Five months in, evenings and weekends, product has been usable since month three and I have had lots of encouraging conversations and zero payments. Everyone I read about seems to get their first customer in week two. Is there a normal range here, or is five months already a sign that something is wrong with what I am building?
One concrete way to force the ask without it feeling awful: offer a paid pilot. A month at a reduced rate with a clear scope of what you will do for them. It is a small enough commitment that people say yes, and it is still money, which is the only feedback that counts.
Worth separating two clocks. Months since you started building is not very informative. Weeks since you started actively selling usually is. If you have been selling for one week out of five months, you are one week in, not five months in.
This reframing is the most useful thing in the thread. Most solo founders are twenty weeks into building and two days into selling.
Also be honest about how many people you have actually spoken to. Ten conversations is not a market test. I did not get a customer until conversation 60 or so, and the rate of learning per conversation stayed high until about 30.
I am at about fourteen. So probably early rather than doomed, which is a nicer place to be than I thought this morning.
Set a decision date rather than an open ended slog. Mine was six months from first sale attempt, and I wrote down in advance what would count as enough to continue. It stops the question from being asked emotionally every Sunday evening, which is corrosive.
@lena_lifts · last yr. · 3 replies
Five months part time is unremarkable and the week two stories are selection bias, those are the ones worth writing about. Every founder I know personally took between two months and two years, and the ones at the fast end usually had an audience or a former employer's problem already in hand.
The thing I would examine is not the elapsed time, it is whether you have asked anyone for money yet. Encouraging conversations with no payment usually means the ask never happened, and people will be enthusiastic indefinitely as long as it costs them nothing. Name a price out loud in the next three conversations and watch what happens to the enthusiasm. That number is your real signal, not the calendar.
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@heirloom_hank · last yr.
Almost everyone does this. The fear of a no is doing a lot of work in the not ready yet story.
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@vacuum_analyze · 12mo ago
I have not asked. Not once. I kept telling myself it was not ready, and reading that back it is obviously the whole problem.
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