds like an insanely short period of time and if you
don't if you have a full-time job and you're going to do this interested in
years
three-time yourselves for weeks anything else after that
throw it out if it's if if you can't do it in that time
it's not important for the MVP and this will really help you focus and sort of
lean it lean your product down to exactly what it needs to be so the next
step after you build it
its launch it and i highly recommend launching it as soon as possible you
want to get this thing out in front of users and have users using it or not
using it
get an idea of what your user base how your user base is going to respond to it
and they are at all
so i'll talk a little bit about how i launched user so i originally launched
juicer and I got my one client to sign out behind integrated in their site
pretty quickly and then i decided i want to promote a little bit more so I went
to read it and I went on to two separate it's because the first thing I did is I
thought about who are my clients and in my room I customers and my mind
number one client was other web developers like me
other consultants or freelancers or people working companies who have been
tasked with heading a social media feed to a client's website
number two was social media marketers themselves so go directly straight to
the source
so when i read it and i found two subreddits that are exactly that's our
webinar social media and so from there
somebody found the site they liked it and they posted product onto and I don't
know product on was at the time this is mid-2014 so I think they have just
launched so I remember somebody telling me it was on product and I was like a
look at and I kind of told me like it was a really big deal
ok don't know what that is exactly by product and actually turned out to be
really great
so hopefully i can give you to use or general rules of thumb that I've learned
from this
but the most important thing I think it's a figure out who your customer is
and where they are and this sort of all comes
it's really kind of all part of step 1 which is coming up with an idea but it's
really knowing at least trying to formulate your head
do you think your customer is and I'm figure out where they are so i guess i'd
read it is a great place for that because there's a subreddit for
basically every person every type of person or every career so chances are
you'll be able to find a subreddit that pertains to your customer race over to
use hacker news
news ycombinator com which is really great if you're building a sort of
programmers centric tool but be careful because they can be pretty harsh and
negative
it's kind of scaring number three is product on
like I said it's probably the best in terms of getting your users because
everyone who gets a problem newsletters or just really interested in new
products of all times
but nowadays i think pretty sure there's a waiting list and it can be a little
bit difficult to get on there so the better way to get on there is to build a
really good product and finally whatever your customers
so like I said the first thing you have to do is forget our customer is and then
the next places to put it there so if your customer is not a person like
pastas developers and spend all day online
I can have to go offline and find them and and tell them about your business
them you know
so conventions their place of business giving calls emails showing up in person
all of these things sounds scary but they're totally valid method for getting
customers before getting customers like i said so when one side launches write
it down product on and hacker news or not and i read it and you know it did
pretty well it had a couple few days where i had a few hundred signups I
think
and after that just growth
basically all the way down to zero you know maybe one user a day so I realized
that I couldn't be continually launching it on all these sites so i had to come
up with a more solid way of your customer base so i put I i did so by
focusing on a few things and some of these are gonna be a little
counterintuitive because I think a lot of the time when you hear about Rose
hacking and growing company
you sort of get the start up mentality which is growing as fast as possible you
know you want to do the hockey stick right and I didn't do that would you sir
we grew slowly but settling so the first thing we did was we focus on SEO and
those who don't know
SEO is search engine optimization making yourself throw up higher on google
essentially and I knew nothing about SEO
I knew that it was a thing but i had no idea how to do it
so first thing I did was google a lot of stuff about how to get better at SEO and
i've included a lot of the more useful links that i found in the show notes but
essentially the number one thing is you want to focus on keywords and get your
site to be really really fast and so I mean optimization is great and that's a
whole topic into itself so i don't really talk about it but you want to
make your site
super super pass and then secondly sort of like coming up with an idea and
coming up with a customer bases you want to focus on you want to determine what
search results you want to show up in so what are your keywords that you're going
after you
and a great way to do this is to use the Google Adwords Keyword tool and
essentially what this does is allows you typically use it to purchase google
adwords will show up for certain search results but it does two things that are
really important that are relevant SEL is it will tell you the the competition
of that combination of keywords and it will tell you the search frequencies
will tell you how many times a month
those particular combinations of words to search so ideally what you want is a
search term that is as low competition and high search for equal chances are
you're not gonna be able to find this because they're very very rare
what's better than in this case
like I said with the whole idea of starting small if you want to find
something that has both the low competition and low search frequency so
if it's only a few people are searching for that amount
that's okay because those people probably desperately need what you're
offering another thing to focus on is the concept of long tail keywords and
what this is is like very long and complex and specific strings of
characters for you know very detailed search results they're very specific
so a great example for juicer was how to embed a social media feeds into Shopify
site
you know there's probably 20 people a month and search for that but those 20
people desperately want we're offering
so we sort of come up with a couple combinations of things like that where
you know various different sites and just sort of think about what I would
search if I was a different customer type and so my one really genius thought
when it comes to SEO and the thing I think that made as you're working more
for us than anything else was bothering a free plan and I didn't really mention
it before it was a juicer is SAS business software as a service so
essentially what that means is that our customers are paying customers pay for
monthly pay a monthly fee and I get to use our product and definitely as long
as they keep going
but there's also a freak here so it's got more limited functionality that
allows you to sign up and test it out and it's free forever
so a lot of people who can't afford to spend anything on this service but they
still want to social media feed on their site and we allow them to do so
the one caveat is that it has juicer bringing it and so this was sort of my
my genius sort of double edged SEO insight is that not only are is painted
sign up for a paid account incentive to get rid of the juicer bringing out of
your feed
black badges are bringing also is links on other people sites that are linking
back to juicer and each one of those increases our SEO geez
so obviously that's not going to work for every type of business but I think
there's something like that or just about every product that some sort of
hacker or you know sort of light bulb inside that everyone can have the next
thing I focus on was content marketing and content marketing is essentially
writing blog posts and essentially this is just a subset of SEO and so like I
said a great blog post that ended up writing was how to add a juicer social
media feed to amplify site you'll notice that the titles is how to add a juicer
social media
so it turns out one of the keywords we went after with social media feed or so
visit this is great for two reasons one because it increases your SEO Jews as
well you know anyone who searches for Shopify social media is going to find us
and two is because it actually teaches something to users and it's useful to
someone who finds it will then actually be able to follow along
do you say and then the problem solved and they're happy and you always want to
make your customers happy
the one sort of my one sort of genius in sight as well with with content
marketing was as juicer
I knew but virtually nothing about the social media marketing so and we were a
company that that's what we do is be provided a tool for social media
marketing so it's a little embarrassing to have a twitter account but had 50
followers and maybe even less
so I sort of wrote a series of blog posts about our journey into social
media marketing and sort of like what I learned what I tried and what worked and
dip downward and it ended up working out really well because people who are
searching for like how do i grow my Twitter followers then come to us they
would learn something about that and then as well
oh by the way juicer will help you with this - so it's sort of like was like it
you know another sort of two pronged approach to growing our customer base
the next thing we did was we built a plug-in or an add-on and the first
plug-in that we build was for wordpress and so WordPress is for those who don't
know you probably all know like a crappy PHP forum or blog framework three sites
so i had to write PHP code which was nightmarish but it was ended up being
great because for a few reasons because one we could submit it to the wordpress
plug-in directory immediately and the WordPress plug-in directory is super
easy to optimize the search you essentially just put a list of all the
words you want to show up for and then you just immediately show up on can
search for those so anyone who is using wordpress oftentimes when the install
plugin they don't go to Google they just go directly to the WordPress directory
in the circle mayor so basically overnight we were showing up at the top
of the WordPress plug-in directory
which is great and you know it's really great because WordPress anyone who's
looking in the WordPress plug-in directory is building a site so those
you're also customers right there like have people who need to address to the
site but they're building right now
and the last thing I recommend and I didn't have to do this because my
business is online only
but you want to hit the street if your customers aren't online
you're gonna have to go talk to him in your life you talking you're talking to
our customers step number five is that your customer so you build the product
you've launched it and you taking some steps towards getting growing your user
base
so when when we were surgeries are obviously didn't have very many
customers we have a few people that signed up here and there but we almost
immediately after launch put up a contact page and email address on the
site and I don't think for the first couple weeks
anyone contacted is really but I can sort of observe how people were using
the site you know people don't want my family and friends and just signed up to
be nice and and I would reach out and talk to them and see you know what they
thought about it
the sort of email them and see if they have any thoughts one way or another
about user
most people going to respond to me but if you did and if you give me a really
great insights and so during the same time you know people start slowly
trickling in the SEO SEO takes a long time to take it back dogs that have
negative three or four months before we probably got any users from google
search and we got a few more from WordPress because that happened quite a
bit more quickly but still it got to the point where you know once a week and get
an email from a customer and all of a sudden twice a week I was getting an
email from a customer and then once a day i was getting email from customer
and so
I have a lot of customer service myself so slowly but surely people started
emailing as more and more and more and it got to the point where i was getting
a bunch of emails a day and I think it's really important especially as the
person who built the site that you handle the customer service yourself
yourself don't have anyone else to do it for you and this is for a few reasons
one because you really sort of keep your finger on the pulse of your site you'll
know what your customers are using it for what problems they are having what
will definitely tell you about any bugs they have and you'll really get an idea
of what they wish the product could do because they'll ask you hey can I gonna
do this so i think when you're doing customer service
it's really important at first to be unscalable so customers will ask you hey
can you recite do this or hey I wish it did this and that what i recommend doing
it for release in verse is do all of it so they say hey can u district
yep or not the second but now it does and so this will teach you
sort of like a big pain that you're your customers have to go through so so you
know you do it as manual as possible i want to recommend doing this like
building out feature immediately so do whatever it is your customers ask you to
do and do it Superman and you want to do is for a few reasons one because you
want to waste your time building something that only one customer needs
and two because it's not one customer needs you get several people asked me to
do it and a bunch of people ask you to do it and eventually you'll get really
sick of doing it and so this will give you a really good idea of what is your
customers have to go through every time they're doing whatever task you with
your product in and and do it that means it's a really good feature idea for your
product and you should probably add it to your site if at the very least so you
don't have to do it anymore yourself
but this
if you get really sick of having to do something that customers that need to do
that's a really good sign that it should be in your product and so this is that's
where improving your product comes from so you do customer service enough and
you'll get a really good idea of what it is your product used to have a set
number 6 is to repeat step 5
you guys remember that customer service to your customers
so hopefully what's happening here is that people will sign up and they'll say
hey we should do this or hey what is going to do this and we'll keep asking
you the same thing over and over and you'll get really sick of it and then
you build it and then people stop asking that but then they'll start asking about
something else
hey we should do this I was into that and just keep doing this over and over
again and so eventually you'll reach a point with which is known as product
market fit which is knowing that whatever it is you're building has found
its niche in the greater economic realm
so you're going to have to keep repeating this for basically forever
them juicer is not about two years ago and I'm still repeating step 5
every day step number seven
ok number seven if the first you don't succeed try try again
so juicer is definitely not the first product ever built that place it
somewhere around the seven sort of full product of built on my own and it's
definitely the first one I would consider to be successful by any sense
of the word
don't get hardened disheartened if what you tried doesn't work with something
else and try again
and so those are the sort of main first seven steps i think that it takes to
build a product and I kind of took a really wide brush strokes there I think
but i just got a few more tips here for you
and so the first one is great business you every time I know I kind of gave a
bad rap to work a full-time job earlier but I definitely don't recommend putting
your job immediately and going out of starting a business and said create a
business in free time and this is really easy too young and single and don't have
kids but if you are a highly recommend if you are all those things are highly
recommend building every time
number two is to grow slow so there's no rush
and there's a few reasons to go slow in one is it will become allow you to
become the master of your problem domain so if you're like me you started social
media aggregation business and you don't know anything about social media or
recreation or anything of that nature and by growing so i was able to really
sort of understand how what is our customers are doing and why they want
this service number two is it will allow you to really get to know your customers
and the more you to know your customers
provided you're a good person and you probably are the more customers will
like you
and the more your customers like you the more people will sign up for your
service
the 30 another reason to go slow and allow you to scale your infrastructure
without having to hire people and so the nice thing about growing slow is that
you can do it yourself
and so this means you don't have to raise money you know be a real startup
which means the state's the lower means less stressful and it means that no one
is your boss still which to me is kind of the whole point
so the really nice thing about being developers and we're all developers here
is that what the main reason that you have to raise money as a higher people
generally the first person you hire a developer you don't have to do that
so besides that you don't have to worry about you actually wasting your time
raising money talking to investors keeping them updated about what it is
you're working on
you could spend all of your time working on your product no tip is to find a
partner
so this is for a few reasons i generally recommended non technical part of the
partner but the technical partner is great as well and they let you do a few
things
so there's someone to bounce ideas off of which is really great just to have
someone to talk about it was my girlfriend gets really sick of me
talking about you all the time
it's someone to motivate you when you're not feeling motivated so i know that
there were certain points during juicer especially right after we launched where
if I didn't have a partner I probably would have just given out because it
seemed like an insurmountable problem to get customers but I had a partner and I
didn't want to let him down so i get working on it and paid off
and finally the greatest part about having a partner is it someone to do all
the things you don't want to do so this means like getting a bank account and
setting up a proper corporate structure are talking to lawyers or really doing
anything you want to do which is great so juicing today
juice has been around for almost two years
when I first started we had one customer and one paying customers we had a
hundred percent conversion rate and it's it's gone down quite a bit since then
but now we have about 17 thousand customers and ten percent of them are
paying and it's by far the best paying job I've ever had
i work an average of one of four days on sorry will
i work an average of one of four hours on a juicer per day depending on how
much I'm building versus how much customer service i'm doing it
any questions so the question is do we doing currently testing and the answer
is yes we did when we first started we had at one price in mind which was then
sold price which is ten dollars a month and actually the way it works is a
little bit different so when we first launched
you got a 30 day trial and there was one like okay account was ten dollars a
month and i think it was like sort of unlimited everything you want updates
every 10 minutes and nobody signed up and so one of the first things we did
was actually introduced or like tiered pricing like having different pricing
models and then offering the free version bring forever version and that
was sort of like a combination of my SEO plan but also people like try to discern
extent so we sort of have like a real cheap version and I'm like a more
expensive that was really sort of had to build more functionality to support the
more expensive version
well it's a good question the best timing device to find a bc but we
haven't found any bc with juicer
well people have actually reached out but we've specifically told them we're
not raising money at least at this moment
so that's a good question i had i think anytime if you need money anytime is a
good time to find a bc sooner rather than later
sometimes
but i would generally say you want to at least validate your product first so you
want to have built the MVP and gotten some users sign up and I do we are
showing up into the right bro
but unfortunately I'm not a master of raising pc capital so i can tell you the
best overall ok so the question is two parts one is like what makes juicer
what made me think I was gonna be some more successful or what makes you seem
more successful mile price and then what
when did I know to give up my old products and so the first thing I'll say
is that juicer is the first product I've ever built
we're from the get-go I sort of had an idea of how to monetize it everything
else I've always built this build a cool thing and then people will sign up for
and then I'll be rich but I never really had any plans
it was the first one that was like an actual business from the beginning and
then number two is how did I know when to give up my other products and i'll
say that I don't know
I didn't even really consciously give up on that might just sort of stop thinking
about their slowly stop thinking about them and then of course the less
attention
the less they did I think general you can tell but for me it was sort of like
the in the I kind of spot at least 14 started doing this sort of thing that
but all I had to do was build it and they will come sort of thing but that's
going and building it is the easiest part and giving customers is the hard
part
well as a bunch of our parts but that's one of the hard
and so I think a lot of times i would just sort of build it launched it get
out there and be like my job is done just let that thing grow and obviously
that's not the way to approach it but I think you can tell
and if it's if it's certainly if you're not thinking about anymore that's fine
but i don't know i could tell you the ideal
yeah so the question is since i don't have a BS degree and I don't work with
any other programmers
what do i do when i need help or have questions or when I need to talk to
someone about these things
well I I I definitely think that giving it full time job
previously to this as a software engineer was one of my biggest role like
learning experiences really accelerated what I knew and you know through those
jobs I've had I have various friends that I can talk to and i have
surprisingly a lot of friends who sort of done similar things to me and they
don't really work full-time anymore and have started their own businesses so
we'll get together and talk a lot of that sort of thing
you know I use that work with a lot even now my questions about how something
should be done because that I don't definitely don't know how to do
everything
a lot of googling I also my girlfriend's developers so i can always plug her
about things i think i'll get somewhere
yeah
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