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I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

(tjcx.me)
851 points swyx | 7 comments | 18 Jan 21 20:01 UTC | HN request time: 4.152s | source | bottom
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nickjj ◴[18 Jan 21 21:26 UTC] No.25826835[source]▶
That was a fun read. I wish the author mentioned how much he was trying to sell the service for. It could have been $59 a month or $599 a month and with doctors you could potentially expect the same answer.

I'm not a psychologist but some of the author's quoted text came off extremely demeaning in written form. If the author happens to read this, did you really say those things directly to them?

For example, Susan (psychologist) was quoted as saying:

> "Oh sure! I mean, I think in many cases I'll just prescribe what I normally do, since I'm comfortable with it. But you know it's possible that sometimes I'll prescribe something different, based on your metastudies."

To which you replied:

> "And that isn't worth something? Prescribing better treatments?"

Imagine walking into the office of someone who spent the last ~10 years at school and then potentially 20 years practicing their craft as a successful psychologist and then you waltz in and tell them what they prescribe is wrong and your automated treatment plan is better.

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stevewodil ◴[18 Jan 21 21:41 UTC] No.25826991[source]▶
It's actually a very good sales question, I don't find it demeaning at all.

If you're on a sales call selling a product that increases user retention and someone says "no we don't need that", you would often reply with "So you have perfect user retention then?" to probe them and re-open the conversation.

It could come off as standoffish but when used correctly it's very effective because it gets the person on the other end to open up more and you try to get to the bottom of their objections.

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na85 ◴[18 Jan 21 22:20 UTC] No.25827381[source]▶
>If you're on a sales call selling a product that increases user retention and someone says "no we don't need that", you would often reply with "So you have perfect user retention then?" to probe them and re-open the conversation.

Assuming that I didn't initiate the call, if I tell some sales punk that I don't need their product and they come back at me with "So you have perfect user retention then?" my answer is going to be "fuck you" followed by ending the call.

Arrogance might work in used car sales but it's not a panacea for closing the deal.

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stevewodil ◴[18 Jan 21 22:24 UTC] No.25827432[source]▶
I'm sure that happens occasionally as well.

I get it, sales people can be annoying but it really only hurts your business (in this hypothetical case) if you have a user retention problems and are actively fighting against people trying to help you solve that problem with a mutually beneficial business agreement.

They will call the next person on their list, I'm sure it won't matter much.

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na85 ◴[18 Jan 21 22:40 UTC] No.25827575[source]▶
>I get it, sales people can be annoying but it really only hurts your business (in this hypothetical case) if you have a user retention problems and are actively fighting against people trying to help you solve that problem with a mutually beneficial business agreement.

Oh please. Not every product that's applicable to a given business would necessarily be beneficial to that business.

I get it, sales people have to drink the kool aid, but some humility is needed. Your product isn't right for everyone, and the sooner you understand that the sooner you can improve the quality of your lead generation.

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1. stevewodil ◴[18 Jan 21 23:35 UTC] No.25828067[source]▶
If you have a vendetta against sales people you can just say that. We are talking about a completely hypothetical situation here, I don't see how you're now implying that the lead generation isn't good enough.
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2. renewiltord ◴[19 Jan 21 00:21 UTC] No.25828439[source]▶
On HN, people hate cold emails. In real life, I've found that most people will respond or ignore. Like a tiny minority will act like you killed their mother, but that's life.

I know you know this, if you're in sales, but I, like many other engineers who read this forum was overly cautious when I first started speaking to people because I anticipated that 99/100 would be upset at having to talk to me.

The truth was that 99/100 were willing to speak to me and listening to HN and Reddit set me back farther than I expected until I unlearned that lesson.

So I'm saying this for the benefit of all those other engineers like me.

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3. stevewodil ◴[19 Jan 21 00:51 UTC] No.25828670[source]▶
Makes sense, you're typically not cold calling or emailing engineers which is presumably the majority of hacker news users
4. na85 ◴[19 Jan 21 01:43 UTC] No.25829001[source]▶
I don't have a vendetta. I used to work in sales. My first job out of school was cold-calling and I saw first hand what types of people tend to rise to the top in that environment.

I quit that job as soon as I could because I was sick of manipulating people or pressuring them into buying something they didn't want. At the end of the day that's all sales is. If your customer wants your product then by definition you don't have to sell them.

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5. stevewodil ◴[19 Jan 21 02:32 UTC] No.25829317[source]▶
That makes a lot of sense then honestly. "Boiler rooms" are definitely not good environments.

>If your customer wants your product then by definition you don't have to sell them.

That's a misnomer, what if they don't know you exist? That's what sales and marketing are for, to inform people that could benefit from your product that it exists, essentially. Will their business implode if they don't buy your product? No, almost certainly not. But, they might derive a massive cost savings, time savings, increased employee satisfaction, or other efficiencies by using whatever you're selling and your job in sales is to get them to listen which is the hard part.

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6. na85 ◴[19 Jan 21 02:51 UTC] No.25829453{3}[source]▶
>That's a misnomer, what if they don't know you exist? That's what sales and marketing are for, to inform people that could benefit from your product that it exists, essentially.

This is a fiction that salespeople tell themselves to help them sleep at night. I use twitter not because someone from Twitter Sales sold it to me but because I sought it out of my own volition.

Only bad products need sales. Good products can thrive on marketing alone because people want good products.

7. matkoniecz ◴[19 Jan 21 12:23 UTC] No.25832779[source]▶
I guess that it is a selection bias.

People hating spam will complain about it, people not hating it will not bother with commenting.

And HN may have higher share of people more affected by spam (surveys send to emails scrapped from github and so on) and more likely to be able to find needed services - what makes beneficial cold calling even more rare.

And I guess that my reaction is unusual. I moved to another phone service after previous one cold called me offering a loan on bank service operating under their brand - and that was a sole reason.