Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀

Building Orbit. For founders who'd rather build than chase receipts and finance admin. Sharing the journey + what I've learnt.

@orbitmoney_ | ex-@eclipsefi

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@pmitu know this well 🥲😂 I remember with my last company a few instances of vomiting from anxiety over the toilet bowl while crying 😂

Fun times

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@KSimback @NousResearch Possibly.

But still will be interesting to see what retail adopts.

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@neshtedle BD down bad

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

This is something we are testing now, we are looking at stronger wedges where we can focus on paid initially.

The strategy of freemium first can be very limiting unless you have big budget.

[Meng To @MengTo]

Best decision I made this year: switching to paid trials.

Free users were 50% of our token costs, brought abuse and spam, and rarely converted.

Paid trials converted better, lowered noise, and increased customers.

As a bootstrapped product, I’d rather serve serious users than compete with VC-funded free plans.

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@MengTo I guess paying for something you definitely get more skin in the game + doesn’t skew your numbers on less serious people.

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@Jason They need to do this to survive tbh they need to create more lock ins for their model

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

When the map disappears, the next move is usually not to stare harder at the map.

[Jon Brosio @jonbrosio]

The hardest part of building something from nothing
isn't the work. It's doing the work when nobody's watching, reading, buying, engaging, subscribing, collaborating, or caring yet.

But it's that work that makes all the difference

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@pmitu All of the above ? :')

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@SmallTimeVC 14-15 I could live with this tax rate :')

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@CARN0N @Tesla Cars are usually double in aus than the Us for same car especially in upper range

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@leonabboud Rage baiting works 🥲

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@ArnaudBelingaCX So they can access it from claude?

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

Got really stuck in my head recently with biz direction recently.

We hit a few walls in our initial wedges and it's been back to the drawing board a little bit and how we validate some stronger entry point.

It's painful but learning a lot in the process.
Need to be willing to led go of initial hypotheses faster and adjusting with market signals.

The vision is still to build this financial OS for solopreneurs, but we need to sharpen up the initial offering and focus on a wedge with high willingness to pay.

This means going back to talking to a lot of users and running tighter experiments.

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@RaminNasibov Worms Armageddon initially on floppy disk

Then I would say:

Worms mayhem
Rayman 3 hoodlum havoc
Battle for middle earth 2
Star Wars battlefield

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@claud_fuen I can imagine they move through iterations really fast too

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@pmitu Happy early adopters with willingness to pay

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

@OneNationAus It’s dumb policies like this that derail ON tbh

You don’t need to be extremev, just less useless than the current flock

[Simon Chadwick 👨‍🚀 @simonch00]

Or also validated learning.
You don't need to be a sneaker industry expert to tell solutions to sneaker salespeople.

But if you're not you better be freaking good at understanding the workflows like the back of your hand and talking to enough people that the patterns make sense.

Someone from that industry will likely natively know the workflows better than you initially but that's where your ability for fast validated learning comes in.

+ you'd need to have enough signal first to go all in in that vertical, someone native to that industry may have inherent signal about how strong the pain and need is. But you can't just assume it.