Day 02: To pivot or not to pivot?

Hi!

Welcome to all new subscribers. In this newsletter I document my journey of building out a profitable online business as a software engineer. Focused, but not limited to, topics about building a SaaS.

So you know how yesterday I said we are going to be building a video delivery tool? Scratch that. 😅 

What I did yesterday?

So, I tried creating the LP’s as mentioned, however I quickly realized I did not have a specific user in my mind. Sure, I had several personas that could use this and use cases that could fit the case of the product, but nothing was specific enough for me to be able to hash out a LP for it.

That got me thinking. Can I even see this product taking off? I mean, like really taking off?

Well, yes I could if I really thought about it. You know I could see car garages using this as a video approval tool to ease the customer communication.

However, from a few conversations I had apparently this type of tool is either already being used or is not useful to garages. This would not lead to the product necessarily exploding but rather would be a clawing fight for the market.

Can I segment the market?

I figured, I have always worked as a Software Engineer and Demo’s were always undervalued and underused. Same goes for bugs. Rarely did we get a good video reporting a bug. Most cases it was a shabby note in Jira you had to go and chase down. Video would be a great tool, but given it already is a pain to force people to change their workflow, getting them to start using a new tool would be ever so harder.

So what are you saying?

Well, it seems like this video tool I have created is a great idea and an interesting piece of engineering, however I understand the market very little. That being said, I am fully aware I might be giving up too early. I have not fully tried marketing this. By that I mean, I have not actually tried to really be sleazy enough to go and annoy people to get to sign up. I haven’t even launched on Product Hunt.

However, I think I will spend today evaluating a new thought I had. So let us dive into that.

BTW, if you (ever) feel I am giving up too early, feel free to call me out on my BS. 🙃 

What is the plan for today?

Following the thought I had yesterday - what market do I understand the most - I have come to the conclusion that I only know about is Software Engineering (SE for the future).

However, I am interested in several other areas such as woodworking, working out, personal finance and I’m sure I could list a few more.

A few days back, I reached out via IG to a woodworker to get his opinion on the video tool. The answer was pretty straight forward; it is not that big a deal to send videos via other channels. However, there was a definite answer when I asked about the problems he is facing; pricing.

Pricing as a freelancer or maker

To be honest, this is an area I have pondered a few months back. I have reached out to several SE’s that were freelancers and their answer was similar. Pricing and estimates is a problem they wrestle with. Now, I cannot really help with estimates, but I can help with the tracking of time spent, costs and making sure that there are no trends towards losing money.

You got a theory, what’s the MVP to test it?

If I create a simple free tool to collect emails and launch it on PH, then I should know whether I struck gold or not. I have two simple lead magnets in mind:

• Create a beautiful HTML quote/offer that you can send to someone via a link

• A simple form to get a minimum cost of a product

Something is telling me that the first option makes more sense. Although the second option targets more the problem at hand.

There is still the option to create a Frankenstein out of it and create a form that calculates the cost and then creates a pretty HTML offer out of it.

Let us break it down a bit

Let’s stick with the first option. Then we can figure out what to add next. The way I see it, one should have the option to input the individual items that are in the quote, possibly with a price. Items that are not part of the quote. Some formal heading or addressing of the potential client. And then the final quote with possibly a CTA. We can leave the CTA out of it for now.

So let’s try to build it ASAP and launch on PH to see if we get any traction.

What do you think? Will this work? Let me know!

Cheers,

Matt