Comment by gervwyk
7 days ago
Any idea how a company like this would go about building a user base? Would love any sources of how to learn to market something like this.
7 days ago
Any idea how a company like this would go about building a user base? Would love any sources of how to learn to market something like this.
The whole geo-IP space started back with my startup, Digital Envoy, in 1999 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39734355). The way we went about it was by providing an API to clients but we actually hosted our entire database (encrypted and in a proprietary format) with clients. The reason for this was for latency (back in 1999 we could get about 0.03ms per transaction something that you can't get on any edge delivered service) which was necessary for the types of clients we went after.
The business was very valuable across a lot of industries - gambling, encryption, advertising, security, adult entertainment, etc. - so there was a lot of demand that also helped smooth out the demand up/down cycles. If one market was cold, another was hot. But basically it's a lot of work and a lot of hand-to-hand combat. This is the best way to learn and get passionate customers. Show up, sell to them, and convince them they need you. You'll learn so much by doing this. And don't use the excuse that you're an introvert or not good at selling. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to learn and improve. No one is the best at anything on day one - you won't be either. But you'll get there if you keep at it.
Being the absolute best in the market meant that even having much more better funded competitors ($50m+ for competitors against our $12m in funding) meant we tended to win all the time. And before you ask, if I had this to do over again now, I could do this company for a LOT less money given how commoditized things are. I can tell you the time I almost spent $1m on a storage array until I found a cheaper vendor for $250k. Oh, that storage array was for 1TB of storage. So yeah.
Feel free to ask me anything. If there are enough people who have questions and want to do a chat I'd be happy to host a video call and get peppered with whatever questions you might have.
Thanks so much for this!
I’m just now really trying to put myself out there and get into sales to further develop our business. We’ve been lucky with some early network sales, but for the next chapter of our business (https://resonancy.io) I need to build the sales engine and I feel very much out of my depth.
Just telling myself its a practice and trying to chip away at it one week at a time.. At this point identifying potential customers and getting meetings is a real challenge. Been trying Apollo and doing cold outreach but is a slow grind. Also trying my best in linkedin..
IMO - and again, remember this is experience from 20+ years ago although I still do a lot of this now - using these kinds of automated shotgun approaches is a mistake, especially early on and especially if you are selling something. We use an automated engine for our podcast agency (https://edgewise.media) but that is a different pitch when it's "come on my podcast and talk about yourself" versus "I want you to spend money for my widget".
What we did was more labor intensive and a function of these kinds of tools not existing (initial dot-com days). We would read the tech press, etc. and identify companies that might have a use for our tech. Then we would email the top person (guessing their email address usually - and most companies use a small number of variations for addresses) with a custom written, but short, tailored pitch to why they could use us and see if they wanted to talk. No pitch deck or attachments. Literally 2-3 sentences. Something that if even someone is going to quickly delete, something in those 2-3 sentences might catch their eye and make them reply instead of delete. We landed customers like Google (who we ended up later suing - that is a different tale), Doubleclick (who ended up being bought be Google), PayPal, Xbox, and a bunch of others through this method.
Happy to chat more. Startups are hard and all of us should help one another out to make the road a little less hard if possible. Keep at it - I know you'll get there. Hard work will get you there, shortcuts (usually) won't.
Did running the geolocation service allow you to see otherwise hidden abuses by ISPs and other service providers ?
What I mean is: did anything ever break or behave badly ... and then when you investigated you discovered "Oh, look at what these people are doing ..." ?
Interesting question. We never saw anything to this extent but did see when mergers happened how dial-in POPs would be merged and reallocated. Also interesting was how many IP addresses existed for North Korea (less than 32 IIRC) versus Antarctica (more than 2k IIRC). Reminder: I've been out of the business since 2005 (stayed on the board until we were acquired in 2007). So my data is quite dated at this point.