Week 6: Where good ideas come from
The scariest part of starting a company is, I think, the beginning. The uncertainty is simply crushing. Your idea might be something people will love, or it might be something of zero value.
How do you find out?
You validate your product by talking to people. But beware. There’s a popular saying that the only true form of validation is someone paying for your product. And if you’re building anything of moderate complexity, that can take a little while!
What do you do in the meantime? With 6 weeks to go, I’ve put my product into the hands of early users. This week’s update is about the tactics of doing that successfully.
Creativity is a two-way street
How do you know if an early user is good to work with? Isn’t anyone who’s willing to toy with your product good? Not necessarily.
I think there are three things you’re looking for before you hand over your product for feedback:
Commitment to the problem you actually want to solve
A decision-maker in the room
A clear path to a deal
It’s tempting to take feedback from anyone who will give you the time of day, because in the beginning, you’re so hungry for a win. But if you screen for these criteria, you’re much more likely to be inching toward true product/market fit.
When you do find someone who matches the description, forsake all other goals and go to the ends of the earth for them.
Why?
Because that’s where good ideas come from.
The stereotype is that the founder has long-term vision. They can see 10 years out and know exactly what to do to reach their goals. They have all the good ideas.
But the reality, at least in my experience, is quite different. It’s gone something like this:
Throw out a basic problem statement to the world
Collect people who resonate with what you said
Talk to them!
Ask them lots of questions about their problems
Only when their problem seems to be a fit, give a pitch about how you see the problem and the solution to it
Listen to their feedback, and ask lots of follow-up questions
Invariably, step (6) has given me more good ideas than I could have ever dreamed up myself. I think, in a lot of ways, this phenomenon is a relief. It means you don’t need to be a genius to start a business. You just need to know the right process.
And that process has paid off in spades for me. Here are just a few of the good ideas people have given me where I could spend many more months maturing ShadowTraffic:
Automatically creating ShadowTraffic configuration files by making statistical observations from production data
Integrating with JSON-server to help people fake an entire database
Supporting a distributed mode for very large-scale load testing
Building your business this way cultivates true fans, which Kevin Kelly believes you need only 1,000 of to be successful. In Perrenial Seller, Ryan Holiday goes further, saying that word of mouth from true fans trumps any other form of marketing, including ad-spend.
Endurance
One of the most interesting parts of attempting to launch a product in 90 days has been observing the kind of stress I feel from week to week. It hasn’t all been the same.
When my schedule has emphasized sales and marketing, I’ve been emotionally exhausted. It’s hard to get up in front of people and sometimes embarrass yourself!
But when my schedule is dominated by product and engineering, I’m mentally exhausted. It’s like taking the SATs every day.
They’re both taxing, but in different ways.
Here’s a spot I’d love to hear from you. If you work in multiple areas, do you feel different kinds of stress in each one? Do you think it’s reflective of the work, your skill, or something else?
Go ahead and reply directly to this email.