B2B Recap

Well, it's been a while since I last wrote anything. If I'm being honest, I've been so busy trudging through slog of B2B cold outreach on LinkedIn that I've not had the time to update my site.

Most of my energy has been completely depleted by how soul-crushing the process of pitching and getting endlessly ghosted is. To save my mental health, I took a few weeks off to see friends and family in India. It was exactly the reset I needed and I got to do quite a lot of fun stuff; like spotting lions and doing mountain hiking. Because I was so busy, I didn't have much of a chance to open my laptop. But in all honestly I definitely needed the distance. I hit a massive wall trying to sell the product I spent weeks building, and staring at my screen wasn't helping.

I've just arrived back in SE Asia now and the change of scenery has given me the space to actually think, and looking back at the last few months, I've decided to codify some rules for my next 'sprint' so I don't repeat my own mistakes.

For context, I am working on building software for the environmental markets. I chose this niche because it has enough small industries not to be plagued by VC funded competitors, I have enough domain knowledge to stand out from your average indie hacker and I really love the idea of helping restore nature. I initially chose a small market in the UK which I'd had a bit of exposure to during my time at uni for my first target market. Without going into too much detail, the companies I was looking at restore habitat parcels and then sell the credits to corporate buyers.

The main trap I fell into was building before I'd secured actual deposits. Early on, a few of the companies I was talking to independently complained about the exact same problem: inventory management was a massive headache for them. I took that as a green light and started writing code, thinking I'd validated demand by just hearing the problem unprompted. However, when I went back to these same companies with a solution, their enthusiasm vanished and I got silence or 'no' from nearly all. However, one company actually signed a Letter of Intent (LOI), which gave me enough false validation to go build even more features out (as this was what they said they needed before buying).

This expensive lesson is the foundation of my first two rules moving forward:

• Wait until you get a minimum of 3 deposits before building anything. A credit card is the only real signal that you are solving a painful problem.
  If you're unsure if they want the product, it means no. This applies to everything other than a deposit: Silence? That's a no. Asking for more features? That's a no. Saying 'this is great, we will take a look once it's built' That's also a no.
• Don't build something that could get you put in jail. If your software breaks, the worst-case scenario should be temporary delays or extra manual work for your users, not heavy fines or lawsuits.

With all this in mind, I'm likely going to pivot to a different environmental market, or at least approach this one from a completely different angle. This is because I realized that the companies I was pitching to simply didn't have the cash flow to buy software, primarily due to the market itself being quite new and illiquid. This also brings me to my final rule:

• Make sure the market is liquid. If your target customers aren't actually making money, they won't have the budget to pay for your solution.