Tom Blomfield

> And yet frame.io seems to be doing very well, it is popping up more and more places.

The key is knowing who your target customer is and solve for them [0]. Then, you are in a good place where you either fire ones who aren't [1] or change your solution (rather, start with a burning, hair-on-fire problem your target customer has, not solutions) [2].

Typically in a b2b setting, one starts out by addressing all needs (must-have) of their target customer as opposed to their wants (good-to-have). That is, other customers whose wants are NOT your target customers needs, you do not address them in the early stages of the product development [3]; and price / position [4] the product accordingly [5].

When changing the solution, figure out if there's another much bigger adjacent problem, that you weren't paying attention to [6], staring you down [7].

[0] https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done

[1] https://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/users-you-don-t-want

[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/library/8g-how-to-get-startup-ideas

[3] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211024

[4] https://hackernoon.com/obviously-awesome-a-product-positioning-exercise-604e8ced841e

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix#Lauterborn's_4_Cs_(1990)

[6] http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

[7] https://tomblomfield.com/post/33506878578/making-something-people-want-the-gocardless

I agree - I implemented it using Ruby, Sinatra & TwiML [1], but it should be a couple of clicks on Twilio.

Come to think of it, they should really have some simple "If-this-then-that" style rules that non-developers could choose to implement a really simple IVR system.

"If it's between 9am and 5pm GMT, then call 077xxxxxx"

"If no-one picks up, then call 077xxx"

"Else leave a voicemail".

Why do I have to support a sinatra app to host some static TwiML?

1 - http://tomblomfield.com/post/17571449233/home-brew-customer-phone-support