#thefirst1000 Part 2: The Experience
When I saw what used to just be my idea in an App Store for the first time, words couldn’t describe my excitement. I was in the back of an Uber Pool and made all of the other passengers download it as I lurked over their shoulders.
What I didn’t know in that moment was that I was already months behind.
Creating an app for the first time is a lot like doing anything for the first time; your first instinct is to bask in the glory of this new journey you’re embarking upon when the pros are busy lapping you. I was just trying to make sure the code gets accepted and I was overlooking the value that I uniquely brought to my idea during the time that it needed most.
Your first days of your app being live are very similar to the artwork you brought home from grade school. While you were busy showing Mom your finger paintings; your competition launched with a plan.
This is the difference between launching an app in real life versus what you see in Hollywood re-enactments. In real life businesses launch ready to acquire their first 10–100K users but what Hollywood shows you are a couple of bros lounging and having drinks. In real life, your competition knows that 6 months from now; their progress will be measured against yours to see whose platform is getting traction the fastest. This means you don’t have time to celebrate, you’re literally in the middle of a race and if you’re treating your launch like a pet project, your competition is already in the lead.
‘The Experience’ is about breaking that fourth wall and showing you what the actual workload before all of the launches and milestone accomplishments looks like. So little is shown about the work done in the background to get your idea to the point that you’re ready to build, despite first-time founders needing that information to be able to launch their app idea like the business that it is.
Most of the people who ask me where to get started don’t have a tech background, so it’s best we begin with
How to Sell and Refine your Idea when That’s All You Have
Pitch Decks
In Hollywood, the protagonist just happens to stumble upon a life-changing idea while being best friends or roommates with rockstar developers, and the three of them just happen to stumble their way into millions in venture funding. In real life, you gotta go find that shit.
More than likely, those developers aren’t in your network, and you likely aren’t tied to venture capitalists waiting to back your next idea. This means you’re going to have to get used to talking about your idea to get the ball rolling.
Whether it’s potential customers, partners, or investors; at this stage, getting your ideas out of your head, and into something tangible helps when you’re forging the relationships that you need to move your business forward. If it’s your first time doing a pitch deck, you likely can’t do much worse than one of my earliest versions; loaded with black and white imagery, microscopic font sizes, filled with profanity and tons of missing elements. It actually has ‘Bout that action’ written in it…
Many investors/funders will have different requests for what they want in a deck but the Pitch Deck Template from Sequoia Capital is a good place for you to start and get it right!
You’ll honestly spend an insufferable amount of time and sometimes money, tweaking, and changing your pitch deck. You’ll be doing yourself a huge favor by learning how to use Canva so it doesn’t cost you money every time your idea evolves. I usually tell people who aren’t experienced designers to find a template and stick closely to it.
Later stage companies can afford to spend thousands on a well-designed deck, but for those of us who aren’t there yet, here’s an additional pro-tip; In my work as a designer, I use the resource kits for prototyping tools like Adobe XD and Sketch to create more dynamic slides in my decks.
The Difference: you get access to millions of unique icons. This can do wonders in explaining your story. You have more dynamic displays for business and pricing models. You can use the mockups to display how you envision your product and sometimes you can even find templates for decks within their design stacks.
Additionally: Sometimes as a founder, you want to know what something looks like at the highest level so you have something to work toward. I always check out Dribbble when I’m looking for new and inventive ways to improve a pitch deck.
Sometimes your deck is the only interaction people will have with your company. Polished brand experiences can open doors that would normally be closed to companies at your stage.
Here’s how I have worked to improve our pitch deck in the 2 years after the first one I shared and I’m excited to see it get better as we continue to scale.
Getting a Prototype
Most solo-preneurs draw up a contract for the MVP that they want to be built based upon rough sketches or god awful mockups. I was no different.
See for yourself; it might look a little bit like Twitter 😬, but it was my second time using XD, I had yet to speak to any potential users, which means that I had no idea how to create the kinds of interactions on the site that would meet their needs. I really just needed something to get me started.
…and that’s okay. That’s where most people are at that stage. One of the things I always encourage first-timers to do is check out Adobe XD. It’s free for you to start designing, it has extensive online toolkits so you can flesh out some pretty nice interfaces to improve what you send over to your development team.
Pro-Tip: Tools like XD and Figma actually let you create a clickable prototype for free that you can use to test with users, developers and potential investors to help give a realistic vision of how you want your app to work.
The Difference- This will open your eyes to what most founders forget to include in their prototyping contract.
These oversights can have severe UX consequences. I actually got dragged in a slack channel because my MVP didn’t allow users to edit their profiles. It turns out one of our early users accidentally put their password as their bio and couldn’t get it off. That was a rough 24hrs before getting it fixed but it brought out a great learning point:
In Hollywood, the protagonists barely get the MVP to work, but somehow it also manages to be everything that their customers had been wanting. In real life, you’re going up against giant corporations. Forgetting simple things in your MVP like profile editing or predictive search- the things that make using your competition’s products intuitive can be the reason they decide to just stick with what they know.
How will you know when you’re ready to move to development?
The answer is, you really don’t. Building an MVP is essentially a physical representation of a process of eliminations. Through testing, you’re finding all the things that don’t work and why people can’t figure out how to use what you built. You’ll methodically go through and continue to patch up the holes in the boat until you find something that floats.
One of the sayings you’ll hear far too often in tech comes from Reid Hoffman, “If You’re Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late” In my case, this advice was spot on. Check out this Reddit review of FreeSpot’s MVP:
I’ve since healed from the emotional bruises of being humbled by internet strangers but I share this so that you can see there’s growth on the other side of your barely workable MVP so get it out there fast continue to iterate.
Making Your First Contract
Make a contract that the other party wants to complete and renew. The relationship is so important here. It seems self-explanatory but so many people look at it like how can I hit the lick and get my product built for the lowest possible cost.
This isn’t that kind of deal.
What you should be thinking is…
How can I create the best arrangement for the future of my company with what I have in my account?
I cannot stress enough how important it is for you to be able to go back to your developer/s once your MVP is built and you need changes to be made after the contract is completed.
Your first product will suck. It just will. People won’t understand how to use it. People will want additional features. You’ll need to be testing ways that you can improve the experience. What you created might just grow stale on your userbase. The reality is building an app is a series of incremental improvements.
Hollywood doesn’t show you stories about products that stopped evolving because it’s just so hard for companies to survive that; especially this early in the game.
Being stuck with a product that needs to be reiterated on but isn’t can be like not having a product at all. If the contracting/team-building process isn’t done right the first time, you will have to do it again, and if you’ve grown an audience, raised funding, or received a grant…
Congrats! The Price Just Went Up!
Turning a Contract into a Team
If you have ever wondered what FreeSpot would look like without a team, check this out. This was my best attempt at trying to build it on my own.
This isn’t to say that the path to 1,000+ users cannot be completed as a solo founder. I know that it can, and I know plenty of people who have already done it. What this shows me is how much further I’ve been able to go within my own journey once I had help.
When you’re trying to validate a product, you spend way more time trying to figure out what should be built, what features are the biggest priority to your users, which ones cause the most problems, and how to better monetize what want to create and whats the best go-to-market strategy than you do actually writing code. I encourage people who aren’t tech-savvy to not lose momentum with the ideas they’re working on because in the early stages momentum can be all you’ve got, but oftentimes, that’s exactly what your team wants to see from you during the idea stage challenges.
Your ability to create momentum towards a problem that you’re solving can be what pushes your business forward where others fail and what proves you’re the right one to be leading the charge to build this solution.
A true understanding of a problem or market gap, and a solid knowledge of how to fix it can be more valuable to a business than a developer.
We all know how vital it is to actually get something in the market that solves customers’ problems. What I had to figure out, were the ways that I could equally vital to what I was building. I was then, and continue to pull from my experience as a customer on our competitor’s platforms. I have to pull from my background in design to make sure our app is one that people want to use.
But most of all I had to grow.
For me, that was participating in accelerators and incubators that taught me more about venture funding. I even had to dive into learning a new coding language to make sure we had an app that was better than ‘practically unusable’ and I had to learn how to network, pitch, and hustle up the funds to keep my idea alive. In my experience, that’s what I think works best to draw people into the work that you’re doing.
If they stop working and nothing happens, they know that they’re the ones driving this idea. However, when their work stops and you’re bringing in users, bringing in funding; that’s a team that people want to be on.
The people who can help bring your dream to life will continue to work with you because they’re inspired by your vision, and when the early-stage challenges start to mount up, they know you’ll find a way to get yourself and your idea through it.
It’s about the only thing that Hollywood gets right about this entire experience but definitely the most important, and surely what will get your idea ready for development.
Next Article: Building a Product
