It was about June 16th of 2011 that I left my day job. Here I am almost 12 months later, two product demos and zero customers wondering exactly why I quit my day job. Well it has been an interesting learning experience. The main things I’ve learned on the business side are the following:
- Make sure you have customers for your product.
- Make sure you have many customers for your product.
- Build the simplest thing you can sell for a profit.
- R&D is very expensive even when you’re doing it all by yourself. Plan on it taking 3x longer and costing more then you expected.
- A technology is not a product and a product is not a business unless you make a profit on selling it.
So a few thing have really frustrated me over the last year. The first was how much longer it took to get the first system working then I expected. Months went by very quickly, but progress was very slow despite working 7 day a week and 14-16 hours per day. The second was how inept I’ve proven at finding early customers.
There was some bad luck involved, such as my initial target customers losing funding and a contact I made who was going to introduce me to several companies he knew passing away before he could complete the initial introductions. There was also the week long evacuation just 10 days after leaving my job due to a wildfire that ended up setting me back about a month behind schedule.
I guess the real question is, “If I knew back on June 1 2011 what I knew now, would I still have left my day job?” The answer I think is still yes. I would not have been able to develop my core technology for the sensor platforms while working there. But, what would I have done differently ? Now, that’s a good question. I think I would have dug into my market research a bit earlier and learned more about the market segment that I was targeting.
It’s a bit of a catch-22 with technology development because you don’t always know what you’re going to have until you build it. It’s hard for marketing people to understand the uncertainties involved in engineering. I guess R&D is so risky for a business because the schedule and capabilities are a bit unpredictable. Which is why starting out with a technology based product business is so prone to failure. Ironically, usually the technology works, but there weren’t enough resources put into selling the technology, so when the initial cash runs out, the business implodes.
So what am I doing now as a result to save the business? Well I am still on plan A, but this time I think I can get my other two products done and my gut feeling is they will sell a lot better then the first one. I do need to put much more effort into the marketing side on finding customers before I am done. Design goals need to align with features that are needed to sell the products. No time for the nice engineering features. They have to be focused on what will sell the product. Time is very critical. I estimate about 4 months of development and 4 months to sell something. A very scary tight deadline with many very long work weeks involved.
– John