I'm about to launch my startup and I don't feel good about it

Callum Short

Callum Short

Founder @ Beambox.com
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Jan 1, 2015
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I've been working on this for the past 6 months, an innovative product with a SaaS attached to it. Projects like this always start with an overwhelming excitement, the exploration of limitless paths and the thrill of creation attached to it.

The problem is that after 6 months of thinking about it everyday, looking at the sales website everyday, considering the potential everyday, it becomes a familiarity which defuses the excitement. I no longer feel great about it, and the overwhelm has now transitioned into a necessary perseverance which I fear will become painful.

Maybe it's that the idea isn't that good. Maybe I got so caught up in its production that only now I'm slowing down is the smoke clearing and the commercial viability of the product is evidently shit.

Or maybe it's comparable to listening to a song so much that it no longer sounds good, or wearing an outfit so much that the familiarity of its look diminishes its appeal.

I'm still in love with the idea and its creation, I'm just struggling to see past this feeling and focus on what matters.

The almost finished website: https://getbeambox.com

Be honest with me.
 
As someone who went through a similar SaaS issue, you may just have to accept cutting losses like I did. It was an expensive way to learn/understand market research and viability. I also took people's word when they said 'they would pay for it' but never collecting pre-orders.

Seeing your SaaS I'm unfamiliar with the market, but I personally think it has a lot of potential. 'Showrooming' is a big issue now in retail which you might want to highlight on your homepage vs. restaurants/bars. Showrooming in short is people trying on clothes in the store and then buying them cheaper online. If you were to simply highlight how much potential money a business loses with showrooming and what your product can have them make.

Again though, this is the kind of areas that would be figured out in the market research step. It's totally not far-fetched to change your business model though after it's up, 'pivoting'. Even though that's a funny scene all the businesses he listed are a good example.
 
I tried to find a gif, but there is nothing that I found that can represent my jealousy of you right now... That shit is going to make bank. You need to fix that UK timezone shit though, unless you are just starting out in the UK for now - I wouldn't, I would smash that shit across the globe ASAP, cause copycats will duplicate it eventually.

I'm jelly cause it's a physical product with a marketing angle merged together to help restaurants and coffee shops engage with customers...

zXjLnJU.gif


Fuck, I wish I could be apart of this project, shit you are going to kill it mang...
 
Dude, honestly, this looks like a solid product that could be wildly successful. I even like the branding and could realistically see that being big. Push through it. You can do this.
 
Wow - that is an awesome product and idea. Seriously it's better than 9/10 things that are getting funding these days for. This is the kind of business that gets bought for 8 figures within 12 months of launch.

I'd say to build fast initial traction you should partner with companies that already do marketing for these small businesses. If I was doing any kind of online marketing for small businesses and learned about this product I'd immediately be getting one for every single customer I had.

Lastly see if you can set it up in such a way that you retain ownership of the data as much as possible. That the monthly fee they continue to pay you gives them access to that data but they cannot easily just pull it out and market to these people without paying you.
 
Looks like an awesome product man.
But I know how your feeling about the product and if it will be a succes, I've been there not so long ago.
Don't do what I and my former business partner did and trash it becouse there is that little nagging voice in your head wondering. JUST fucking launc it ASAP and go global staright away.

If I ehould pont one thing out, that I know some people will ask about whaen I introduce them to your product, is Does it scale, is there going to be diffrent plans, I can think of a few contacts that I have that would want to roll this out on a hughe scale
 
Hedonic-treadmill.

Ignore your emotions. You will feel better when you have customers. Then you get to be excited about what matters: your product making people happy.

You are confusing excitement about the "art" of your business with the business as a whole. If you want to be a continual art/start guy, there is a market for that. However, if you want to be in business then get use to the fall-off from the creation orgasm.

Now you must decide to move on to customer creation. It will give you a high too.

On edit: I am with CCarter--Great concept and I would be selling the hell out of it. I DREAM of these type of businesses coming across my desk or into my brain. Feel free to offload it to me. I will only charge you a nominal fee.
 
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When CCarter says "I'm jelly cause it's a physical product with a marketing angle" you know it's good shit. I can say I haven't read CCarter saying that much if ever? However that's for another time. Honestly this has so much more potential than what you have on the lander.

Think about these few things you probably haven't thought about or seen. I was in MR for a bit and ran in this space. These big corps pay millions for shit you wouldn't believe.

- Why not drop in retargeting? Facebook primarily but others too.

- In Store Analytics is a thing and this is something that can be in this space. It's growing slowly in USA but the market size is huge. Everyone from coffee shops to malls will want this shit. Imagine the foot traffic you can get and analyze data from. Then throw in the marketing you can do them.

- Google Insights has data about people using wifi in stores and what not to search for items or compare prices. This would sell and they have market research that's legit to back up your claims.

- Not sure if you can do push notifications but this could be hella dope.

- Push Ad installs possibly - this could be another huge thing.

- These can be connected into what's being talked about as "location marketing" usually pushed by ad agencies and mobile ad networks. Don't know to much about this but shit it's money.

- Integrations would be huge. Zapier.com can integrate you in with like 300+ apps with a single integration into their system.
 
Ohh fuck I forgot about this till right now.

CONVENTIONS/CONFERENCES.
2 ways to sell this.
1.) Sell directly to hotels and convention centers. They markup and resell it to their clients the convention producers.

2.) Sell to convention producers and they figure it the fuck out with the convention center/hotel.

Imagine being able to sponsor the wifi for any expo and capturing all that data. Shit like amount of people, their facebook accounts, twitter, linkedin what not. Whoever sponsored the wifi could get all of that. OR as a convention creator why not collect all of your visitor's info and sell packages to companies who were at the convention as an upgraded marketing package.

There are shit tons of conventions,expos and shit every year. Grabbing ahold of those people have been a pain in the ass and no one's really innovated the game from what I've seen.
 
Hi Callum, this looks really great. I love the fact that it's a separate device that plugs into existing hardware, looks like it makes it really simple to use for the customer. The branding is on point, too.

Some good ideas in this thread. My two cents: (Which may be totally irrelevant since I have no idea how it works...)

Perhaps consider selling the device as a one-off purchase with limited functionality e.g. customisable authentication / promo message (assuming that side of things sits on the device, not your servers) and upsell the marketing / analytics stuff as a recurring monthly. I say this because your price will likely double the average customers monthly internet bill. While multi-site operations would 'get it' I'm not sure the typical landlord / cafe owner would (to the same degree anyway) but branding and basic functionality for a one-time cost would be a much easier sell. Plus that way you have covered the cost of the hardware upfront and don't need to worry about returns etc. to the same extent.

If you do have to charge a monthly right away then it would be cool to have some data to sell the business owner on. Impacted sales by £x etc. Need to get these deployed ASAP and start getting that data.

I actually really like the conference/convention idea above but with a slight twist -- sponsor the wifi at a publicans conference or similar and pitch via the authentication!

Best of luck with this.
 
Absolutely huge thanks to everyone who's posted. I've researched every single idea that's been dropped on this thread and I'm unbelievably excited to start selling this. Built a data scraper last night and have telephones, owner names, addresses and websites of 1500 restaurants in my area, time to start creating a sales process.

I'm going to post a case study thread as soon as it's live as it would be great for me to stay connected with your thoughts and ideas. Plus it's my hope that I'll be able to post some decent content in regards to it.

Also have spoke to a guy at a city meet-up about the idea, and once I linked him to it he got rather excited and wants to be part of it, driving the sales aspects forward. While I don't think I will enter any kind of partnership with him, I'm meeting with himself and his business partner in 2 weeks which should be interesting at least!

Thanks again mates, looking forward to maintaining dialogue with you all.
 
Callum Short said:
I've researched every single idea that's been dropped on this thread and I'm unbelievably excited to start selling this. Built a data scraper last night and have telephones, owner names, addresses and websites of 1500 restaurants in my area, time to start creating a sales process.
Click to expand...

If you want, might be too late now, but if you start doing sales in other areas I have a Kimono Labs system set up for scraping Yellowpages, and I have Foursquare/Factual API set up for restaurants. I can just throw you the Kimono Labs and the Factual/Foursquare api is free if you want to hook that up ever for lead gen, can show you the code. Factual/Foursquare have their api open for restaurants in particular.
 
Real question is sup with that affilate campaign? Or whitelabel? Because let's be real the talent here could sell that shit real quick.
 
flaw3d said:
Real question is sup with that affilate campaign? Or whitelabel? Because let's be real the talent here could sell that shit real quick.
Click to expand...

This is definitely in the pipeline. Initially it will probably be quite a manual process, if it works out then I'll probably integrate an affiliate system. I want to make sure it's not open house though, so that I have the right affiliates and can give them generous commissions.

juliantrueflynn said:
If you want, might be too late now, but if you start doing sales in other areas I have a Kimono Labs system set up for scraping Yellowpages, and I have Foursquare/Factual API set up for restaurants. I can just throw you the Kimono Labs and the Factual/Foursquare api is free if you want to hook that up ever for lead gen, can show you the code. Factual/Foursquare have their api open for restaurants in particular.
Click to expand...

Foursquare looks like a great source for business data. Definitely going to use this in the future. Thanks mate.
 
juliantrueflynn said:
If you want, might be too late now, but if you start doing sales in other areas I have a Kimono Labs system set up for scraping Yellowpages, and I have Foursquare/Factual API set up for restaurants. I can just throw you the Kimono Labs and the Factual/Foursquare api is free if you want to hook that up ever for lead gen, can show you the code. Factual/Foursquare have their api open for restaurants in particular.
Click to expand...

In for the Kimono Labs hook on the restaurant scraper if you don't mind.
 
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