Finding Hydra's first customers

There has been quite a bit happening whilst building Hydra, and a good portion of it involves getting out and talking to people. We’ve been knocking on doors, cold calling and arranging to meet business owners, trying to find the people who would benefit from what we’re building. I even offered to do a website for our first client in return for three referral clients! No clients from that offer yet, but I think the experience of trying to get something off the ground is worth writing about whilst it’s still happening, before the results make it easy to tell a tidy story about what worked.

In my previous post about Hydra, I wrote about some of the decisions behind making the product simple to use. As software developers, that is familiar territory, we can look at a problem, decide what needs to change and get to work. Finding customers introduces a different kind of challenge because the person you want to reach has their own priorities, and the fact that you have spent so much time creating something doesn’t automatically move it up their list. Hydra helps businesses bring their customers back, but there is still the work of getting a business owner to give us their attention in the first place.

I touched on something similar in Crazy is a feature, when I wrote about creating KeepTabs and how quickly I moved into building without stopping to think enough about who would use it. It’s quite easy to see how that happens. Coding gives you something to point to at the end of the day, a new screen, a feature that now works, something you can show someone. You can put a lot of effort into reaching a business owner and still have no meeting to show for it. That doesn’t make the effort unnecessary, but it does challenge how one measures a productive day when there’s always more code waiting to be written.

With Hydra, we are putting time into that work, going door to door, making calls and trying to get meetings. There is something quite direct about having to explain what you’re doing to the person you hope will use it. On a website you can keep refining the words until they sound convincing to you, but in a conversation the other person gets to decide what is interesting, or whether they want to hear any more at all. I think that alone is a good reason to keep having those conversations, especially when you are also the person building the product and already know all the reasons it should exist.

The website offer is one of the things we’re trying to get those next few clients. I can build something useful for our first client’s business, and in return ask for help reaching three others. Of course the website also takes time, time I could spend working on Hydra itself, so there is a balance to be found there. I wouldn’t want to take on so much additional work that the product we’re introducing people to gets neglected. At this stage though, I’m willing to try an exchange like that and see where it leads. Having a skill that can help somebody else’s business is useful beyond the product you originally went there to talk about, I guess.

Alongside reaching new businesses, we’re talking to our early users, and I find myself thinking about how closely the two things are related. What makes someone willing to try Hydra, and what would make them comfortable telling another business owner about it? Those are things I want to understand better as we go. A referral carries somebody else’s name with it too, so whilst it’s exciting to think about one client helping us reach three more, there is a responsibility to make sure they feel good about having made that introduction.

Which brings me to something else that happened along the way, the Railway outage. We were able to continue with builds because our Pro plan was being prioritised, but it planted the idea of redundancy in my mind. It’s quite a position to be in, working hard to convince someone to depend on what you’re building whilst being reminded of the things you depend on yourself. I wired up a Slack app for notifications and health monitoring, which gives me a way to observe what’s happening, although knowing something has gone wrong still leaves the question of what you can do about it. Having a good backup plan is something I want to explore further, and probably deserves a post of its own.

All of this has been making me think about what it means to build a business around software. There is the product, the effort of getting somebody to try it, and then everything involved in making sure they can keep using it. Each part needs attention even whilst the others are unfinished, which makes for some interesting decisions about where to put your time. For now we’re continuing with the calls, the visits and the conversations, and I’m looking forward to sharing what comes of them.