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How much time does it take to create a product that makes money?
📈 Recently I witnessed people to whom it took at max 3 months to create MVP, push it and scale it.
🧪 There are some specific cases/exceptions (e.g. Open AI) when you are more of a researcher.
More and more I stand for the idea that people start making money in the "pre-stage" of the complete product to save as much time as possible.
So what should the length of the product development be until the first money comes?
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Since Iuliia Shnai said in one of my YouTube interviews this thought, I resonate with it:
"Share what you do before it is completely done because you can see the people's reactions and identify whether it is worth building."
(something in this sense when we talked about build in public approach)
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@busmark_w_nika
From my experience, you can ship a product fast either you're a team or solo. But it requires a shared mindset to approach the product development and launch accordingly.
With dcupl, you can build a web app that starts generating revenue for you in just one day. I don’t think this is a question that can easily be pinned down.
This is the current thing right? If you hang out on PH and Startup twitter. But is it realistic? To validate anything in startup, it's often a good idea to reverse the thought process. Start at the end and reverse. So in this case. Okay. You read about a lot of people making MRR after minimal effort, and fast. Only in most cases it's just talk. Headlines that generate clicks. And not really rooted in reality. At the end of the trail you usually find some ebook they want to sell you that will make you successful. But if they are so successful and generating 20k MRR etc. Why are they selling you generic copy pasta ebooks? Anyways. My point. Find a few cases. that took 3 months to build. 3 months ago. That are successful now. Make sure numbers can be proven. So that means some form of fact checking. like position in the App Store or high profiles name dropping them etc. Then ask your self. If I started this idea 3 months ago. 1. Would I be able to make the same thing. 2. Would I have the time and money to do it. and 3. would I be able to create the same momentum as they have. Aka marketing etc. Find a few cases where this happened. And then be realistic. Try to come up with a similar strategy in an area where you could repeat this. Validate then execute. And yes, it's definitely possible! Personally. I validate with this lens: 1. Can I do it? 2. Is there a market need. and 3. Do I want to do it. (All these must be 100% before i'm interested)
@busmark_w_nika If they prepped it 3-4 years back. then executed over 3 months and now are in green. Then it took longer in total right? Usually people with some niche industry insight can do well here. A lot of VCs back these domain experts that has found a wedge in the market. A case I admire recently is https://midday.ai these guys used to make SaaS products for other people for 10years. So they got really good at it. Better than most. They spent 8 months. from start to launch here on PH. Now has 10k customers. 12months in total. Also everything is open source. Their wedge or domain expertise? Well actually they have non. What sets them apart is that they are unreal good makers, because of that 10 year period of making top notch products for others. 1 designer and 1 coder. worth checking out. And the space they are in, has unlimited potential. they can become the next salesforce or stripe. And because of their speed, they are unafraid of competitors stealing their code. Which is very refreshing to see. Also. VCs are calling them. But they are saying no. Flipping the script. And putting them in a position to dictate favourable terms later down the road. The common denominator of people who gain success with startups is often that they had some sort of "unfair advantage" at the start, this can be many things. like access to capital / time or domain expertise or access to unique data. So try to find your "unfair advantage" before figuring out how much time it will take to make money. Without it you will most likely be outcompeted by mr.market. esp in the lower shallows. where is very saturated and competition is fierce. As they say, nothing easy was ever worth doing. Hard is where the biggest opportunities lay. Sure there are some rare cases of some guy who made an app in 24h and made a million dollars. but that's like winning the lottery.
@busmark_w_nika Ive seen a few cases like this. but very rare. 1 in 1000 maybe. And I look at a lot of cases. The only one I can remember that had that kind of storyline was jenni.ai They seem to have pivoted now as their first business model probably got oversaturated. One thing that invalidates my entire theory tho, is the current AI fad. You don't have to have anything but speed to do well here. As it's a goldrush. But that too will fade. So now is the time to buy shovels. 🌈🔱🦄 It would be interesting to map out who these "3 months to create MVP, push it and scale it" are and look at their story. Maybe in your upcoming newsletter expose? I think that would be very interesting reading.
If you think your MVP is good enough to launch, then I think you should. Use this to collect feedback and generate some income for the final version
It took us 2 years and we are still building. :)
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It really depends on your product. For a SaaS, I highly advocate launching as soon as possible on a very basic MVP but very clear vision, and iterate with your customers
That's what we did for IndiPen, between the idea definition and the first sales, there was something like 25 days (~15 days of customers interview and ~10 days of development). < 4 months after we've reached 1000MRR
It may not work for very complex product or specific industry.
Some other people prefer to iterate with free customer for 5-6 months. There's pro and cons
They usually will grow faster than us after their first sales, but they may have worked a lot on something nobody will want to pay for.
IMO 30 days is a good target to aim for
Some products, like those for regular users, can be launched once the MVP is ready. But for corporate clients, I suggest waiting until the product is fully developed. Corporate clients might only try it once, and if it's not user-friendly, they could be lost.
I mean thanks to all the AI tools, you can build a product in one week, and then make a few dollars here and there by launching it on all the platforms (Product Hunt, Hacker News, etc...).
But in my experience, it'll take 3-4 years before you make any real ($20k+ per month) money.
(this assuming you're bootstrapped... Obviously raising VC accelerates things).
I think it really depends on the product, but I totally agree with Iuliia's point.
If you're product takes a while to make money, you at least need to be getting positive reactions and feedback for it from people to have the faith to continue building
Buska