Startup advice from an expert?

One on hand, I've got screaming toddlers. On the other hand, I've got screaming customers. Which hand do I scream back at first!?

When starting out against competitors who have years of a head start, how do you go about differentiating yourself against your target audience?

I have used our competitors' products for years and have found a lot of problems that made it harder or take longer to do certain tasks but I'm finding it difficult to show these to potential customers (or sometimes build these into my MVP).

Vincent is definitely my favorite columnist and answerer so far.

Hey, Vincent. Now that you have a cash machine or cow or whatever, what's your biggest constraint? Is it hiring and training? Is it knowledge, maybe? Or inspiration?

In retrospect is there much you could have done to be less constrained in this area and still have gotten to the success you have?

Hey, Vincent. I've got a steadily but slowly growing freemium Elixir screencast business. For a long time, I had no churn at all, but as I've increased the prices from $12 to $15, $18 and finally $21 a month, churn is now fairly common. Throughout all of this, MRR seems to just go up about $45/month no matter how much I publish or whether or not there's a price hike. Of course growth is nice but I'm not thrilled with revenue, traffic, YT watch time, etc all growing at linear rates. The only thing with accelerating growth is my twitter following.

My most recent experiments have been:

1. adding gamified content + feature voting, which has definitely increased engagement, made it simpler for me to choose what to work on and brought in some friendly emails. It's too soon to tell if this will grow revenue, though.
2. writing text-based tutorials in the hopes that Google likes them more than pages which exist mostly to embed a video

Elixir's not huge, but I believe my most successful competitor is at about 5x my current revenue, which I'd be happy with. In order to grow more, I'm considering the following options:

• going into workhorse mode and creating lessons faster
• offering one-off course sales
• releasing a ridiculously cheap product or "Godfather Offer" like an ebook to get people from audience to customer
• releasing a more complex and more expensive product like a Laravel Spark-like "starter kit" for Elixir + Phoenix projects
• broadening the scope of what I'm teaching to include something less niche

What do you think is worth trying first?

G'day Vincent,

I've been bootstrapping for over a year & a half now, interleaved with consulting work to keep paying the bills. I'm now full-time consulting because I ran out of money, so my project (https://cete.io) is stalled just prior to being launch ready (I have a buggy beta at https://beta.cete.io).

Accelerators and even Angel Investments seem attractive to get me back on track, but I'm worried about the unknown long-term cost of giving up large equity chunks vs the short-term benefit (especially here in Sydney where most deals seem to be for 15%+). On the other hand, I know the short-term cost of consulting instead of building; every day I don't work on the project feels like a day I'm missing out on getting feedback / proving my idea / launching.

Should I continue consulting until I have cash reserves again, or dive into hunting for investment/accelerator money?

Thanks mate!
Jess.

I really want to build something, but my coding skills suck. Should I go down the no code route or learn to code properly?

How do you find/keep motivation when no one else believes in you or what you are doing? Family, friends, internal doubts all telling you to give up and focus on your 'real job', 'your pipe dream is just a fantasy', etc? How do you block out the noise and doubts and feelings of failure to set aside the time and effort to finish what you believe could be the thing that changes your life when everyone else can't see your vision? It's not as easy as 'just ignore the haters' or 'cut them out of your life', etc - I'm talking about the people closest to you, the ones you can't or would never cut out of your life. How do you work on your passion in spite of this?

Hi!
This is an interesting opportunity, let me try to ask a question.
I don't know if Vincent can answer this question but this problem bugs me since I heard about it.
"Feel free to pivot if it allows you to make more money", some guru said. But it's always in conflict with my understanding of business when it always should be fun and passion for a founder. But pivot can lead to something that the founder is not much passionate about. Is it wrong is a founder listens to his/her own heart first, money second?
Thanks!