{"id":17,"date":"2012-05-31T10:39:31","date_gmt":"2012-05-31T10:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/?p=17"},"modified":"2012-06-02T09:58:13","modified_gmt":"2012-06-02T09:58:13","slug":"almost-1-year-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/almost-1-year-later\/","title":{"rendered":"Almost 1 year later…"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was about June 16th of 2011 that I left my day job.\u00a0 Here I am almost 12 months later, \u00a0two product demos and zero customers wondering exactly why I quit my day job.\u00a0 Well it has been an interesting learning experience.\u00a0 The main things I’ve learned on the business side are the following:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Make sure you have customers for your product.<\/li>\n
  2. Make sure you have many customers for your product.<\/li>\n
  3. Build the simplest thing you can sell for a profit.<\/li>\n
  4. R&D is very expensive even when you’re doing it all by yourself.\u00a0 Plan on it taking 3x longer and costing more then you expected.<\/li>\n
  5. A technology is not a product and a product is not a business unless you make a profit on selling it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So a few thing have really frustrated me over the last year.\u00a0 The first was how much longer it took to get the first system working then I expected.\u00a0 Months went by very quickly, but progress was very slow despite working 7 day a week and 14-16 hours per day.\u00a0 The second was how inept I’ve proven at finding early customers.<\/p>\n

    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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

    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?”\u00a0 The answer I think is still yes.\u00a0 I would not have been able to develop my core technology for the sensor platforms while working there.\u00a0\u00a0 But, what would I have done differently ?\u00a0 Now, that’s a good question.\u00a0\u00a0 I think I would have dug into my market research a bit earlier and learned more about the market segment that I was targeting.<\/p>\n

    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.\u00a0 It’s hard for marketing people to understand the uncertainties involved in engineering.\u00a0\u00a0 I guess R&D is so risky for a business because the schedule and capabilities are a bit unpredictable.\u00a0 Which is why starting out with a technology based product business is so prone to failure.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

    So what am I doing now as a result to save the business?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I do need to put much more effort into the marketing side on finding customers before I am done.\u00a0 Design goals need to align with features that are needed to sell the products.\u00a0 No time for the nice engineering features.\u00a0 They have to be focused on what will sell the product.\u00a0\u00a0 Time is very critical. \u00a0 I estimate about 4 months of development and 4 months to sell something.\u00a0 A very scary tight deadline with many very long work weeks involved.<\/p>\n

    – John<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    It was about June 16th of 2011 that I left my day job.\u00a0 Here I am almost 12 months later, \u00a0two product demos and zero customers wondering exactly why I quit my day job.\u00a0 Well it has been an interesting learning experience.\u00a0 The main things I’ve learned on the business side are the following: Make… Continue reading Almost 1 year later…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-before-quiting-your-day-job","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtnstormdaq.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}