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Lean Startup

From 0 to $850k per month in less than 1 year

From 0 to $850k per month in less than 1 year

Here is an interesting Twitter thread on how She’s Birdie, personal safety alarms for women, started in November 2019 and is on track to hit $850k in August. Product-Market fit is the big reason. They are also killing it with Facebook Ads.

Via StackedMarketer

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A Method to Find “Product Market Fit” Before You Have A Product

A Method to Find “Product Market Fit” Before You Have A Product

“There really is one goal, and one goal only: find a product that a few customers need and love, and ultimately will pay for, and evidence that there are many more similar customers.”

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Is your business idea good or bad?

Is your business idea good or bad?

Slogging it out on a weak business idea is tough. You really notice it when you have the right product/fit because everything becomes so much easier. ‘An idea is bad when it takes too much effort and time to achieve (and sustain) the desired results.” ‘A good business idea has these characteristics:

  • Has demonstrated strong market demand
  • Multiplies your effort and returns healthy profit margins
  • Is a fit for you as a founder (your skills, experience, network)”

Sometimes a great idea is just how you present it. The first name for Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week, was “Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit”.  There is no way the book would have become a global bestseller for years without the genius name. Try a lot of ideas to find the good ones.

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LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman on the Myths of Failure

LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman on the Myths of Failure

Reid Hoffman offers insights from his first startup that failed. Here are some of the mistakes he made:

  • my decision to build my perfect vision rather than launching a less-refined product that we could adapt based on market feedback delayed finding product-market fit.
  • Another mistake I made was to focus on hiring people with 10+ years of successful experience in a particular job…When people fail, they think, “I need to learn more.” I should have hired learners, not “knowers”.
  • My final big mistake was picking the wrong investors… And when I went to them and said, “I’ve learned from these mistakes, and therefore we should do X,” they responded, “No. We just need to do television advertising, and that’s what we’re going to make the company do.”

“A classic but frequently misunderstood dictum for founders is that they should fail fast and celebrate failure. When I hear this, I think, “No, no, no!” The goal isn’t to fail fast – it’s to learn fast by tackling your most dangerous potential points of failure. By testing your investment thesis as quickly as possible, you give yourself more time to correct your mistakes and change your approach.”

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What is Product-Market Fit

What is Product-Market Fit

I’ve mentioned the importance of product-market fit many times in this newsletter. It’s important to startup success simply because some business ideas are better than others. When you hit on the right idea, everything seems to work much better. Grinding through a weak idea burns cash and destroys your motivation.

Ann Miura-Ko, of VC frim Floodgate, offers her perspective on product-market fit. There are other important ideas in her video as well so I recommend watching it.

“A lot of people when they say I’m raising my seed investment, they’re saying I need to get to product-market fit. And the problem with product-market fit is it’s this really nebulous concept.  And what everyone believes it means is traction. But there’s no like map for how to get to traction.”

“In reality, you know, product is more your value proposition. The promise that you’re making to your customer of why the experience with your product is going to be an order of magnitude better than anything they would have expected. And so on the market side, it’s actually an ecosystem. And it’s your customer. It’s the person who pays, it’s your manufacturer. It’s the distributor, it’s all of the different people in companies that need to buy into what you’re doing in order for you to succeed and what is your value proposition to all of those people? And then finally, the third leg of the stool is actually your business model.  How do you make money and most people leave this to the last minute to answer and I would say that’s probably as important as your product because if you don’t think about pricing, if you don’t think about how much people will pay, or how they will pay for it, or how they want to find your product, then you haven’t actually thought about the totality of your product.”

Business Opportunity: Product-market fit is a really important idea that’s worth your time to explore for your own business. MarketExamples, from above, has great product-market fit.  Most newsletters never find that level of traction.

IdeaEconomy is not there, yet. I don’t have a simple, communicable idea that clearly conveys value for a particular niche. How about your business? Have you found product-market fit?

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Differentiation Strategy (and the Sea of Sameness)

Differentiation Strategy (and the Sea of Sameness

Very comprehensive guide on how to make your business stand out in our hyper-competitive world. You can’t differentiate with price or features. With so much competition everyone is basically selling the same things.

“USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) originate from the 1940s and were created for TV ads. Back then, it was easy to have a unique proposition since there weren’t that many products around. Making one-of-a-kind claims was easy. Things have changed dramatically since then.” “Marketing is a game of attention. If you do what everyone else is doing, it’s hard to get it. ” “If your goal is to gain market share and awareness but you have no clear product differentiation, that’s a problem. Unfortunately, it’s not a problem that’s easy to solve.”

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The MVP Experiment Canvas

The MVP Experiment Canvas

Great resource to help you develop and improve your business. I love visual frameworks like this. It really helps to structure your thinking about how to bet your business started and find early customers.

I highly recommend reading through the link. More importantly, do the exercises. That is the only way you will get clarity on your value proposition.


Business Opportunity: This MVP Canvas is based on the Business Model Canvas created by Alex Osterwalder. It was widely promoted in the best-selling book Business Model Generation.  It was later used as the inspiration for the Business Model You Canvas. Both books have led to very successful consulting and coaching practices for the authors.

I think a personal development version of this canvas could be very popular if done right. A systematic and visual approach to improving your life could lead to a popular book and coaching opportunities. Think of it as a blueprint to sell to personal development coaches.

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How Product Hunt got their first 2000 users by doing things that don’t scale

How Product Hunt got their first 2000 users by doing things that don't scale
“To test the idea from the get-go, especially as a non-technical founder, Ryan settled on a daily Email list and a Linkydink group. For those who haven’t heard of Linkydink, it’s a link-sharing tool created by Makeshift. You just create a group and invite people to share links with other contributors and subscribers. Each day, the collection of posts were sent to the subscribers to Product Hunt daily emails. The list started off with a couple of dozen influential people in the startup industry that Ryan personally knew. Seeding the email list with the right people, it soon grew to 170 subscribers and people started interacting with Ryan expressing how much they enjoyed the daily digests.”
 
A lot can be learned from reading how successful entrepreneurs grew their business in the early days.
 

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Make Smart Lifestyle Decisions Increase Chances of Success

Make smart lifestyle decisions to increase chances of success

Rob Walling of Drip and TinySeed shares his advice on maximizing the chances of business success.

“One of the powers of running small companies is we have enormous amounts of options.” 

“Debt reduces optionality.”

Instead of making $500 per month car payments, “you take all that money and you build a damn business.” Rob bought a company for $30k, that is less than what many professionals spend on a car. 

Work remotely to cut out your office lease, rent a small apartment instead of buying a new home, cut luxury expenses, etc. and you’ll have a lot more runaway and options to grow your business.

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The Value of Niching Down: How I Created A $13K/Month Website To Help People Start A Family

The Value of Niching Down:How I Created A $13K/Month Website To Help People Start A Family
(This link is on Starter Story which only allows three free previews per month.)
I’m sharing this link just to show how niche you can get with a saturated business idea and still find success. There are tons of dating sites, but this match-making service helps non-conventional couples start a family.

“Modamily connects people who are ready to start a family and educates them on all the different ways they can create one. We help match up men and women mostly aged 25-45, both straight and LGBT and connect them with likeminded people who are looking for either a romantic relationship leading to family, a platonic co-parent (usually a gay man and straight woman), a known sperm donor, or an egg donor/surrogate.”

Business Idea: Don’t aim for a general audience. That is far too competitive. Start hyper-focused and it’ll be much easier to gain traction. Seth Godin calls this a Minimum Viable Audience.

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Building a Minimum Viable Product is Like Serving Burnt Pizza — Build Lovable Products

Building a Minimum Viable Product is Like Serving Burnt Pizza — Build Lovable Products
Here is a different take on building a Minimum Viable Product MVP to test your startup idea.

“Stiffer competition means that MVPs aren’t going to cut it anymore. If startups truly want to stand out, they need to strive toward creating a minimum lovable product instead.”

“When you’re only relying on the MVP, the fastest and cheapest functional prototype, you risk not actually testing your product, but rather a poor or flawed version of it.”

via top10in.tech

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How to Validate Your Startup Idea

How to Validate Your Startup Idea
“There’s no one right way to validate a startup idea. And, even if you do it perfectly, it doesn’t guarantee success. But it does hugely reduce the risk of failure.”

There are some links about the very popular Mom Test book that helps ask better questions when testing your startup idea.

“The Mom Test is a book that helps you speak to your customers in a way in which they can’t lie to you, subconsciously or otherwise. By talking about their life, and the problems they face around your area of interest, INSTEAD of your solution, you get an unfiltered, unbiased set of feedback about what they REALLY want to have solved.”

via Founders Grid
 
 

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