Nathan Barry’s $5k App Challenge: My Seasoned Bootstrappy Advice

"I know Hacker News types think that’s a great list of niches, but it’s actually a really terrible one. You can’t sell to ANY of those people."<p>This piece of the conversation really left me wanting more, especially since I've been using that very same list with no success over the years. What are some good niches? Better yet, what's a heuristic for picking good niches? She seems to suggest we should focus on an audience we already have, as Nathan has with web developers (designers?), or that we could easily build. So I am the local corporate javascript expert: perhaps I could rally that into an audience of javascript developers or maybe even people that really need javascript developers?

This seems to be a fairly common problem amongst developers and designers.<p>The first problem is actually shipping something that customers can buy. I'll skip over this because both Nathan and Amy have certainly been able to do that. So the next step, the 'white whale' project is the infamous second project.<p>The advice out there suggests either:<p>1) Outsource Development (it certainly helps if you're a developer)<p>or<p>2) Learn it the hard way and do everything yourself<p>Rob Walling has certainly had fantastic success himself - all by outsourcing. In fact, if I remember correctly, Rob struggled to successfully launch countless products before he chose a different route. Rob chose to purchase existing businesses (HitTail, Beach Towels etc.) and then started marketing them . I don't believe he had any success before that.<p>Amy Hoy has had great success with building everything herself - Freckle being a great example. However, Amy has also failed with Charm: "It ended up with me spending 2 years and $200k on something I had to shut down."<p>It seems like it's not just as simple as choosing either option 1 or option 2. There are examples and counter-examples to both options.

Nathan and Amy: this is awesome. By letting us “listen in” on your dialogue the lessons in here feel genuine. Great work.<p>To add a little fuel to the fire, I’ll make a few comments:<p>&#62; Amy: "I’ve never seen anyone do successful presales for a software product, for the record."<p>I guess it depends on the definition of “successful” – Jason Cohen had 40 pre-sales before he started building WPEngine: <a href="http://blog.asmartbear.com/stop-customer-interviews.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.asmartbear.com/stop-customer-interviews.html</a><p>&#62; Amy: "I don’t know ANYONE… ANYONE… who outsourced their product and made a success out of it."<p>Again, it depends on your definition of “success” but I personally think Rob Walling is pretty successful, and he outsources almost all of his development: <a href="http://www.softwarebyrob.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.softwarebyrob.com</a>