We have decided to keep the journey of Circles open and transparent to hold ourselves more accountable. Obviously, it is a selfish decision because we believe this to be the fastest way to success and get to hear ideas, criticisms, and feedback from everyone following our journey.
After the last blog, we got a flurry of congratulatory messages for Circles App launch on android play store from friends and family. After the initial excitement subsided the reality dawned on us of the uphill journey lying ahead. Even though we had done idea validation on IIMA campus, we learned so so much in the last one week.
- Talk to your users as often and as many as possible. These are the most woaahhhhhhhh mind fu*king blowing moments and you would most likely be how can I be so stupid to not think of this or why did I not talk to more users during the product development phase.
- For the past 6 months, we were thinking that we are working on this novel idea which nobody has done anywhere in the world and we have the 1st mover advantage. Only to learn that there are at least two more competitors working on the same idea as us, maybe its serendipity or market validation.
- We were not naive to think that there would be no competition but we never expected it to happen so soon (took us completely by surprise, banging fists on the desk moment). I was completely unnerved when I found this out but speaking to our mentors helped us calm down. Their suggestions: “stick to your game plan, grow fast, ideas are dime a dozen and focus on execution”.
- We have joined the Y Combinator startup school 2019 and have decided to track GMV as our main metric for now and every action that we take has to lead towards growth in GMV. We had few failed transactions last week which gave us huge insight into what went wrong or what really concerns our users.
- Also, when you get feedback from users, there are two types of users, let’s call them paying vs prospective users. The paying user is the one who actually uses your product and tries to complete the transaction, their feedback is much more valuable because they care about your core value proposition and have just emotionally connected with your product.
- The prospective users are more of a window shopper and a potential paying customer. The difference between first and second type is that first one will tell you things which you immediately need to work on and second one is telling you things which you have to do right after you have solved problems of the paying customer.
We have realised that idea validation is not the same as product-market fit and successfully finding product-market fit requires you to talk to tonnes of users. We even annoyed some of them at mid-night :P but because it is so important, it makes sense to educate ourselves on how to talk to users. YC SUS 2019 recommends The Mom Test.
If you have read this far, I am going to assume you find some value or learning then please share your wisdom with us and become a part of our journey to becoming an unicorn (its just a metric but we want to build something which people love).
For those who don’t know, With Circles you can find any credit/debit card or wallets, extremely useful to avail discounts on online travel booking or online purchases and credit card discounts.
