Before you Startup!

  1. What problem are you solving?
    1. Can you state the problem clearly?
    2. Have you met someone who has experienced this problem?
    3. Can you define the problem narrowly? (What can be addressed immediately, do not attempt to solve all problems for everyone)
  2. Who is your customer?
    1. Scope: Have a niche customer base in mind to begin with
    2. Frequency: How often do they have this problem?
    3. Intensity: How important is the solution to this problem to customers
    4. Are the customers willing to pay for the solution? (Listen to customers who are willing to pay and who use your product despite imperfections, don’t seek feedback from users who want it for free and don’t let them highjack your product & lead the company astray).
    5. How easy are your customers to find?
  3. Does your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) actually solve the problem?
    1. Your MVP is not art, its job is not to be beautiful or garner admiration, it’s a product focusing on solving user’s problem who are willing to pay for it, so don’t get attached to the MVP, it would undergo several iterations
    2. Take feedback of serious & paying customers and implement it in MVP and take it to market (don’t take feedback from friends who are using your product out of courtesy or from investors who have underlying agenda to steer your product in one direction, always listen to loyal customers)
  4. Which customers should you go after first?
    1. Go for the easiest & most desperate customers first
      1. Customers whose business depends on you (they use your product else they would go out of business)
      2. Customers who would be willing to pay for the solution
    2. Which customers should you avoid?
      1. Customers who are unreasonable, constantly complaining with no intentions to improve the product or want to erode your market support
      2. Customers who are trying to take advantage of your product (exploit) and not willing to pay for the services
    3. Should you discount or start with a low-price offering?
      1. If you are really good at something never do it for free
      2. Payment is a validation from the user on the perceived value of your product

Mistakes startup founders often make

  1. Founders often choose a problem that they usually don’t care about
  2. Creating products for users they don’t care about
  3. Choosing co-founders that they don’t know well
  4. Not having transparent conversations with your co-founders (stake, roles & vision)
  5. Not launching (sacrificing time to market for perfection)
  6. Not using analytics (no metrics to monitor progress)
  7. Not knowing where your first user/customer will come from
  8. Poor prioritisation (tasks, issues and development)

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

  1. MVP doesn’t have to have all the features right from inception
  2. Build a lean MVP & get it quickly in the market for customer feedback
  3. You don’t have to solve all the problems of all the users
  4. Focus on problems that your niche customer would face on day to day basis & take their feedback
  5. Your MVP is not special, it’s not a work of art, don’t get attached to it
  6. Write down the specs & box it in with in timelines

How to setup metrics?

  1. Setup analytics (google analytics + event-based analytics): How users area using your product, how long they are staying on a page, what actions are they taking on the page, user behavior
  2. Pick no more than 5-10 simple stats (Keep it simple so that all stakeholders can monitor and understand it
  3. Make measurement an integral part of your spec (What can’t be measured, can’t be improved on)

Product development cycle

  1. Write down the specs (clarity: so that everyone is on the same page, ease of monitoring)
    1. Fortnightly meetings to review and discuss new ideas/ features
    2. Stick with the plan for the fortnight (don’t change things midway whimsically): trust the process
  2. Have short development cycles (develop, deploy, test, monitor, feedback, make changes, redeploy, repeat)
  3. Fundamental KPI goals: Revenue, usage metrics
    1. New Users
    2. Retention of existing users
    3. Volume of content created
  4. Write down the brainstorm with stakeholders (New features, fixing bugs, maintenance, testing)
  5. Categorize and prioritize
    1. Easy: Multiple can be completed in a day
    2. Medium: Would take <3 days
    3. Hard: Would take entire development cycle
  6. Decide on hard calls (Most of the hard issues can be made easy/ medium by just removing the hard bits which are both hard and irrelevant- which do not have impacts on the decided KPI metrics and do not help moving the numbers needle in the right directions)
  7. Pivot vs Iterate: Always iterate, rarely pivot (never if you can help it)
    1. Pivot: To change customer or the problem statement itself (To change the use case, change the market or abandon the target market)
    2. Iterate: Change the solution (to make improvement based on the feedback of paying users): Iterate by talking to paying & loyal customers and don’t be trying to build an art masterpiece that is all in your head

The real genius is to solve problems which could not be found by people before you, focus time on finding right problems than finding solutions to wrong problems

Psychology