Evan Carmichael and Danny Iny tell Ronald to stop planning his radio streaming software and talk to actual radio stations first. Evan's team once spent months building a feature nobody wanted. Start with smaller stations, validate the problem exists, and confirm they'll pay before you write a line of code.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Ronald, who wanted my advice on his new startup idea. So what he's trying to do here is he wants to sell software to international radio stations to help them broadcast to a greater audience online and reduce their bandwidth costs and make it super easy to set up and use and reach that wider audience. And he was asking, "This is what I want to start with. Do you think international radio stations will buy this? Thanks, Ronald." So Ronald, I'm not too familiar with international radio stations, but it doesn't really matter. The best advice that I have for you is go and start talking to them. Find a potential customer See if they actually have this problem that you think they have and see if they'd be willing to pay you to solve it. The best way to start a business is around a paying customer. The worst way to start a business is think, oh, here's a great idea, I think people want to do it, and you spend all this time and energy creating something that at the end of the day nobody really wants. Now you're in the software business, so the only investment is going to be your time, you know, out money buying things, but still, you know, your time is valuable, and hopefully you want to spend it in ways that will generate, you know, good return and something that you're excited about working on as well. So go talk to these guys, go talk to radio stations, smaller ones to start with, people who will spend the time with you, and try to find out if this is a big problem and build it around their specifications. Some personal experience: I've had software companies before, and one of the big mistakes that we made was We had a software company and we created what we thought was a really cool feature, and we spent months working on this one feature. It was the most complicated feature in our software, and at the end of the day, once we released it, we found out that our customers didn't care about it. You know, they wanted a small portion of that, and if that worked, it'd be okay. But we spent all this time creating this feature that we thought people liked, but they didn't. And luckily, we had enough other features that we were still able to sell our software and make some money from doing it. But how much better would our software have been if we didn't build this feature and we built other ones that our customers really wanted? So the lesson is talk to your customers, right? Before you start building something, go talk to your customers and find out if they really want it or not, and they'll help guide your first generation and then your future generations as well. You want to build everything around your customer base. So hopefully that helps. I want to also invite one of my friends, Danny Inni, to share his advice for you. And give you some extra feedback on what you can do to grow your business.
Well, Ronald, it sounds to me like you're an engineer and you have some expertise in the hardware and software technologies that would be required to develop this sort of technology, this sort of solution. Now, it's very common for inventors, for engineers, for entrepreneurs who are focused on the product side to think about what is a really cool, really valuable product that they could put together and then take it and start shopping around for who is someone who would want to buy it. What you really need to do, because that can work, but it leads to a lot of situations where you've got entrepreneurs with products they've put a lot of time and money into building with nobody who wants to buy it. What I would suggest to you is start by looking for a need before you look for a product. So look at the way that international radio stations are currently doing business, how things are working for them, how they connect with their audience, and what is preventing them from taking the next step. What are the next steps that they really want to be doing? Are they trying to reach new audiences? Are they trying to broadcast online? What are the things they're trying to go into, and what's missing for them to be able to do that? And then develop a solution that is going to allow them to do that, to overcome whatever it is they're trying to overcome next. It's possible they'll want to buy this. I don't I don't know, I'm not an expert in international radio station business models, but I can tell you that if you start with the product and then look for the need, often you end up with a product and no sales. Whereas if you start with the need and then build a product, most of the time you're going to have someone who's going to want to buy it. So I hope that was helpful to you, Ronald, and to everyone else who's watching us. Ronald, if you have any further questions or want to explore this a little further, You can find me at FirepoleMarketing.com, and in the meantime, I wish everyone lots of success, and I'll see you all in the next video.
So, Ronald, I hope that was useful for you. I hope my advice and Danny's from Firepole Marketing was useful, and you can go home and implement that into your business. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up, and I'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you want to leave a comment under this video. And stay tuned for the next episode.
