The 66 day start-up challenge
Start a new business and get your first customer in 66 days!
So here it is, the next chapter of our entrepreneruial journey, we’re finally happy with our new business idea “Reboxed” and now we have decided to challenge ourselves to launch the new business in just 66 days!
Why 66 days I hear you ask? Well, it’s because that’s the average time it takes to build a new habit, (according to a study by researchers at Lally et al) and if there is one thing we have learned in the last few months it’s that having pure focus and creating good habits makes a better entrepreneur.
The other factor is that most workdays aren’t as productive as they can be. We spend too much time on email, have too many meetings, then struggle to find the willpower and energy to focus on what’s really important. Being stuck in the ideation and validation phase for the last 6 months almost killed our motivation and made it really hard to stay focused and maintain positive progress.
When kicking a business off there are so many aspects to it. Especially in our case with our new venture, where we’ve spent months refining the idea and the proposition but no time at all on the product. Moving into this product phase where we need to validate the business with some hard data, not just research and questionnaires it seemed like the fitting time to put some markers in the sand. It’s also useful to have some accountability and an end goal, which is what we intend this 66 days, and you guys reading this, to do for us.
The challenge
So the idea of the 66 day challenge was to fast-forward the project, so we can see what the end result might look like and how the market will react. Along this journey, we aim to get important validation in the form of getting a customer and some key metrics from it, such as cost and effectiveness of certain channels but also some feedback on the user journey and motivating factors from the customers as to why they need this product and why they would use it. We’ve highlighted some key problems that we aim to solve with our product but the main thing is to test and validate our hypothesis.
At this point when you feel your idea is on point, you need to accelerate and get to the big questions, test the business ideas, validate that it can work and solve critical challenges. In order to accelerate you have to stop walking the walk and start sprinting toward a goal.
Getting more done with sprints
Why do sprints help teams get more done? It’s not just about speed. It’s also about momentum, focus, and confidence giving yourself a set timeframe to complete tasks, the style of agile project management is popular in many fields and google ventures use them as part of their accelerator for companies like Slack, Foundation Medicine, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Medium. As Jake Knapp ex google venture sand author of the Sprint book says “This experience of applying design to business challenges in everything from robotics to farming has repeatedly shown that design is an essential tool — one that helps startups learn faster and build products that fit their customers’ lives better”
In sprint theory 66 days is actually a really long time, some teams build and test in 5 days, trialing prototypes and acquiring customers, for a great example, check out this awesome article by google ventures . We’re taking on our own sprint approach, it’s a “startup brand sprint”. Building a lean model of how we want our brand to communicate, operate and function to prove our concept.
Breaking the 66 day Challenge down
Our 66 day challenge is like “interval training,” short bursts of sprinting and then jogs for us to validate, iterate and improve on our work at each stage. In our startup brand sprint, there are 4 key streams of work, Branding, Product, Admin, and Marketing.
- Branding — Our logo and brand story which will later form the key marketing message.
- Admin — The business set up, trademarking, IP and investment and legals.
- Product — The product that solves our customer's problems i.e the marketplace platform.
- Marketing — Customer acquisition, strategy, and content for customer connection.
As we venture into this startup journey we realised how relentless the pace is, you are constantly pushing yourself to get to the next stage, one of the benefits of this process is to have a clear goal at the end of the race, to acquire one customer to a new brand. As we are building a marketplace business, it means we don’t just have to acquire customers but also set up suppliers, build a site, get stock into the system and create a brand that people will trust, all this while working on a bootstrap budget.
Interval Sprint Phases
We started with an initial strategic approach session to breakdown all the elements we want to tackle to define some clear “ interval sprint phases” in order to try and make this happen. It looks something like this.
Phase 1
Validation — Validate our idea with customers, suppliers and test (product).
MVP Design — Design and build a prototype that could work for testing (product).
Legals & Contracts — Initial contracts for suppliers, customer data, shareholders etc (admin).
Brand & Culture — Brand story, values, mission and culture (brand).
Phase 2
Suppliers & Partners — Sign up initial partners to give us access to stock.
Lean marketing plan — content, social + paid, performance and personas.
Finance / Budget — final business model, CPA model and finance for investors.
Phase 3
Launch and Acquire — Launch business and test and learn.
Data from the initial test and learn— feedback loops.
Pivot or Pursue — Plan next 66-day sprint.
Breaking up into phases means we have more achievable targets and time to reflect as we start to gain momentum at each stage. To help manage this process we have been using the awesome Airtable to plan and track our sprints, here are a few screenshots of what we’ve been building.
Some of these sprints cross over in duration and we are pretty much working flat out on each area but have split up areas of project lead with our internal team (when I say team I mean myself and Matt) but it helps to organise your sprints into smaller tasks and goals to keep it as achievable as possible.
Written by Phil Kemish & Matt Thorne
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