Zero to Sold

Title: Zero to Sold

Description: Teachers began sharing self-built solutions through Google Sheets, highlighting a shared problem within their community. This led to the creation of a web-based application that addressed their needs more efficiently.

Tags: Marketing, Reading Journal, APP

Date: 2023-07-24T07:30:19.000Z

Draft: false

Categories:

Series: Zero To Sold

Keywords: teachers, self-built solutions, online communities, Google sheets, shared problem

We found out that many other teachers did the same when they started talking about their self-built solutions in their online communities. Teachers began to share their templates through Google sheets. It was clear that this was a shared problem in a very tight-knit community.

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发现了一个群体的集体痛点

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Even though it helped, it was clunky and overwhelming. I looked into it, and it seemed quite possible to build a web-based application that would do this work faster and more reliably.

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发现了一个更好的解决方案

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There was a sizable market with an apparent, shared, and critical problem. The problem was solvable, but no one had yet built anything to make it noticeably easier.

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商机的定义。

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So, we released it to the public, built a landing page, and waited. Nothing happened. One or two people signed up for the free trial, but there was not much else. We hadn’t done any marketing, and we hadn’t made any sales. The service just sat there, idling.

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市场需要冷启动

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And then, one day, everything changed. In a comment to a Facebook post about how teachers dealt with feedback, Danielle dropped the link to our product with an explanation of how she used it. Teachers started to respond, asking for more details, they checked out the program, and came back to share their newly found discovery on social media.

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在知乎上也经常有类似操作

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That fueled the growth of our business from its first few users to thousands of customers a couple of months later. It was surreal, but we had tapped into a highly active tribe. Once we understood that, we didn’t need to do much when it came to marketing our product: our users would do most of that for us.

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社区一条帖子就完成了冷启动：一个好东西被大家看到了。

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Every day, new teachers would sign up, and since we provided a service that solved their problems well, we had incredibly high retention and conversion rates.

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确实解决问题并且高频使用

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For many of our customers, teaching from home was a side hustle. Using our product enabled many of them to turn this into a full-time source of income. We priced our service to be affordable and easily justified. We even increased our prices by 50% a year into running the business, and it continued growing nevertheless.

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价值被真正的创造了出来

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business from nothing, without any outside funding or assistance. Bootstrapping is about accomplishing the

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In the Preparation Stage, the focus will be on finding an audience, their biggest problem, and a solution that solves that problem in a way to make people pay for it. You will find out how to price your product initially and start selling.

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第一阶段最大的问题是种子用户与定价让他们付钱

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In the Survival Stage, the focus will be on finding a repeatable way to make money. You will learn how to work on the product, listen to your early customers, and start building out processes and automation to stay on top of your business.

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Find your niche audience. Find and validate their critical problem. Invent and validate a solution to their problem. Build a product to implement that solution. Build a business that can repeatedly sell that product to your audience.

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价值创造一般过程

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Tech founders—and I count myself as one—focus on products because that is what we use to solve our problems. After all, when you run into a challenging task, what do you look for first? An in-depth scientific explanation for the epistemological essence of the task? Or a tool that will do the job for you seconds after you install it?

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作为一个技术宅,万不可太沉迷于技术,应该关注产品。解决问题而不是研究科学。能用就行

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Successful businesses are built by solving critical problems for an audience that will pay for a solution to their issues. The Preparation Stage is when you make these foundational choices. Once in motion, a business has certain inertia that makes these decisions hard to change. Even though pivoting your business into new markets is sometimes the right choice, it’s extra effort. That’s why it’s a good idea to spend considerable time on getting it right in the first place.

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为特定群体解决一个关键的问题,这个问值得他们花钱解决。

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They fail because there were not enough customers. They fail because the product solved the wrong problem. They fail because the product solved the problem the wrong way. And sometimes, they fail even though the product solved the customers’ problems.

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一句话总结就是产品必须要真的有价值

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Many successful bootstrapped businesses start with an audience, a specific niche. They find their customers’ critical problems and provide valuable solutions that people gladly pay for. Their product is centered around continuously providing value to new and existing customers. Audience, problem, solution, and product can be looked at individually.

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Fake it until you make it . Who why how what

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Who am I helping? You will discover how to find the perfect niche and make sure it can support your business in Step One: Your Audience. Why do they need help? Learn how to find and validate their critical problem in Step Two: Their Problem. How can I help them with that? Find a good solution and make sure it fits into your prospective customers’ workflow in Step Three: Your Solution. What can I create to help them that way? You’ll learn how to create an easy-to-maintain and reliable product in Step Four: Your Product.

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A business would be nothing without customers. You can have the best product in the world, but you won’t be able to build any meaningful business if there is no one to pay for what you offer.

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换句话说，没有客户的产品一文不值

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Where do you find those paying customers? The first step to building a business is answering that question, and for bootstrapped founders, there is one critical component: finding the perfect niche.

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需要回答的第一个问题

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For a bootstrapped business, the choice of your target audience has a few significant limitations: you will have to be careful to find a market that sits in the Goldilocks Zone between too small and too big, and, at best, it should grow in a certain way. You will discover how to find the numbers and figures to make informed choices about your audience.

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市场规模太大会有巨头，太小无法支撑成本

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So, what makes a niche interesting for a bootstrapper? What is it about niche customers that you can leverage to create a sustainable business? How deep a niche do you need to find a good audience?

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为什么种子用户对你的东西感兴趣，你如何利用这些种子用户作为杠杆来撬动车轮转起来。

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Sometimes we look for immutable things like age or gender niches. Other times the specifics we’re interested in are fluid things like preferences or experience levels. Some niches can be large enough to contain millions of people, and others might just consist of a handful of individuals.

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细分市场的一些共性

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What unites all niches is that they are inclusive of some and exclusive of others. The members of the in-group will be reasonably similar, depending on the specificity of the niche. That’s why niches work so well for bootstrapped businesses: if you can provide a tool that solves a niche problem very well, you can be sure that everyone in the niche will be interested in it.

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In