mi notez:

Identifying Good Markets to Enter:

You know the industry really well, you understand your customer, therefore you can build the correct solution to the real problem, and be able to sell it to them

Size of Market: growing, not shrinking

Change in Infrastructure or distribution, i.e. something has disrupted the normal way it used to work

Passion – a drive & motivation to keep going when you absolutely want to quit

Goal is to take any idea you have, and turn it into an assumption that you can test, to see if your assumption was true

research the problem (before you propose a solution). understand the REAL problem, not just what you THINK the problem is. ask why it’s a bad idea, you’ll get better answers that way

validate your ideas:
design the experiment.
set goals
what do you want to measure
how will you measure it
run the experiment.
analyze the results
did the results confirm your hypothesis?
do you have new questions for the next hypothesis?

if you can show that people are interested and demand your product, then you can build a minimum version

you want to DELAY complexity, don’t build any technology yet, until you can’t do it using manual techniques anymore. i.e. make your idea work using manually techniques. i.e. using manually written emails to do what your application would do if it was built. do this to test demand before you build it.

you have to think up 10 ideas of how you will get customers, and do this ahead of time before you start. because the first 3 ideas you have won’t work, and you’ll be tempted to give up if you don’t have 7 more ideas to try.

by collecting email addresses and building interest for your product/service before it is build, you will be able to survey and then promote your product launch to people who are interested in it, which is better than building something and then start cold calling strangers, trying to get them interested in it.

Minimum Viable Product

will people use it & come back
will they tell others about it
will they pay for it

identify your biggest risk of why your idea won’t work.
then develop a way you can test to see if that risk is real or imagined
i.e. if the risk is people will not pay money to see their name on a webpage, the you make a test to see if they will fill in a form with a credit card number to buy the service.

this will not damage your reputation if you do the testing correctly – find early customers who have the pain you are trying to solve, and they have a lot of pain of it (i.e. this is an important solution to them), and work closely with them, be open, honest, make them feel that they can help build the solution by trying your idea and giving feedback. they will realize it is a testing environment, and they won’t freak out. also – have courage, you have to take a risk to get a reward.

celebrate after you accomplish a test, you’ll need to take the edge off so you can stay alert and fresh, so you don’t burn out

personal development items:

start blogging about your experiences, mostly the bad. tweet them and push them to startup communities. get people to read them. doing the blogging will strengthen your ability to communicate which helps in customer development and sales. having other people read them will get you exposure to people who want to help you. that is why you should write about things you are having trouble with. when people see trouble, they want to help.

This was a great talk, some good logical common sense ideas, and some great insights into some other successful start-ups.

Amit – what are your thoughts on the 37signals approach to building a profitable business from day one, building true scale, not taking VC money, etc? Seems like many of your ideas intersect with theirs, though maybe not to the same extent?