I realized that I might be building things wrong. What you build and its success is very much dependent on you and your team characteristics. You should not try to build something that takes a lot of time to show its value if you are a small, lean, frugal team. You cannot make an ERP and try to sell it to some multi-million dollar corporation if you are just a solo guy. They will need to have that ERP for a long time, and seeing you are just a single guy, they might not have much confidence in the longevity of your business. Thus, who you are, what your team is, what your product is, and the customer you are selling to has a deep influence on your success regardless of your competency to service them even solo.
We can look at Arixcel as an example. When I was interning with PWC and working on valuations, we had to deal with Excel sheets that had formulas that referenced each other across multiple sheets. It was a nightmare to trace dependencies.
To solve for that, we were using a tool named Arixcel which just showed us all the dependencies and where each thing came from. Later I got curious and investigated about their corporation. I got to know it’s only a two-person team and they are making $600K ARR. They’re selling to big corporations like Big Four, MBBS, and a lot of prestigious firms.
So you can see that even as a solo or a small team, you can sell to big corporations, but you have to tick some boxes first.
First of all, you have to provide extremely fast time to value. Arixcel showed us the formulas in an instant; it was not like I had to use it 4-5 times to get some value out of it. Just with a single shortcut, I saw something very valuable, and it made it indispensable in my workflow.
You have to treat yourself to the same standards. Whatever products you make should have extremely fast delivery of value. The speed to delivery of value is what will determine the financial viability of your startup. Because otherwise, people will just abandon it before you can even prove your worthiness.
Thus, previously, my guidelines or SaaS idea was very simple: “Hey, just help winners win” and pick industries where there’s a lot of boom happening right now.
But now I have to make one indispensable addition to it. Whatever you make should be such that you can provide extremely fast time to value, such that even a few button clicks an provide value in just seconds.
Thus I would argue that as a small team or a solo player, it is more wise to build a feature or a plugin or something of that sort for a workflow than to create an application that handles the entirety of it. People really cannot take that risk of relying on an important process on some software that they don’t know if will survive. Because hey, you are a small team, you might run out of money. Your reliability is not cemented out in the market right now. As a small team, your trust deficit must be overcome by immediate proof. A Fortune 500 company might love your product’s functionality, but their procurement team is thinking: “What happens if this two-person startup shuts down next year and our entire accounts payable process breaks?” You can be 10x better than the incumbent and still lose because you’re a risk they can’t justify taking.
It rules out:
- Complex workflow tools
- Things requiring training
- Platforms needing data migration
- Products dependent on network effects
- Solutions requiring organizational buy-in
Thus:
- Ruthlessly cut scope
- Design intuitive interfaces
- Solve problems that are genuinely painful (not just theoretically useful)
- Build things people can try without commitment
“Help winners win, in industries with momentum, with tools that deliver undeniable value in under 60 seconds and require zero behavior change.“
Build a killer feature, get traction for it, and then you can decide if you should do more feature integration. So that naturally you might evolve into a workflow application. But Always start as a feature. A feature that stands alone on its web page, or something that integrates into an existing workflow application, like Arixcel did with Excel.
Examples of these are web applications that do some PDF editing for you like ilovepdf. They can be standalone, but there are many complicated things that require powerful applications. So we can see people making plugins for After Effects because you cannot make a web app of After Effects to the same level. It is better to just slide into that ecosystem.