🛑Do things that Don't Scale
A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised.
I am learning it on my skin, little launches matter. Past year I launched a blog, lclmarketers.com, and instead of looking for my personas I start to create a nice website, create a beautiful IG account, but what I forgot is that I didn’t have an audience. Hence I was building something that I was not sure if there was a need in the markets. Of course after 6 months I failed.
According to Paul Graham (Founder, Y Combinator)- as a young startup, there are only three things you need to focus on —
The product you’re going to build
Building what your users want
Unscalable things you do initially to get the company going
Initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch. If you are creating a new product and you are not sure if it is solving a problem, the biggest mistake is launch simultaneously in 8 different publications, with embargoes. And on a tuesday, of course, since we read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch something.
Now with a friend of mine we are working on an idea. At beginning I was thinking to launch a super FB ads campaign to reach our prospect, actually we even tried. And of course we FAILED. We spent money, with zero leads. Nobody knows us, we do not know what we are selling, we do not know if market wants it.
Stated these fails we start to move manual. Manual means we started first to contact each customers one by one, check their feedback and do continuos test. In some we some good impact, in some we saw failures. But in the end we are keeping all the flow manual. Means that we receive an email, we set up a meeting, we speak with the customers and we try to make him happy. The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get. All manual, no software.
Some startups could be entirely manual at first. If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. It would be a little frightening to be solving users' problems in a way that wasn't yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems.
Do things that Don't Scale as for sure you do not have an email customer format, you do not have all payment system set up, you do not know nothing about your customers. All the flow would be not perfect. We launched IkiCoach and we lost 20 good leads as the chatbot was not collecting all the info.
Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs. Think about Facebook, they start just with Harvard people, Airbnb with New York area.
There are two reasons why we resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. We'd rather sit at home building the product and flow than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. But for an Idea to succeed, at least one person will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing.
In the initial stages, it’s feasible to go out of the way to help every single user and deliver value to them. Offering one-to-one sessions where you understand their problems and solve them is an excellent way to build a connection with them.
Now go out there. Take that plunge, take that leap of faith.
Your passion and belief to build your idea are central to everything that you’re doing. Learn from the data, and move on.
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