Ask HN: If you have a great product that people love, so what next?

2 points

4 years ago

I saw almost all the videos of YC, and a bunch of videos from their partners and other people in the startup and venture space, PG essays, et. I know they always talk about two things: 1- talking to customers, 2- building the product. Ok, I'm doing both of them in my startup and have done everything well. Now we have over 100 people who really love our product and care about it, even doing many things voluntarily for it in their country, creating content and introducing us to others. Also, I'll introduce it in the following.

Our focus is on the B2B2C model (some none-inflationary CAC sales channels[1]) instead of paid channels (we can't afford), it needs trust, and for an agency in NY trust comes from searching and seeing an article about us in NYT, WSJ,... or raised funds in Crunchbase.

Introduce myself:

I'm a developer, electronic eng and in my 20th I created a way to pre-train MLPs with low entropy datasets and other bs. Now I'm 35. During this time I worked hard to find a way to collect the fund I needed to create my AI lab and work on it. But there was one problem I have Iranian nationality, and I had to move to another country because of sanctions, no access to international banking, and so on - Now I'm in Denmark.

My question is: So what the next? I'm open to any ideas.

About my product:

Let me introduce our platform; Selldone.com; our users can create a storefront and we give them an online back-office to manage their businesses. So far it is similar to Shopify, But the most distinctive thing is that it does not have 'any plugins' or 'templates'. Our ultimate goal is to remove humans from repetitive workflows with automation and AI.

Selldone (SD) has over 2K active shops (start using within the last 4 months) + 500 paid merchants in the US, UK, Australia, Europe, Korea, Nepal, China, and many other countries. They use selldone as a marketplace builder. Platforms (like Shopify) have two problems in expanding in the markets outside of North America: 1- local payments and 2- regulatory compliance [2]. We can solve these problems for any country, and deploy and run selldone locally in any region within 48 hours.

If you like to know more: [some thoughts and plans]

There are +300M SMEs, and +100M home businesses worldwide. What I'm seeing is the high adoption of selldone by users who are getting started with it, and we're also following the B2B2C model, which provides a great opportunity for partnerships. What we need are ways to 1. put selldone in front of agencies and freelancers, 2. create trust by influencers' distribution strategy, and 3. focus on compatibility with local regulatory compliance concerns.

[1] https://a16z.com/2022/11/10/escaping-hells-flywheel-building-non-inflationary-distribution-channels/

[2] A customer concern in Germany in our chat: "As you see even 76.000 customers in Germany have to stop their shop. Problems mentioned in the article: price per liter, cookie, cdn. https://lsww.de/shopify-illegal/#ftoc-heading-12 "

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