That's a great read. I've always been interested in learning how such tech-oriented companies found their initial traction. Are there any blog posts / articles / podcasts about Uploadcare's early days and the search for the product/market fit?

I just got wind of it, we at Uploadcare will soon be releasing an article with more info about the early days :) And, I believe, a podcast or two. Thanks for this question, btw. Would you elaborate on what you would like to know? It'll help us compile a great article, thanks :)

Great to hear that!

The reason why it's particularly interesting to me, i.e. to someone with a dev background, is that the lean startup wisdom says you should be very specific about the customer you're after and Uploadcare seems like a solution targetted at a broad spectrum of customer segments. Of course, I'm happy to be proved wrong if there are one or two dominant customer segments that you address Uploadcare to. Also, you might have as well started out with a very specific customer persona and spread to other segments. Whatever it was, curious to know.

I guess many developers dream up products targetted at developers like them selves. Selling to fellow developers is hard. It would be great to read a success story for a change.

Short answer is:

- believing in your own service - perseverance - fanatical customer support

This helped us to stay focused and our happy customers brought us new happy customers. We didn't know much about marketing in the beginning.

This is cool. Must be motivating to see it throughout the day. Companies normally charge for that kind of prospect details. What's the data source?

UI & API in one go?

I just went through the tutorial on meteor.com, and I'm impressed with the speed of getting results.

When I were to build another online app, I'd split that in building the frontend and the API composed from microservices, so that I'd be able to offer access through the UI and the web API. Is Meteor a good choice for this approach?

You can create REST points from Meteor collection very easily - http://www.meteorpedia.com/read/REST_API

tl;dr

Here it is: http://clientcrowd.com

What's your opinion?

Long version:

Assumptions

Entrepreneurs want to interview customers personally but they would rather like to spend their time on something else than finding people fitting the profile, and that would agree to an interview, then arranging each interview, and then organizing the output.

Ideally, they would like to have interviews in batches, so that they could for example clear one afternoon to do just that.

I can see two scenarios: starting with a customer profile spec or with a list of customer contacts. I'm not sure what is more common.

Assumptions about the audience

1) Early adopters and lean proponents (smaller segment, easier to reach out) Entrepreneurs familiar with the lean startup / customer development and appreciating customer interviews.

2) "what business to start" (adwords phrase) (larger segment, harder to convey the value of the solution) Entrepreneurs not recognizing value in 1 on 1 interviews. If interested in learning about their customers, they would choose anonymous surveys and marketing research publications over other, more involving methods.

Anyone out there feeling arranging customer interviews is a problem they don't want to deal with, and would be willing to get interviewed by me on Skype about it?

What's your thoughts about the idea and the assumptions?