Product, Team, and Sales explained simply

It’s ok to ignore most startup advice because they focus on making things better (and you’re just trying to launch)

The never-ending amount of good advice for building startups causes decision-paralysis for an early stage founder. The purpose of this essay is to temporarily pause that advice and propose a simplified way to think about the product being built, the team doing work, and achieving traction through sales. Successfully answering the below questions are sufficient to conclude a startup “ready” for pitching to accelerators & seed investors.

Product (Viability)

Are people using your product how you expect & as often as you expect?

A simplified way to conclude whether the design and features are satisfactory (or to keep iterating the product / product / proof of concept) is by looking at usage.

Likewise, the reason so many articles emphasize “launch fast” and “talk to customers” is that you get to answer this question faster.

• If people aren’t using your product as expected, it’s because they don’t understand the design and actions they need to take: Invite users to 1:1 in-person interviews and ask them to show you how they achieve a specific goal in the app [v.1]
• If people aren’t using as often as expected, it’s because the user experience isn’t engaging: Something is broken in the retention behavior [m.1]
• Plan B = change the target user demographic: If you’re confident that people understand the user experience and the retention behavior is present, then the “ideal user” was picked incorrectly

Team (Rate Of Change)

What changed this week compared to previous week; this month compared to previous month?

The most noteworthy part of any startup pitch is the team’s progress-to-date; a straight forward way to showcase progress is by talking about the changes made.

Surprisingly, the speed and frequency of change is strongly related to the team’s mental state / motivation / processes.

• If your team’s rate of change is slower than expected: Change the way you agree on weekly goals and tasks [v.2]
• If your team isn’t doing work: Help them speak to (and improve) their mental state [v.3]
• Plan B = find new team members: If you’re not convinced that your team members are the right ones for this startup (they lack one of the qualities: grit, love the problem, love the users, have joy for what you’re building, change their lifestyle to accommodate doing the work), then are time-consuming ways to find new team members [v.4]

Sales (Grow One Metric)

Did your one key metric increase by 10% last week?

Do things that grow whichever activity causes your users to thank you — how you measure that activity successfully occurring is the metric you want to grow.

“Revenue” or “Users” isn’t the right metric to pick; increased revenue and user acquisition happens as an outcome of picking (and growing) the right metric.

• If growth is slower than you expect: cut out activities that don’t make noticeable weekly increase in your one metric [v.5]
• Plan B = pick a new metric: If you think you chose the wrong metric, go through the “5-Whys” iterative interrogative process to understand how more of a particular metric will help the user [v.6]

Resources

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m.1, Retention behavior can be broken down into five phases: user’s emotional state to want to do something, product trigger to capture user’s attention, product action to satisfy user’s emotional state, variable reward allowing unpredictable joy, and investment which continually improves user’s experience — as detailed in the Hook Model https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jXM4NymIcA

Vlad’s (my own) Personal Experiences

v.1, No matter what kind of “user experience best practices” I apply, the most straight-forward way I conclude my UX to be good-enough is by asking someone in-person to use my app to achieve a specific goal (ie. “can you show me how you would write a new post?”) and then silently watch their actions / facial expressions / momentary pauses. If they have to ask me questions for how to do something, then the design needs improvement.

v.2, I found a lot of success doing a simplified version of weekly sprint planning. Some examples of goals: “login screen works with X credentials”, “itinerary approved by Y partner”. It’s tempting here to pick tasks instead of goals, so one way we made a distinction between “tasks” and “goals” was to ask ourselves “what incident needs to happen at the end of the week which will make us happy” — this becomes the goal, and the chain-of-events that need to happen for that incident to take place helped us decide on the corresponding tasks. We found that 2–3 weekly goals were manageable, and would occasionally throw in a “stretch goal” if we wanted to get more things done, which would only be worked on when “main goal” would be finished.

v.3, When my team (or my own) moral / productivity is at an all time low, I’m usually facing a lack of “a convincing enough reason to keep pushing forward”. I’ve seen this situation manifest itself in different ways — depression, procrastination by working on low priority things, loss of contact, loss of creative ideas for dealing with blockers, and general feelings associated to burnout. One effective way I’ve dealt with low mood is through venting sessions where we break our doubts down into simple facts, and label them as objectively true, objectively false, or things we don’t know (interesting outlook on using depression as a self-help tool: http://www.openentries.org/entrepreneurs-depression/).

v.4, There’s a few ways to go about finding new team members, unfortunately they all rely on luck: launching digital ads targeted at your geolocation + domain expertise (expensive), getting a person-recommendation from coworker / college peer / superconnector at event (rare), showcasing at lectures / pitch events / hackathons (very time consuming), asking for advice via cold outreach on LinkedIn / Reddit (moderately time consuming).

v.5, Common activities I’ve realized give a false sense of accomplishment: networking events, speaking gigs, improving brand design, paperwork / trademark / patents (unless biotech product), project management process optimization, consultant workshops.

v.6, Starting with any metric, I ask “why is this metric important and how will more of it help my ideal user” and keep going (usually 5+ times) until I start to uncover an activity that ultimately matters.
For example:

> Why are “more users” important? Because more users on platform gives people more choice.

> Why is “more choice” important? Because people will have a higher chance of getting matchmaked with the right person.

> Why is a “higher chance of the right person” important? Because people will enjoy more events that they usually attend solo.

> Why is “enjoying more solo events” important? Because people will experiment with more hobbies if they trust that they’ll meet interesting people.

> Why is “experimenting with more hobbies” important? Because people will make situational friends to enjoy the pursuit of a new hobby.

So if the activity that ultimately matters to the target-user is “making situational friends for a new hobby”, then one potential metric could be the “number of suggested people that were liked by users in a weekly time period”.