Speaker: Jesse Mecham (@jessemecham)
Jesse grew his business to 4M/year in revenue starting with an idea and an Excel spreadsheet. He shares what he learned in his journey with YouNeedABudget.
Takeaways
- Started with an Excel file to do budgeting and people started to come (400$/month)
- Spreadsheet was “lowercase minimum valuable”
- Assume you know nothing and be open to learn as you go
- Spend less time reading and more time creating
- Find your unique message proposition. You need to stand out of the crowd
- You’ll find it by writing sales copy for your product. Over and over again
- Settled on four rules for the system. Once settled on those rules, sales took off
- Quit day job when making 20K/month
- First, you need to convince people about the problem before they can be convinced about using your software
- Give the method away and you can use the software to implement it
- Lead with unique, that’s why people give you money In his case, the budgeting method is the unique bit
- “How are we different from Mint? Mint is like doing postmortem analysis.”
- Do things fast and hack it
Read notes of all the other talks on the Microconf 2014 Hub page.