- always work on things that have the highest KPI (revenue or active users)
- either talk to users or build the product
- fake progress (twitter activity, optimizing)
- 24 hours a day has to be allocated in family, exercise, friends, hobbies, sleep and startup
- list task and assess impact on weekly goal (high, medium, low) and complexity (easy, medium, hard) and always choose high impact with easy/medium complexity
- review weekly updates (low value work creep in)
- avoid switching between coding and meeting/talking to users
- Business = growth,
- your startup idea is a hypothesis. How do you prove it quickly
- Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Trigger To change a behavior you need an idea (motivation), your startup (ability) and something that forces people to change their minds
- start with a problem from user view, do not use fancy tech (e.g. blockchain) just because it's new and you want to try it out
- ideal - market should grow 20% in a year
- launch quickly (even if it's bad)
- talk to customers and get a feedback
- iterate
- time your spec (I have 3 weeks to launch something)
- write your spec and cut it in half
The mom test
- introduce your idea indirectly, use "my colleague has an idea" instead of "my idea is..."
- you listen, customer talks
- talk about life of your customer (extract the data from their life)
Good questions to ask:
- what's the hardest part when ....
- tell me last time you encounter the problem
- why was the problem hard
- what have you done so far to solve this problem?
- what don't you like about the solutions you have come up with?
Users:
- your co-workers, friends
- yourself
- just show up somewhere where the product will be used
Tips:
- take notes
- keep it casual
- keep it short (10-15 mins)
- take phone number
- discard compliments
Prototype stage is about choosing the first customers.
- how much does this problem cost them (money, energy)
- how often the problem arise
- how large is the budget for solving the problem
| Customer | ROI | Frequence | Budget |
|---|---|---|---|
| McDonalds | x | ||
| Fancy rest | |||
| Google Cafe | x |
- silent launch
- silent launch (without any landing page)
- landing page with action