Three mistakes I made when starting HoodHub

I'd like to tell you about three mistakes I made when starting HoodHub. The first mistake is that I did not spend enough time at the start counting the costs, looking at what skills and work the business would require, and evaluating whether the team we had assembled was up to the task. We had a great founder team that got along great together but we did not have the sales and marketing experience especially in B2B SaaS to realize the sales goals we were hoping to achieve. We built and called and sold and marketed, but we had a big disadvantage by not starting with the complete set of skills in our founding team.

The second big oversight was that we naively thought that because we had sold a few pre-orders on some cold sales calls before diving into product development that we were done with all the sales/traction work for a while until we build a prototype and had something to sell. This meant that we spent about six months building a product that didn't end up having the traction that we thought it would. There was still a lot of interest in our idea, but the prototype we were building did not connect to the market interest. We kind of repeated this mistake in our first pivot: We went out and knocked on some doors to gauge interest, got some verbal commitments, and then got to (re)building our product. Again, we found that when we had a product in hand, many of the customers were not quite ready to buy. We did better the second time around, we only spend about 6 weeks building before going back to selling and we had pivoted to a stronger market that yielded some sales, but still, we had no idea that we had several months of hard work ahead of us to find the right distribution channel to reach our customers in enough volume to support a business.

If I could go back and start over I would make sure we were spending at least half of our time testing the market all along the way as we were building. Even when you don't have a saleable product, it's important to spend at least half of your effort trying to reach your target customer. Try out marketing messages, get customer meetings and referrals, build up an email list and/or Twitter following. Not only will this will help you get off to a great start when you are finally ready to start, but it gives you a constant source of feedback on what product the market is looking for.