From solo-founder with a day job – to a million dollar software business – Alex Yumashev – MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recap

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: jitbit.com
Twitter: @jitbit
Slides:

Talk Recap

• “You can teach a software engineer how to run a business, but you cannot teach an MBA how to write code” – Joel Spolsky
• Jitbit history
  • 100% self-funded
  • 10 years; first 5 years: just me, all alone, 2 years moonlighting
  • 4 people, 100% remote
  • Flagship product: help desk software app (Really, REALLY crowded market)

The Don’ts

• Don’t wait for an idea
  • start building before you have a product
  • tons of product-agnostic stuff:
    • website
    • blog
    • analytics
    • email list
    • payment gateway
  • less consumption, MORE creation
• Don’t target developers
  • (At least not with your first product)
  • Hard crowd to please – don’t make it hard on yourself
• Don’t worry about pirates
  • Software pirates never switch to paid versions – they switch to your competitor
  • We even tried “cracking” our own software and uploading it
• Don’t worry about incorporating
  • Revenue is important, “LLP or LLC?” is not important
• Don’t be afraid of competition
  • Don’t try to come up with some new cool innovative shit
  • competition is good news – they proof market exists
  • “Me too” products are fine – you can even clone a product
  • “First – learn to draw a horse” – Salvador Dali

The Dos

• Charge More
  • charge from day 1
  • price for the customers you want
  • $5 customer is different from a $99 customer – $5 customer is PITA
  • add completely stripped $5 plan only to prevent disruptive competition (if threat imminent)
• SEO
  • works on all stages of your company
• “Always be marketing”
  • where no one expects it: 404 page, 500 page,
  • support = cheap marketing (no hard selling, but delight people for word-of-mouth)
• “Marketing Mondays” by Mike Taber
  • whole team does nothing but marketing on mondays
• Content Marketing
• Log everything
  • links you build, AB-tests you run, posts you publish
  • have a “commit history” for your marketing – not just your code

Product Management 101

• Monitor feature usage from 1st customer
  • Monitor trial/paid users separately
  • Kill the unused ones
  • Enhance the heavily used ones
  • CRO inside the product

SEO

• SEO should be done by founder
• Do the basics (on page, mobile, speed, Annie Cushing’s SEO checklist, Google Webmaster Tools)
• target long-tail keywords
  • make all your internal content public – publish knowledge base, enduser docs, API docs, FAQs, installation guides, workarounds
• Build links from pages that rank for your keyword
  • even at #218. Export the ranking URLs (serps.com), check for link opportunities
• Build brand mentions
  • Google’s patents: “Non-linking citations are treated as implied links”
• Competitor backlinks
  • use LinksSpy.com
• Track rankings
  • if it drops, check the “marketing log”, check the Panguin tool
  • track top20 rankings to learn when your competitors improve their SEO –> reverse engineer

Other things we tried (Did it work or not?)

• Remarketing ==> NO
  • people hate B2B/work-stuff on FB
• A/B testing ==> YES
  • be prepared that 90% of tests will fail
  • Always have a hypothesis behind a test – not just “lets try X and see what happens”
  • Don’t trust your guts
  • Statistical significance (long time + high-traffic pages)
• Email marketing ==> NO
  • at least not at the scale I hoped it would work
• Growth hacks (“invite a friend”, “RT to extend trial”) ==> NO
  • not in B2B
• Net Promoter Score ==> YES
  • surveying method to know customer happiness
  • delivers actionable data

-Christoph