9. • for your own community
• that you can ship quickly
• that solves a problem people will pay to have solved
• that does not need a lot of traction to be useful
• that has existing competition
A product ...
10. A product for your own community
https://www.flickr.com/photos/drewm
11. Amy Hoy
“Are you a Ruby developer? Then serve Ruby
developers. Are you a UX designer? Serve UX
designers.”
12. The worst that could have happened with
Perch? No-one would want it but we’d have a
useful tool for our business.
13. With a track record in a community you will
already have trust.
14. A product you can ship quickly
http://freekvanarkel.nl
15. John Radoff
“The goal of a startup is to find the sweet-spot
where minimum product and viable product meet
– get people to fall in love with you.”
16. To launch with a small product, you need to find
a problem that can be solved with a small
product.
17. Perch v.1
• A simple content editor
• No way to add new pages
• No API
• Images could be uploaded - but not resized
50. Launch and
beyond
Managing a growing side-project
alongside an existing job or
business.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall
51. Winston Churchill
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the
beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of
the beginning.”
52. • We launched Perch at the end of May 2009
• At launch we were still 100% booked out on client
projects
• Income from Perch was initially reinvested into Perch
• January 2013 we made the decision to stop taking on new
client work
Our timeline
54. Not making a profit?
• Are you pricing too cheaply?
• Are you reliant on expensive services?
• Are you attracting customers who need a lot of support?
55. The slower growth curve of
bootstrapped products gives you time
to fix problems before they become
BIG problems.
57. When your product is a side-project you have
even more things that could cause you to push
back a feature.
58. We don’t publish a roadmap
• It allows us to be flexible and react to customer needs and
changing trends in web design.
• It means that customers are not relying on the launch of
feature X in order to complete a project.
• It means that we can hold back a feature until we are
absolutely sure it won’t cause anyone a problem.
67. Small releases
• Fewer changes = fewer things to go wrong
• Easier to isolate the issue if a problem does occur
• Get features to customers more quickly
• For our customers, less of a dramatic change that they
need to communicate to their clients
72. Seek out the opinion of those
customers you never hear from. The
happy majority are often silent.
73. Marketing
How to tell people about your
product, when you have no money to
burn.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brent_nashville/5284764031/
74. Seth Godin
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you
make, but about the stories you tell.”
75. You have made something that
genuinely solves a problem. Go tell
people about it!
76. Pre-launch of Perch
• A month before we put up a landing page and email
signup form
• About 500 people signed up
• We emailed the list on launch and those people
represented enough sales on launch day to pay back all
pre-launch costs.