“Lonely at the top, boychick?”
– Hesh Rabkin
This is tenth in the series of my experiences so far in building Machine Dalal. As a reader you could be a voyeur who is watching me endure this pain or may you thrive on the schadenfreude, as these are times when there is massive funding crunch, talent crunch and market crunch. A perfect storm to fuck-up a man’s hopes and dreams.
Even though the title is about fundraising, I have been spending more of my time product-building. For people like me it probably comes easy to work, to build and to explain, probably not so much.
One reason why Machine Dalal is being pursued, is due to the enormous response that the product receives.
This sort of thing can make you complicit towards one aspect. Also, workload increases, a lot goes into running a software that is actually being used by international audiences. Goalposts start to shift, reprioritizations happen, and if you are not careful there are miscommunications, and the product could fall into disarray.
The gods have been kind to us, we have been able to progressively grow, ship updates, implement risk free pricing options and would probably have added Spanish by the time next update is shipped.
But it is not all easy sailing.
Ideas, howsoever grand, are fragile. There is a huge chasm that exists between how you feel about something and how your intended audience does. And you must understand that it is okay for people to dismiss it, especially the investors.
Professionals and industry experts would always have doubts and those fears must be allayed, and once the overcome their initial trepidation, you will get the confidence, like we did.
Although I will admit that a lot of industry experts have come forth and commended on what we are trying to accomplish here and offered the sort of support that money can’t buy.
There is an inherent imbalance in progress when you are trying to develop and grow while maintaining fiscal discipline. The one aspect where I feel the most pain is the lowered weekly user growth rate, for me that metric is sacrosanct till we add revenue into the mix.
The obvious benefits are that a lot of mistakes get corrected early.
This is not my first product rodeo; we have been successful in building quite a beautiful bouquet of software products.
At the end of the day. I am not an investor friendly being. I am a user-first / product-first kind of person, and that is a balance we need to maintain here. Investors look at various aspects and they are relevant aspects to their job. Investors love stories, users pay for the product.
Here it is about what user wants, product should deliver. And what we build the user should be able to use instinctively.
Simple Intuitive Pricing
You can’t incentivize your customer with freebies, and you should not expect user to commit to rather new proposition. The idea is to de-risk decision making. If done right this solves two problems.
One, you attract progressive users, those who see the benefits and are not averse to spending a dollar on something that could be valued higher.
Two, you solve a lot of problems pertaining to payments, subscriptions, invoicing, et al.
There is no perfect pricing, but a software that works, works. And this way you have a process in place whenever you experiment with pricing and introduce newly priced products into the platform.
And if you are lucky, you also get the pre-marketing, marketing, and advertising right. This again involves building landing pages, running ads, email marketing, phone calls, and proper documentations.
These little things are as important as those big things. And here is how the presentation looks like,