3 ms·

Process question: What specifically would you do to get early customers or to market the mvp? How did this change over the 25 attempts? What was your criteria

Process question: What specifically would you do to get early customers or to market the mvp? How did this change over the 25 attempts? What was your criteria for "this one has failed let's do another one"?

bootstrapper101 6y ago
My other account (bootstrapper101) got throttled. Maybe @dang can help merge this tomorrow. I could maybe spend 5000 words and still not be able to say all I want to say about this. The ideas were all over the place: Social, Enterprise, Consumer, Saas. I learnt over time that once you have failed so many times, you start avoiding obvious mistakes. Mistakes like polishing your app before launch, wasting time on PR, building too many features, not spending enough time qualifying your users. Once you build enough products you start knowing the impact of things like: 1. Marketplace products: supplier and consumer chicken and egg problem) 2. Single player mode: you don't need your friends to be on the app and you can get immediate value as soon as you start. 3. Social products: Where degree matters. Most IM products can provide a lot of value of if 1-3 of your close friends are on it. But products like Facebook needs 50+ friends, Twitter needs strangers. 4. See if you LTV (life time value) > CAC (customer acquisition cost) + Operation cost + Development cost 5. Customer acquisition strategies: Programmatic (ads, crawler), Sales team, Referral, Content marketing There are so many other small things. These concepts are like different lego pieces and over time you find which one works better for your product and you use the right pieces. Biggest takeaway was how to do faster iteration, brutally prioritize and automate everything. Everything else is learning along the way!
- everybodyknows 6y ago
  Could you tell us a bit about compensation/ownership for your other two on staff?

bootstrapper101 6y ago

My other account (bootstrapper101) got throttled. Maybe @dang can help merge this tomorrow. I could maybe spend 5000 words and still not be able to say all I want to say about this. The ideas were all over the place: Social, Enterprise, Consumer, Saas. I learnt over time that once you have failed so many times, you start avoiding obvious mistakes. Mistakes like polishing your app before launch, wasting time on PR, building too many features, not spending enough time qualifying your users. Once you build enough products you start knowing the impact of things like: 1. Marketplace products: supplier and consumer chicken and egg problem) 2. Single player mode: you don't need your friends to be on the app and you can get immediate value as soon as you start. 3. Social products: Where degree matters. Most IM products can provide a lot of value of if 1-3 of your close friends are on it. But products like Facebook needs 50+ friends, Twitter needs strangers. 4. See if you LTV (life time value) > CAC (customer acquisition cost) + Operation cost + Development cost 5. Customer acquisition strategies: Programmatic (ads, crawler), Sales team, Referral, Content marketing There are so many other small things. These concepts are like different lego pieces and over time you find which one works better for your product and you use the right pieces. Biggest takeaway was how to do faster iteration, brutally prioritize and automate everything. Everything else is learning along the way!

everybodyknows 6y ago
Could you tell us a bit about compensation/ownership for your other two on staff?