100 days on fire: how we built a minimum viable startup
Growing up in Italy, each time I would have an idea someone would say:
tra il dire e il fare, c’è di mezzo il mare!
Between saying and making, there’s a sea in the middle! It’s definitely more charming than “ideas are cheap”, which I always found devaluating for creative people. But, truth to be told, execution is key to each startup.
Today, I want to share more about the second chapter of Pactio’s journey: what I call, building a minimum viable startup. The idea is not only to build a product that has the minimal set of features to test your assumptions in the real world. It is also to lay the foundations for the company to be ready to attract resources, support, additional team members and, ultimately, to set it up for what I call accelerated learning, which is exactly what a startup should aim for: the ability to generate wild ideas, test your assumptions, measure, pivot and start over again until you can propel the change you want to see. Note that if your only goal is success you’ll be blind to all potential learnings that, in the long run, can potentially accelerate your company even further.
[If we take a step back, the first chapter of Pactio was ideation. For starters, Pactio is reinventing the way journalism is created and funded, initially with a curated crowdfunding platform where journalists enter a pact with their audience about covering a beat.]
So what did we do in order to make Pactio that minimum viable startup that has a chance at building the first news organization of the 21st century — flat, scalable, and still true to the best principles that define journalism?
Jan. 15: Sketch mocks
Using Balsamiq, I sketched all the screens of our web app. A picture is worth a thousand words and it’s a great way to communicate to your designer what you want. At this point we had about 15 screens.
Jan. 22: First line of code.
Choice is made to focus on a responsive web app. Native can wait, because all we care about is the conversion from social media to financial support and having an app would complicate the conversion funnel. That said, we still care about native in the future as a discovery mechanism. That’s yet another reason why we opted for React, which can enable us to build native apps in a more straightforward way than other javascript frameworks because over 50% of the code would be shared between the native app and the web app.
Jan. 29: Register the trademark
Since a brand is what you promise to your users and the Pactio brand is all about enhancing trust in journalism, we registered our trademark quite early. It is a wise thing to do for every startup.
Feb. 5: Labor limae
Horace had an elegant way of putting it: labor limae, or labor of polishing. In order to perfect an artwork, you have to take out as much as add new elements. In fact, beauty is in simplicity. But simplicity is the opposite of easy. Simple is hard. So every other week, we would check on the mocks and the initial user testing and take out features, which is key if you want to ship on time. As a result, over time, we went from 15 to about 7–8 screens overall.
Feb. 12: Get an office @JSKStanford!
I’m a lucky person, I know, but getting an office at Stanford University’s JSK Fellowships is beyond lucky. I owe it to Dawn Garcia and her incredible team if I can have an amazing base for building Pactio here on campus.
Feb. 19: Receive the Lenfest Institute’s support
There’s an up and coming foundation out of Philadelphia who’s shaking things up in the local journalism world. It’s called the Lenfest Institute and I was so happy to secure a $30,000 grant from them along with the privilege of being part of their community, and get help and support from people like Burt Herman and Joseph Lichterman.
Feb. 26: Brand identity
We opted for Garamond because he was one of history’s first printers, from France, a country I owe a lot to. I also wanted the Pactio logo to smell ink as a tribute to traditional journalism. At the same time, it had to feel like a welcoming place and one where innovation could thrive.
Mar. 5: A look at the tools
I’ve been mentoring a lot of first time entrepreneurs ad of late and I realize it takes a lot of time to choose the right services. So here’s what we are using or plan to use at Pactio:
- Slack for internal communication
- Google Apps for everything from email to document sharing
- Hover for web domain registration
- Amplitude for event tracking which goes beyond Google Analytics because you can track events and design conversion funnels
- Quickbooks Online for accounting
- Gusto for payroll (that’s for later, hahaha)
Mar. 12: Look for serendipity: SXSW
Every year I go to SXSW mainly to listen to new ideas, find inspiration and better understand where the digital media industry is going. This year was no exception and enjoyed my time there a lot.
Mar. 19: Professional liability insurance
We really want to set up our journalists for success, so we decided to look for an insurance to cover them against libel, defamation, copyright infringement etc. We used FounderShield as a broker and we couldn’t be happier with the result!
Mar. 26: Announce Pactio on the Nieman Lab
As soon as we started feeling the were getting near to having a beta ready, we wanted to get the word out. So we pitched the Nieman Lab (article), set up a Google Form and, to date, we have received over 60 applications from amazing journalists.
Apr. 2: StartX, we’re coming!
After a demanding application process, Pactio was accepted into StartX summer session. StartX is one of the top performing startup accelerators in the world, where 80% of companies get to at least series A level. I was an EiR there while building Watchup and being back will feel like being surrounded by family.
Apr. 9: Start lean
With 60 journalist applications, we could have decided to invite a lot of them to join. Instead, we decided to launch one by one in order to devote as many resources as possible to our journalists and make sure we would learn a lot from the process along the way.
Apr. 16: Director of Content wanted!
We started looking for a leadership role to help design and execute our content strategy. We got amazing candidates in but the process is still open in case you’re interested! We are also looking for full stack developer (open to all seniority levels).
Apr. 23: Warming up the engines
We selected our first journalist, her name is Molly Peterson and she’s an award-winning journalist based in L.A. who’s covering the impact of climate change on our daily lives. She just received another regional Murrow award. Her page will be announced next week but meanwhile here’s a link you can use to join her pact and get a front seat both in her journalism and in the Pactio experiment. Join now!
That’s all for now, share your thoughts and comments below. And if you’re interested in contributing to the Pactio adventure, please let me know!
