Week 4: When this happens, don’t flinch
There were a lot of instructive moments running my last company, but one stands out above the rest: the moment we believed we had product/market fit.
Until that happens, everything is a gamble.
With 8 weeks left until I launch ShadowTraffic, I might be seeing the beginnings of that elusive milestone. Let me take you through what’s happened this week.
Product/market fit
When you build a product, you’re always looking for positive feedback that you’re building something people want to buy. And one thing you might hear a lot of is, “That’s a cool idea, I really like it.”
For an early-stage founder, hearing that phrase is like getting a drink of water in the desert. You’re anxious for weeks or months because there’s so much uncertainty about the value of your work.
And hearing that is great.
But what you really want to hear is, “I’ll pay money for that.”
Cruely, the gap between those two phrases is a lot bigger than it seems, so there’s huge temptation to mistake the former for the latter. If you flinch, you spend all your time building every feature people think is cool because that’s what you think will earn you customers.
That instructive moment from my last company? We knew we had product/market because prospects were ready to put up dollars despite the product not even being done yet.
I’ve been ravenous for that moment ever since I started working on ShadowTraffic.
There have been lots of people telling me that my idea is cool and interesting, but the little voice in my head won’t let me flinch. It won’t let me stop pursuing customers, even though it’d be a lot less stressful to do the primary thing I’m good at—shut out the world and write code!
I spent time this week chasing down every lead I could. I reached out to every person who engaged with my ideas on social media; every relevant contact in my network; and anyone who might know someone I’d want to talk to.
I got on Zoom as much as I could. And while I haven’t yet heard “Take my money”, I heard things that aren’t far away.
There’s more work to do to recruit early customers, but I had enough confidence to spend more time coding, which I’ll talk about next.
Early-stage software engineering
Every developer pines for it: working on a greenfield codebase.
No blemishes. No bad architectural choices. A chance to do it The Right Way.
But there’s a lot of tension between that desire and making good decisions in building an early-stage product because to launch, you need so much less engineering than you think.
Ideally, ShadowTraffic would be a fully managed cloud service. I’d build something that connects to your backend and simulates production traffic, and you’d have zero infrastructure to manage. It’d be a consumption-based service so you’d only pay for what you use.
In reality, the fastest way to gauge whether I’m building something valuable is to do what sounds borderline dumb: ship the product as a Docker container with a license key. Sounds like something from the 2000’s.
Is it secure? No. Not really. I haven’t built in hardcore validation that you’ve actually paid for the product, and I don’t plan to. I built out a simple digital signature check with RSA encryption. If you’re really determined, you can rip that check out of the container.
It’s a risk, sure. But the bigger risk than someone stealing my product is that no one will want it in the first place.
I spent most of this week committing all kinds of software engineering sins, building a minimal version of ShadowTraffic as quickly as I could.
Now, late in the week, with a handful of positive prospect meetings in the bag, I’m beginning the fun part: writing code The Right Way.