Day 572: automation consultant

sales

yesterday i talked about how i was hesitant about building custom solutions for customers because i’m trying to build a saas company, not an agency

talked to shiva on the phone about it, which changed my perspective on this entirely

key points:

  • starting off by doing custom solutions doesn’t mean that i’m locked into it forever. i was afraid of being on the hook for maintaining solutions for people forever and basically being on-call where i have to be ready to put out fires at any time, but shiva reminded me that i can directly set expectations. it can range from “hey i’m handing over a solution and will not be maintaining it” to “i can maintain this with an SLA of X and it’ll cost an extra $Y/month)
  • building custom solutions is the best way to know exactly what people are wiling to pay for. right now, browserflow is a general-purpose platform that can do anything, but by diving in deep and getting specific, i’ll have a much better idea of what people value. it might be the case that everyone has extremely custom needs (in which case the general-purpose approach is a strength) or it might be the case that there are a few patterns that come up again and again and it’d make sense to focus the product and position it differently

aside: my favorite bit from our conversation was when i told shiva that i wanted to sell shovels instead of doing the digging and he reminded me that browserflow is currently like getting raw ore and wood and being expected to build your own shovel. that cracked me up because it’s true — right now, the product is so flexible that people need to have their own ideas of what they can build with it.

  • selling to developers/companies where they build custom flows or even custom tools on top of browserflow = selling ore and wood
  • selling to non-technical users where they use templates to put together solutions = selling shovels
  • building custom solutions directly for customers = digging

by the end of that convo, i was super amped to talk to as many people as possible and work with them really closely to solve their problems rather than handing them an instruction manual and saying “good luck”

today, i talked to a customer who was super stoked on browserflow, so much so that he had created flow charts for all the different flows that he wanted to build. it’s super clear that browserflow is going to save his team dozens of hours a week and seeing his excitement was amazing

i’m looking at this exploration period as a short stint where i can experience being a freelancer/automation consultant and it’ll be fun to switch things around for a bit!

also, my tweet about getting my first customer absolutely blew up

DK ✌🏽 on Twitter: "after 14 months of building, i finally got my first paying customer!!! pic.twitter.com/x88Mbvdp73 / Twitter"https://twitter.com/dk_the_human/status/1420767725442387970

it’s neat that the maker community on twitter has such a strong culture of celebrating each others successes, no matter how big or small ❤️