客户旅程_分享建立软件产品业务的旅程

客户旅程

背景故事 (The backstory)

I built my fair share of software businesses in the past. Bootstrapped products that I thought were cool idea, or something that scratched my own itch, or perhaps my own version of something I was using but didn’t 100% like.

我过去积累了相当多的软件业务份额。我认为是很棒的主意的自举产品，或者刮擦自己痒痒的东西，或者也许是我自己使用的但不是100％喜欢的版本。

I remember building a task manager, an elearning website, an ecommerce software repurposed for different platforms/CMS, desktop apps for macOS, mobile apps, mobile games, software you could install on your site to add more functionality like maps and providing users support, and more.

我记得当时建立了一个任务管理器，一个在线学习站，一个针对不同平台/ CMS重新设计的电子商务软件，用于macOS的桌面应用，移动应用，移动游戏，可以安装在站上以添加地图等更多功能并为用户提供支持的软件，和更多。

And I don’t mean demos, I mean actual software that I was selling to actual people.

我不是指演示，而是指我出售给实际人员的实际软件。

Some of those went better than others. Some paid rent money, some for a period were my full-time income. But due to one reason or another no one of those became “the business”. Bad timing, wrong niche or choosing the wrong market were some of the reasons for this.

其中一些比其他的要好。有的付了租金，有的是我的全职收入。但是由于一个或另一个原因，没有一个成为“生意”。错误的时机，错误的细分市场或选择错误的市场是造成这种情况的一些原因。

And building a software business is inherently hard, there is a lot of competition and while you hear lots of success stories, it’s hard to hear from the failures and all those projects that launch into nothing.

建立软件业务本质上是困难的，存在很多竞争，虽然您听到许多成功的故事，但是却很难从失败和所有失败的项目中听到。

Just go any day on Product Hunt and see what I mean. Beside the shiny “top 10” kind of thing, there’s a graveyard of projects no one upvoted.

每天都去Product Hunt看看我的意思。除了闪亮的“前十名”之类的东西，还有一个墓地，没人有人支持。

Before I started blogging back in 2017 I was working on a GitHub App that I thought was very cool. I still think it was. Some sort of stats visualization for repositories. I worked on this for some time, then I decided to invite people to try it. I sent out a few emails but I didn’t get a lot of enthusiasm. It was cool, but it wasn’t solving any problem. I didn’t have a channel or way I could promote it and perhaps people didn’t even need it. I couldn’t convince people to try if for free, imagine paying for itPlus working on another company API to do something as fragile as retrieving data for stats made me uncomfortable and soon I moved on to something else.

在2017年开始写博客之前，我正在开发一个我认为非常酷的GitHub应用。我仍然认为是。存储库的某种统计信息可视化。我做了一段时间，然后决定邀请人们尝试一下。我发送了一些电子邮件，但没有得到很多热情。这很酷，但是并没有解决任何问题。我没有推广它的渠道或方式，也许人们甚至不需要它。我无法说服人们免费尝试，想像要付钱吗再加上使用另一个公司的API来做一些像获取统计数据一样脆弱的事情，这让我感到不舒服，很快我又转向了其他事情。

In other words I made a huge error.

换句话说， 我犯了一个巨大的错误 。

I learned a ton, both technically and also on things not to repeat the next time.

我在技术上和其他事情上都学到了很多，下次不再赘述。

Building all those projects without a real success burned me and I said “I don’t want to create a product any more”. So I started a new chapter, going from wannabe bootstrapped software company solopreneur to other things.

建立所有那些项目并没有取得真正的成功让我非常恼火，我说：“我不再想要创建产品了”。因此，我开始了新的篇章，从想成为一家自举自足的软件公司，到其他人。

快进：我发现了一个问题 (Fast forward: I identified a problem)

3 years passed by and I got never even mildly interested in any product idea. I simply didn’t think about doing such a thing any more, and I focused instead of creating material that could help fellow developers build their own software.

3年过去了，我从未对任何产品创意产生任何兴趣。我只是不再考虑做这种事情，而是专注于而不是创建可以帮助其他开发人员构建自己的软件的材料。

Until I was creating a project for one of my courses and I realized that I was doing for the 10th or 20th time the same exact thing I had done previously.

在为其中一门课程创建一个项目之前，我意识到我已经做了10或20次与以前完全相同的事情。

Authentication. Login. Signup. Forgot passwordEmail confirmation. Secure passwords. OAuth. Login with Google. Testing everything.

身份验证。登录。注册。忘记密码邮件确认。安全密码。 OAuth。用Google登录。测试一切。

I did some research, and if you look on places where the discussions between experts happen, like Hacker News, on this particular subject, there are threads that take entire days to read and digest.

我进行了一些研究，如果您查看专家之间进行讨论的地方(例如Hacker News)，就此特定主题，则有很多线程需要整天阅读和消化。

It’s a field where there are a set of best practices, but not documented anywhere. You are expected to implement your own workflows and there isn’t anywhere you can tune in to discuss, ask, or get someone that you know is an expert and figure out the pros and cons of each approach. Except those general places where you ask and hope someone will reply.

在该领域中，有一组最佳实践，但是没有任何地方记录在案。您应该实现自己的工作流程，没有什么地方可以讨论，询问或找一个您认识的专家来弄清楚每种方法的利弊。除了那些您希望并希望有人会回答的一般地方。

And most of the time you must ask in locations where you discuss a specific kind of application stack or technology.

而且大多数时候，您必须在讨论特定类型的应用程序堆栈或技术的位置提问。

But this thing is technology agnostic. It does not change anything if your authentication workflow is built upon React or Vue or it’s a server-side Node or Elixir application.

但是这件事与技术无关。如果您的身份验证工作流是基于React或Vue构建的，或者它是服务器端Node或Elixir应用程序，则它不会改变任何内容。

It’s always the same, but every time you need to reinvent it.

总是一样，但是每次您需要重新发明它时。

弄清楚这是否是一个值得解决的问题 (Figuring out if it’s a problem worth solving)

So my initial idea was to fix this.

所以我最初的想法是解决此问题。

This is a huge undertaking and it all starts from a concept. This is why I brainstormed a name and a logo, I built the https://prototyped.dev/ website, I made a video and started getting my idea into words.

这是一项艰巨的任务，而这一切都始于一个概念。这就是为什么我集思广益地命名和徽标，建立https://prototyped.dev/ 站，制作视频并开始将我的想法变成文字的原因。

And I put up an email signup form.

我提出了电子邮件注册表格。

I guess that before moving on, I have to convince people to give me their email. If I can’t even do this, the idea is just plain bad. I put a link on my blog to drive some traffic to it.

我想在继续之前，我必须说服人们给我他们的电子邮件。如果我什至无法做到这一点，那就太糟糕了。我在博客上放置了一个链接，以吸引一些访问量。

This was 2 weeks ago. 1935 people visited the website and I have 130 people signed up to the waiting list.

这是2周前。 1935人访问了该站，我有130人签署了等待名单。

This is a good first step.

这是一个很好的第一步。

Someone is interested. I made a compelling video, maybe. Or maybe they just want to see what I’ll do.

有人感兴趣。也许我拍了引人入胜的视频。也许他们只是想看看我会做什么。

So yesterday I sent this email to those people:

因此，昨天我将此电子邮件发送给了这些人：

人们怎么说 (What people said)

I got 12 responses.

我收到了12条回应。

Here are some of the (anonymized) replies I got:

这是我得到的一些(匿名)回复：

I’m a DIY guy, thus if there is some paid service, I always try to figure out a way to do the same thing for free.. but I think you had a great idea with your product because one thing I don’t want to deal with is storing personal data, security problems, legal problems.

我是一个DIY的人，因此，如果有一些付费服务，我总是试图找出一种免费做同样事情的方法..但是我认为您对自己的产品有个不错的主意，因为我不做一件事情要处理的是存储个人数据，安全问题，法律问题。

The idea of what I want to build is compelling enough, solves a problem so painful that it’s worth paying for. Good news.

我想要构建的东西的想法很有说服力，解决了一个非常痛苦的问题，值得您付出。好消息。

I watched your promo video with explanation why you started Prototyped and realized that every new project takes month(s) of development for this particular section (login/signUp/restorePassword). I decided that it might save us a lot of time to use your service / library => that is why I subscribed

我观看了您的促销视频，并解释了为什么您开始Prototyped，并意识到每个新项目在此特定部分(登录/注册/恢复密码)都需要几个月的开发时间。我决定可以为我们节省很多时间来使用您的服务/库=>这就是为什么我订阅了

Good feedback. The product would save them a lot of time, and time is money.

良好的反馈。该产品将为他们节省大量时间，而时间就是金钱。

I’m learning to code (mostly Python and JS) and have an app I’m building and I’m coming up to the registration / login / session stage and I’m finding it pretty daunting. I feel like this is a process that nearly every single app on the planet has, coding it all from scratch feels a little needless (though a point could be made a beginner should do it at least once). So anything that could make this process easier to implement and understand would be extremely welcome!

我正在学习编码(主要是Python和JS)，并且正在构建一个应用程序，现在我要进入注册/登录/会话阶段，并且发现它令人望而生畏。我觉得这是地球上几乎每个应用程序都具有的过程，从头开始对其进行编码感觉有点不必要(尽管可以指出，初学者至少应该做一次)。因此，任何可以使此过程更易于实现和理解的方法都将受到欢迎！

The auth process is “daunting”. This term makes me think about pain. coding it all from scratch feels a little needless: it’s like reinventing the wheel every time.

身份验证过程令人生畏。这个词使我想到痛苦。 从头开始编写所有代码感觉有点不必要 ：这就像每次都在重新发明轮子。

I think you’re going on the right direction. It sounds interesting to have access to an authentication tool and that we as developers do not have to worry about, since the tool will take care of that.

我认为您的方向是正确的。可以使用身份验证工具听起来很有趣，而且作为开发人员，我们不必担心，因为该工具将解决这一问题。

I want to make your life easier.

我想让你的生活更轻松。

I am a newcomer to authentication but from my research it takes a bit of set up to get things moving. It would be great to have something with less set up almost like a module you can add to your project

我是身份验证的新手，但根据我的研究，需要进行一些设置才能使事情发展。设置很少的东西就像可以添加到项目中的模块那样，这太好了

Drag and drop.

拖放。

We basically have the same frustration. […] I’d probably mess with some CSS related to the auth pages, but that’d be prebuilt so that I could focus on the actual app.

我们基本上有同样的挫败感。 […]我可能会弄乱一些与auth页面有关CSS，但是会预先构建好这些内容，以便我可以专注于实际的应用程序。

Flexibility, yet convenience.

灵活而方便。

In the past few weeks, I’ve spun up like 3 – 4 web apps using Next.js, and dealing with auth is a pain.

在过去的几周中，我使用Next.js像3-4个Web应用程序一样快速启动，而处理auth是一件很痛苦的事情。

Pain. This word is recurring.

痛。这个词经常出现。

[…] After all this, I realized that I had spent days setting up authentication but had not implemented any valuable feature. In fact, I lost interest in my initial idea.

[…]经历了所有这些之后，我意识到我花了很多时间来设置身份验证，但是并没有实现任何有价值的功能。实际上，我对最初的想法失去了兴趣。

Oh man this is terrible!

哦，这太可怕了！

[…] I think the idea behind Prototyped is solid

[…]我认为Prototyped背后的想法很扎实

I like solid.

我喜欢固体。

Sometimes I use Firebase, but is like having a huge gorilla to take care of who use the website

有时我使用Firebase，但是就像是一只大猩猩照顾谁使用该站

Open source is the ultimate freedom. Own your code. customize anything, easily change to something else.

开源是最终的自由。拥有您的代码。自定义任何内容，轻松更改为其他内容。

I don’t want an authentication that works as long as I use Node. I want one that I can take with me and works or makes itself work on many platforms. This way, I have a consistent behavior I can expect rather than having to remember things like “on app xxxx, the login does _____ and on app yyyy it does _____“.

我不希望使用Node的身份验证有效。我想要一个可以随身携带的软件，并且可以在许多平台上工作。这样，我的行为就可以保持一致，而不必记住“在应用程序xxxx上，登录名是_____，在应用程序yyyy上是_____”之类的事情。

This is spot on. The thing I want to build will work regardless of the technology, because it’s a blueprint with an implementation.

这是现场。我想要构建的东西无论使用哪种技术都可以工作，因为这是实现的蓝图。

It’s like an application architecture. React developers will remember about “flux”. You can change platform, but this can stay with you.

就像一个应用程序架构。 React开发人员会记住“通量”。您可以更改平台，但这可以留在您身边。

I also often have the same problem of authentication. For one of my current projects I am looking into Firebase, because that makes it really easy. But I am not happy to be bound to Google.

我也经常遇到相同的身份验证问题。对于我当前的项目之一，我正在研究Firebase，因为这真的很容易。但是我不愿意被Google束缚。

Repeating pattern of lack of flexibility and uncomfortable feeling of being tied to a corporation.

缺乏灵活性和与公司联系的不舒服感觉的重复模式。

Our biggest concern is security for users and knowing that the system is doing things according to the best security practices that are known.

我们最关心的是用户的安全性，并且知道系统正在根据已知的最佳安全性实践来做事。

This topic is really delicate and security is a key aspect, a fundamental one.

这个话题确实很微妙，安全性是一个关键方面，也是一个基本方面。

Flexibility is another key. Not all signup/login/auth flows are quite the same, so having the ability to control this is important.

灵活性是另一个关键。并非所有的注册/登录/身份验证流程都完全相同，因此具有控制它的能力很重要。

Flexibility, freedom, is one of my core principles and it must be reflected.

灵活性，自由是我的核心原则之一，必须体现出来。

Having a solution to turn to that can confidently help solve them is absolutely a need.

绝对有必要找到一个解决方案可以自信地帮助他们解决问题。

Being a trusted and rock solid solution one can turn to when in need.

作为值得信赖的坚决解决方案，您可以在需要时求助。

我从这些答复中学到了什么(What did I learn from those repliesspan style=”font-weight: bold;”>)

I got very positive feedback. There is a need for a solution to this problem.

我得到了非常积极的反馈。有必要为解决这一问题。

Now I will keep waiting for new replies, and also I send the same email to every new signup to the waiting list, so I’m curious to hear more.

现在，我将继续等待新的回复，并且还将相同的电子邮件发送到等待列表的每个新注册，所以我很想听到更多。

Meanwhile I’m organizing an online bootcamp, but I want to get the ball rolling.

同时，我正在组织一个在线训练营，但是我想让事情变得顺利。

That’s it for this post. I will write an update soon.

就是这个帖子。我会尽快写一个更新。

翻译自: https://flaviocopes.com/software-business-journey/