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Ask HN: What do you think about growth through collaboration?

3 points by simaogdias ↗ HN
A group of friends and I have participated on a hackathon. We want to make a product out of it, and we already have the basic stuff working for individual accounts, and we're currently polishing for validation.

If it was you. Would you invest time in the beginning to build collaboration and team features? It feels like a great opportunity to grow, etc

Also, would you build it yourself, or would you take any shortcuts using a framework to manage access, invites etc.?

thoughts? thanks

7 comments

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mtmail
Skip team features until a customer (or somebody ready to pay) is asking for it. In our B2B SaaS we have Fortune 100 companies as customers and even they are so far fine with individual accounts. We implemented two-factor-auth after customer requests but it's shocking how few of our users actually switch it on, definitely not relevant to grow or get more sales.

I can't answer it for B2C, that growth might work different.

Start with a framework that includes authentication. It will save weeks of work. https://github.com/smirnov-am/awesome-saas-boilerplates

Good luck for your MVP/launch.

PaulHoule
My hot take is that collaborative features make your marketing problem worse.

If your product is single user then a user who buys in gets the full value of the product.

If it is multiple user then you have to make much bigger sales or attract more users overall to unlock the value.

That said, sometimes collaboration is a killer feature. Lately I have developed a content-based recommendation system which works OK but probably the collaborative recommendation systems that are more widespread would be seen as better by most people.

simaogdias
interesting. This is a new take and it makes sense. We need to sit down and assess if collaboration is critical or a dealbreaker to get the value out
simaogdias
the way you showcase the scenario, makes lot of sense! We are torn so this definitely helps

Thanks for the insights and the boilerplate repo, gold

groffee
Get it actually working first.

So many people here (especially on the 'show HNs') just release literal crud (no pun intended)

If you want to make a product, then build it, polish it, TEST IT, get it working, then sell it.

xakdog
I'd say sell it first. There’s a huge graveyard of code that nobody uses.
simaogdias
I see you point, we are trying to figure out a strategy now