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Speaker 1

00:00

Okay, we're live. Hi, my name is Eric. I'm the course facilitator at Startup School.

Speaker 2

00:05

Hi, I'm Michael. I'm a partner at Y Combinator and helper.

Speaker 1

00:09

Yeah, our volunteer today to help answer your questions. So thanks very much for joining in. We've got a bunch of questions that people asked about MVPs on the forum.

Speaker 1

00:22

We're planning to spend a couple of minutes just answering each 1 and really trying to dive in and give some advice tailored specifically to the startup. So let's just

Speaker 2

00:36

do it.

Speaker 1

00:37

First question from Luke at Zephrys. Zephrys is an analytics platform for competitive gamers that provides users with game-specific tools and data to help analyze, track, and improve their performance. Well, let's start with the one-liner.

Speaker 2

00:54

I thought it was pretty clear. I kind of knew what it was. I'm from the space.

Speaker 2

00:57

It's not the sexiest one-liner in the world, but it definitely accomplished the goal of me having a good picture of what it does.

Speaker 1

01:04

Which I thought too. Yeah, like I'm nodding my head and I understand where this is going.

Speaker 2

01:07

That's like an A- for sure.

Speaker 1

01:10

Yeah. Currently is focused on StarCraft II. Awesome. Consumers expect more than a scrappy MVP if there are existing products in the space.

Speaker 1

01:20

Do you have advice for MVPs entering the space with the existing developed competitors?

Speaker 2

01:26

So I thought that was the funny bit because I felt like the first sentence in that should have been the paragraph. Do consumers expect more than a scrappy MVP if there are other existing products? I know, I was wondering that as well.

Speaker 2

01:35

That's the question, and the answer is hopefully no, because as a startup, your ability to build more than a scrappy MVP is very challenging. I would say that if I go back to the Justin TV days, like if you can find a small population of people that have enough of a problem that the other folks aren't solving, that they're willing to use something that's pretty bad, that's a very good sign. If the only way you can find any group of users, even 10, even 100, who love you, is if they have a very polished product, that's not a good sign. That's actually a good sign that the other folks are doing a really good job.

Speaker 1

02:19

Yeah, that the product's working.

Speaker 2

02:21

Yeah, so...

Speaker 1

02:22

1 of the hacks that I like to use at this stage is to actually layer the MVP onto the existing product. So, for example, If there's already some software that your users, not your users, like the people in the community are already using to track their competitive StarCraft 2 analysis, what you could consider doing is actually like building, say, like a Chrome extension that sits on top of the other products and just overlays the extra data. Because you're really like, the goal of any good MVP is to test your hypothesis.

Speaker 1

02:54

Is what you're making important enough for people to care about? Will they actually care that you're building it? And so you wanna do that with the least amount of effort. And if there's already existing good products, it's possible that you may find the users of those products pretty easily.

Speaker 1

03:09

And you can build that little bit that's special to you.

Speaker 2

03:14

There you go. Yeah. Number 2.

Speaker 2

03:16

Cool.

Speaker 1

03:18

Next up is from Plamen at Flatro. We're Flatro. We automate billing, customer care and maintenance for property managers Okay

Speaker 2

03:29

The only thing that's confusing to me is that I thought that property managers do billing, customer care, and maintenance. So are you replacing property managers? Is it software for property managers?

Speaker 1

03:40

Yeah, or is it like the billing of property managers? Yeah. So maybe a bit of clarification, like maybe a bit like, I would probably just start off by, we make software for property managers.

Speaker 1

03:52

We help them automate billing, customer care, and maintenance of their properties.

Speaker 2

03:57

Something, yeah. If it's a tool that property managers are using to be more efficient, then that should be more clear in the upfront. And maybe even speaking to how much more efficient.

Speaker 2

04:05

Does that mean a typical property manager can go from managing 1 property to 5, or from 5 to 15?

Speaker 1

04:11

Yeah, like what's the value prop that you're offering to them? Yeah. I'm not a property manager.

Speaker 2

04:17

We need that.

Speaker 1

04:17

I don't get it right off the... I mean, like, I can't visualize the pain. Though I'm sure...

Speaker 1

04:23

There is pain. Renters suck. We are currently starting with a few clients and are basically tailoring our service to them. Cool.

Speaker 1

04:31

How do we avoid the trap of making our service too specific and how do we balance between the requirements of a few clients with the need to build a platform that is more universal?

Speaker 2

04:40

So I kind of think that like when I see a startup like this I really have this basic question which is are you going into this space with knowledge of the space? Like were you a previous property manager? If so, you should have a lot of insights on the types of problems that are general That can be applied across the industry And so you should have a lot of insights on what your initial product should be.

Speaker 2

05:03

Step A. Step B, if you're coming into this with little personal experience, you think there's an opportunity here, but you kind of don't know what it is, I don't know any. This is your problem. And I don't know a clever way of avoiding it.

Speaker 2

05:19

Just learning the business means you're going to be building a lot of features that probably are not generally applicable, and that's the cost of learning about this business. So in my mind, if you already know about the business, Use your gut. If someone asks you to build something that your experience tells you is not general, great. Don't do it.

Speaker 2

05:36

If not, consider the first 5 customers as you just getting an education on the industry, and it might be a very expensive 1. That's fine.

Speaker 1

05:43

For the case of someone who's coming into the industry that they're not already a participant of, some of the best founders that I've seen, they just immerse themselves in it. Like for example, they may actually become a property manager. Like they may volunteer or they just like go and say, I'm gonna help you run your business for like a week or 2.

Speaker 1

06:02

I think like.

Speaker 2

06:03

That would be great.

Speaker 1

06:04

Yeah, even if, I mean, if you are a property manager yourself, you don't necessarily have to do that, because hopefully that's why you're starting this company.

Speaker 2

06:11

That seems like an even better offer than giving them software. It'd be like, hey, I'll just do some of your work for you so I can learn.

Speaker 1

06:18

1 of the things that I learned from kind of like to this question of how do you prioritize features, I always try to, as I'm doing user interviews or talking to initial users, I really try to find pain points that people are already trying to solve. So for example, if you're talking to property managers and they're totally comfortable doing all the books by themselves, they just have their weekly hour that they spend doing all this. That might not actually be the right place to start with.

Speaker 1

06:56

Maybe you could start with, are they actively experimenting and trying other tools? Have they tried a competitor product? Those are usually the problems that I like to start with, because the person's already trying to find a solution, so they're primed when you come to talk to them to be excited and to try it, versus you having to pitch them hard and changing their entire business workflow or whatever.

Speaker 2

07:18

Yeah, I think we see the opposite a lot, where somebody says, if something's being undone on paper, there is a business in putting it into the computer. And by nature of the fact that it's being done on paper, you could build a billion dollar company and bring it to the computer. And that's actually not true.

Speaker 2

07:33

Like, there are some things that are done on paper that are not broken.

Speaker 1

07:36

That's like build it and it'll come. Yeah. You know, it really works.

Speaker 2

07:40

All right, what's next? How do you help? This 1.

Speaker 1

07:46

0, yeah.

Speaker 2

07:47

That's a good 1.

Speaker 1

07:48

OK. We're answering a question from Sky, who has started Fridgeworthy. Well, let's see what's Fridgeworthy that we use first.

Speaker 2

07:54

There we go. Maybe we'll be your initial users.

Speaker 1

07:57

OK. Fridgeworthy, a social network where people share their accomplishments.

Speaker 2

08:01

Cool. Sounds good for Ivy Leaguers. Ha. Ha.

Speaker 1

08:05

Ha. Ha. Like, you mean like LinkedIn? People are using LinkedIn more as a social network.

Speaker 1

08:11

Yeah, it's crazy. Bridgeworthy. Oh, there's just an urban. I'm trying to see if there's like a website.

Speaker 1

08:15

No website yet. OK. How do you launch an MVP of user-generated content platform? If I make an MVP with minimal content, users will probably leave since there's not too much to consume.

Speaker 1

08:30

So

Speaker 2

08:33

the classic answer to this is 1, does your platform have a lot of replay value? Is there any reason why I should come back daily or weekly? I think that that's a really important question to ask Because even if you get a lot of people, if there's no reason for them to come back, it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 2

08:49

I think, 2, is there a smaller community that if that community was using the product, they would find it useful, even if others weren't? The classic, I guess now old example of this was Facebook at Harvard. Like, as long as the Harvard kids were using it, or even a class, even just 1 of the grades in Harvard was using the product, it was useful. And so therefore, they didn't need to have millions of users day 1.

Speaker 2

09:10

Literally, users on the order of a couple thousand was very useful. So the way that I'd be thinking about this question is 1, how frequent do I get value out of it? If it's not that frequent, is there any value I'm creating? 2, is there a smaller population of people who can find this useful even if all their friends aren't using it?

Speaker 1

09:29

And those people might use it, like have the problem or whatever on a more regular basis. So they'll be like participating more. So start with like a focused smaller group.

Speaker 1

09:39

I think there's always, you know, tricks of the trade, like generate them yourself. A lot of the best user generated content networks like 9GAG, which is now this massive meme website, was started by scraping memes from other sites. That's not, that shouldn't be something too crazy to think about. Reddit, same story in the early days.

Speaker 2

10:01

Exact same story.

Speaker 1

10:02

So in this case, if you're building a network for people sharing their accomplishments, you could look to where people are already sharing this and prime it by grabbing the accomplishments. For example, if someone's tweet, if you're trying to get someone who's already on Twitter onto your platform, you could potentially go through each person's Twitter account and scrape the things that they're proud of.

Speaker 2

10:27

Crunchbase is actually an interesting example of this. Before people cared about their Crunchbase profile, TechCrunch just built the profiles on Crunchbase.

Speaker 1

10:35

Yeah, with media reports and everything.

Speaker 2

10:36

With media reports and so on and so forth. And then after a while, people cared about their profile, and so they tried to keep it updated.

Speaker 1

10:41

And when I'm thinking more about this problem, it's true. We have a lot. Like, we're on GitHub.

Speaker 1

10:46

We're on Dribbble. There's all these different platforms that people may participate in. So, that's a service right there, like not having to generate your own page.

Speaker 2

10:58

Yeah, cool.

Speaker 1

11:01

Next up, Dennis at Swish Technologies. We're building self-driving cars for ride sharing and retirement communities and for schools in the US. Okay, so I'm imagining like club cars or whatever.

Speaker 1

11:19

Gotcha. Please share some of your advice for founders like us with a product that can take a very long time to launch. How do we get users even before we launch? How can we generate sales even before we launch?

Speaker 1

11:32

So I deal with a lot of companies

Speaker 2

11:34

like this. You've seen a lot of this.

Speaker 1

11:36

I'm currently helping 20 bio companies that are all working their way through the FDA process. And we've also funded a lot of supersonic aircraft companies that will probably take a little while to launch. So this is like, this

Speaker 2

11:51

is totally-

Speaker 1

11:52

And self-driving car companies.

Speaker 2

11:53

In fact, probably we funded

Speaker 1

11:54

this exact idea. Yeah. So There's a couple different ways that you can go with this.

Speaker 1

12:04

I'd say that in areas where there's the possibility for harm or there's safety concerns, you have to be extremely careful about what you consider an MVP in any way that can actively harm somebody. So, that having been said, we have had companies test smaller versions of their larger vision. With kind of off the shelf technology. Some of the best hardware companies that I've worked with even though they now make their own hardware and they build a bunch of custom stuff.

Speaker 1

12:50

They started by using off-the-shelf systems like Raspberry Pis, cameras, just existing technology, and put them together in interesting, novel ways. So in this case, like, there is now, you know, more and more kind of off-the-shelf tech than you could use to craft together a, like, a rudimentary self-driving car. I think for getting back to, like, I guess, like, why we work on MVPs, 1 reason we do is to actually validate that people want this. The second reason we work on MVPs is to demonstrate that we as founders have the skills and capabilities to like, to, to kind of like, take the problem from just an idea to an actual implementation, even if that implementation is not the long vision of this.

Speaker 1

13:41

So in this case, it's very easy to have the idea to say, I want to build a self-driving car or something like that. But there's a huge gap. There's a huge discrete bump between people who have the idea for a self-driving car and people who have built something that resembles it. So in this case, building something that demonstrates your capability could separate you dramatically from the pack.

Speaker 1

14:07

So we've had companies that are now off building, like Embark, which builds self-driving trucks. Like literally, they're running on the streets, the highways in Nevada. They started with

Speaker 2

14:18

a club car.

Speaker 1

14:19

I think at Demo Day, they had a golf cart that they rigged up with 6 cameras. I don't even know if it was autonomous. It might have just been remotely driven or something like that.

Speaker 1

14:34

There's a great comic on how to build an MVP and it literally is someone building a car, but the first step is building a skateboard, and then you build a bicycle, and then you build a car. So you could apply the same logic here, that if you're trying to figure out how to build something that's autonomous that works in these communities, maybe you start with an autonomous wheelchair. You just create, or 1 of those personal Hoover things. You start with that.

Speaker 1

14:59

And it still kind of accomplishes the overall goal of making something that's for retirement communities for example But much safer much cheaper And that actually sounds like kind of a cool idea.

Speaker 2

15:12

Maybe it's a good without a role

Speaker 1

15:15

The couple other parts of this question, how do we generate sales before we launch?

Speaker 2

15:21

I actually think that that is, sales are hard. Generating letters of intent or agreements to pilot shouldn't be very hard if there's a lot of demand for this sort of thing. So being able just to get your customer to sign anything, even if it doesn't have a price on it, is evidence that you can sell to an investor and is often seen as more valuable than not having it.

Speaker 1

15:45

So some other things that people have done in this way is if your plan is to sell cars, maybe the first thing you do is you sell the service. So you don't have autonomous self-driving cars yet, but you do have yourself. So what if you ran a car-sharing service in this retirement community to start?

Speaker 1

16:02

That would demonstrate to people that there are people who want to use smartphones to request cars, that kind of thing. And you could literally get started tomorrow doing that, potentially.

Speaker 2

16:13

All right, what's next?

Speaker 1

16:16

We've got Ethan at Volley. We're Volley. We facilitate the servicing of users' vehicles so they do not need to leave the home or office.

Speaker 1

16:27

Servicing that seems like an awkward way of saying we're a car mechanic that comes anywhere you are.

Speaker 2

16:32

I think this is a perfect example of like the description requiring examples, because servicing does not put a picture in my head, as opposed to refueling, changing the tires, doing an annual checkup, all those things create pictures in my head

Speaker 1

16:48

and also there's probably something that you're starting with I imagine that you're not like servicing every end-to-end thing in the car to start So some of the best pitches like like Michael said they cause you to like visualize what the service does But here's actually a problem that a lot of founders run into, is they think that their 1 liner or their short description has to encompass like everything that they'll ever do under the ends of the earth. Because they think that like investors only will get excited by these like big dreams. But in reality, like we're actually just trying to understand what your company is so that we could talk about something else.

Speaker 1

17:21

And so your description doesn't need to be this all-encompassing future vision. It's just like, we want to find out what you do quickly

Speaker 2

17:28

so that

Speaker 1

17:28

we can get to the next step.

Speaker 2

17:30

What do you want to do today, as well? If you tell us what you want to do today, it's a lot easier to tell us what your vision is. So what's the question?

Speaker 1

17:38

My question is in regards to a quick launch with a lean MVP. How do you launch fast while getting all of the legal taken care of to protect from liability?

Speaker 2

17:45

So Ethan, the first question I would ask you before you even think about this is have you studied every startup that has failed trying to do this idea and do you understand why? If not, you are doomed to repeat their failure. So

Speaker 1

17:59

you can start by looking in the YC database.

Speaker 2

18:02

We have funded this. So I really think that the real number 1 question is, do you understand something that everyone else doesn't know about this space? The other thing that I think is tricky is that The population that has the most problem with their cars tends to also be the population that is extremely price sensitive about fixing their cars.

Speaker 2

18:27

And so make sure that you have some insight on how you can be offering the cheapest option. Because if you're, the kind of issue here is a lot of people like to go with luxury and high price first, but the problem is like you're solving my car breaking, which is way less common if I bought it a year ago. And So make sure that you're actually lining this up so you actually have a product that can have demand. So yeah, like to me, there's some fundamental things you want to make sure you knock out here.

Speaker 2

18:54

We've seen this idea die a number of times.

Speaker 1

18:56

We've seen it in every location as well. We have like,

Speaker 2

18:59

a couple. Yes. Oh, yes.

Speaker 2

19:00

We've seen it in other countries as well. Yes. Let's see.

Speaker 1

19:04

In terms of the liability question, you've got to be extremely careful Especially when you're dealing with like large expensive items that people care about The way that I like to think about this is, trust your gut. You're usually not going to try to put yourself in a position where you're taking too much risk naturally. So listen to yourself and listen to other people when they bring up problems that they think you might encounter.

Speaker 2

19:35

All right.

Speaker 1

19:36

OK. This one's, OK, can you pronounce that 1?

Speaker 2

19:40

No. Are we doing high 5? Or are we

Speaker 1

19:42

doing, oh. Bin.

Speaker 2

19:45

Bin stop. Bin stop.

Speaker 1

19:47

Louis. Louis stop?

Speaker 2

19:49

Louis. OK,

Speaker 1

19:49

Louis. We're Binistop. We build a home wellness service and products marketplace for people's wellness objectives. OK.

Speaker 2

19:59

No idea.

Speaker 1

20:00

I don't really know what they do home wellness. I can I'm like thinking of home gym

Speaker 2

20:06

I'm telling you I don't even want to stretch my mind to try to

Speaker 1

20:09

figure out what I'm already

Speaker 2

20:11

because it's so much jargon

Speaker 1

20:13

It is a unique name.

Speaker 2

20:14

Let's see.

Speaker 1

20:15

Let's see if the website has any more. BNSTAP, oh, BNSTAP. Should've figured that

Speaker 2

20:22

out. Oh. No, is it BNSTAP?

Speaker 1

20:27

BNSTAP.

Speaker 2

20:29

Okay. Services for your well-being at home. What kind of services what kind of service request? Oh exercise dance meditation sports when you say like yeah, like your description on your Front page is much better.

Speaker 2

20:43

Yeah description does

Speaker 1

20:45

so That okay back to the question

Speaker 2

20:49

great

Speaker 1

20:51

Should we launch our MVP? For free or is it better to charge people?

Speaker 2

20:56

Let's be clear, you have a service where you're actually like, there is real cost. Meaning like your service is helping someone exercise, there is cost to sending someone to that place, there's cost to recruiting them, there's cost to their time. In any situation where you actually have real cost, you should be charging from day 1.

Speaker 2

21:15

In a pure software play where you don't have any costs, maybe consider something that's freemium, but you don't wanna anchor, the number 1 thing with these marketplaces that are actually moving humans around is that if you can do a situation where you're providing a dollar worth of value and you're only getting 75 cents back, you're going to get a lot of demand, but you're going to lose a lot of money. And when you actually equalize the demand and the price, you'll lose a lot of customers.

Speaker 1

21:42

Especially for something like this, where it's an existing service that people are already buying from other vendors. So you kind of don't need to validate that people want to have yoga classes or people want to have dance classes. What you want to validate is, do they want to have them at their home?

Speaker 1

21:55

Like, that's the thing that's kind of new and I think unique about this. So, like, definitely charge for it.

Speaker 2

22:04

Yeah, my instinct is charge a lot. Charge more than you might feel comfortable Yeah, identify the people are most desperate for it

Speaker 1

22:09

here's a crazy idea charge more than the existing solutions because Like when I think about it if I'm like, I want to have a private yoga class that's expensive. I would have to schlep out to go to the studio and I'm having it at home. Yeah, I mean and that would actually charging more if it sounds a little bit weird, but it would like force It would really force the question of like are you building something that people really want?

Speaker 1

22:33

You would get an answer really quickly. If you were charging more than the neighborhood yoga studio and people are still coming to you, then you're really onto something. If you're constantly having to cut the price and run discounts and stuff like that, maybe they're only coming to you because it's slightly cheaper than the alternative. So

Speaker 2

22:50

there you go Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1

22:52

Now we're on to high 5 High 5 is a local news website that helps you get invited to activities based on topics You enjoy discussing we help people in their 20s and 30s meet new friends with similar hobbies, humor, and lifestyle. That sounds like 2 one-liners in 1.

Speaker 2

23:08

Or 3.

Speaker 1

23:09

Or 3.

Speaker 2

23:11

Yeah, so once again, Vlad, something that a lot of people have tried before is both local news and interest-based social networks.

Speaker 1

23:20

And dating.

Speaker 2

23:21

And dating and meeting new people. So make sure that you're studying those products and you have a strong opinion about why they suck. It's going to help you 2 reasons.

Speaker 2

23:32

1, it'll help you figure out what to make as a good product. And 2, a very common investor question if you ever want to raise money is like, well, what about this?

Speaker 1

23:41

Everyone's always heard of like the other app that they funded. They may have funded like 5 of them.

Speaker 2

23:46

Yeah. And if your answer is like, oh, I don't know, then instantly you lose credibility. So make sure you're an expert on all of these various things.

Speaker 1

23:53

My hunch here is that, Vlad, this might actually be a problem that you're solving for yourself, which is great. Like maybe you just moved to a new city and like you're experiencing this exact problem. So like or or Yeah Or your friend has so like the way that I would start building an MVP It's kind of like what we mentioned at the beginning It's taking what you already do on a regular basis, like maybe you go to meetups, maybe you are on Reddit for the subreddit of that city, and think clearly about what are you doing today, and what's the smallest thing that you could do that has an outsized impact?

Speaker 1

24:31

Like You want to add the least amount of new process to your weekly workflow that just has this outsized large impact.

Speaker 2

24:42

Yeah. All right. What do you do after you launch an MVP? Exciting.

Speaker 1

24:47

Next up, we got Akiz from Smallscope. What are some steps to launch an MVP that found that? What are some steps after launch of an MVP that founders should follow?

Speaker 1

25:00

In the video, there are some examples of successful companies MVPs, however there's no discussion at all on how they iterated, what they learned, why they narrowed it down to those features.

Speaker 2

25:10

So Peter from segment.io actually had a talk at YC this week on this subject, which I think is really interesting. So we started with this depressing fact. Most startups are in the process of dying.

Speaker 2

25:23

And that's depressing fact 1. And depressing fact 2 is that most startups have convinced themselves that they're right on the verge of product market fit, when in fact, they're actually in the process of dying. So if you set that as the environment that you live in, 1 of the things he said that I thought was really helpful is take your MVP and be a skeptic. Have someone in your company be the skeptic and basically ask the question, is this providing any value to my users?

Speaker 2

25:56

And not like, oh well, you know, if I built these 17 features then it would. Is my first MVP, what the service that I provide people today, is it providing any value to my users? Then, if the answer is no, go figure out who's in so much pain around this problem that they would use your MVP, and get them to use it. And then ask that question again.

Speaker 2

26:17

Am I providing any value to those users? It turns out that it's too easy to go down a track where step 1 you're not providing any value and just to make it so that iteration 1 you're providing no value, iteration 2 you're providing no value, iteration 3 you're providing no value. If your product, if your problem you're solving is severe enough, there should be some group of people who are willing to use a really bad product to help solve it. And so go find them.

Speaker 2

26:44

That's where I think the best folks that do MVPs go.

Speaker 1

26:48

And what they do is they literally take what they have today and they talk to different groups of users and they begin to kind of, instead of iterating on the product, like building more features, they actually iterate on the market. So they'll find, I mean, it's always a great example, but the superhuman, Rahul, the founder of Superhuman, wrote a great blog post on how you iterate towards product market fit. And 1 of the things that he talks about is looking at the demographics within the first 100 users.

Speaker 1

27:19

And he realized that founders, salespeople were really taking advantage of the basic features that Superhuman had. And then product managers and some other people who didn't deal with email on the same volume just did not get value and stopped using it. Another test to your point of do people benefit from this very first version. 1 kind of crazy out there test that I sometimes see people run is they turn off their product, and they see who complains.

Speaker 1

27:54

Like, you don't really have to do this, but you could kind of figure out ways to simulate this. So For example, if you had an outage, if your servers went down last week, look back at your email logs to see, did anyone care? So you might already have run this experiment by accident at some point.

Speaker 2

28:13

It's a perfect example of doing something that doesn't scale. A big company could never do that. And a small startup like.

Speaker 1

28:19

I mean, Reddit did that for a long time.

Speaker 2

28:21

Yeah, I mean, Twitter did too. But like a small startup, it's something you totally can do. And if you think about the environment as like, the greatest percentage chance of what I'm doing is death, then you should be willing to experiment with extreme things.

Speaker 1

28:32

Experiment with death, yeah. That's weird.

Speaker 2

28:35

All right, what's next?

Speaker 1

28:36

I do remember a lot of farewells.

Speaker 2

28:38

Tons of farewells. And I

Speaker 1

28:40

always complain. Like, whenever Reddit would go down, I would complain to my friends when we were trying to like,

Speaker 2

28:44

figure out at work. I would text Steve. It would be funny.

Speaker 2

28:46

I'd be like, Steve, your website's down. I'm sure I'm the first person who's telling you this.

Speaker 1

28:50

Yeah. But again, that's a massive sign that you're onto something. If people can't live without your website for 5 minutes,

Speaker 2

28:57

you've

Speaker 1

28:57

solved that. You got something. Yeah.

Speaker 1

29:01

Next up, from Parshwa at Local B, my company is a website for shopping from home base and small businesses around us. After evaluating what I do, I've realized that I have users and traction, but we do not have product market fit. Now the question is, should I continue working on this, especially since margins are thin, or should I quit this and begin again and search for product market fit?

Speaker 2

29:24

You know I think this is always the hardest question to answer because I see problems on both sides. There's a set of founders who if they don't succeed immediately their mental model is that their company is a failure. But then there's also a set of founders who, even after learning 2 years worth of horrible facts, they still will not acknowledge that it's not working.

Speaker 2

29:45

I think the best strategy for this, the 1 that's easiest to execute, is to time bound it. So what I would say is like, hey, we're gonna try everything as hard as possible to make this work for this period of time, probably no less than 6 months. And if we haven't figured it out then, then we're gonna open ourselves up to pivoting. I find it's easier to time-bound it, because it's easier to be intellectually honest with yourself about, have I worked on this really hard for 6 months versus 3, versus have I tried all of my ideas like that's a really good running out of

Speaker 1

30:21

ideas then

Speaker 2

30:22

yeah yeah like you like ideas are kind of thing you it's it's it's easy to trick yourself that you've tried all of your ideas it's not easy to trick yourself have I been working on this for 6 months

Speaker 1

30:31

So some strategies that you can use during that 6 months are, like, put all the ideas that you still have up on a whiteboard and, like, pick the top 1 and spend a week working really hard on that. Because it's possible that, like, you've been going through this for, you know, a couple months or a year And you've gotten into this setup where you think you've tried everything or you're not sure about a specific question that you might have. Like am I going after the right demographic?

Speaker 1

31:00

Do I have the right stores or small businesses on my platform? And you could test it. You could say like, actually, we don't have product market fit. The founder of TaskRabbit was just speaking last night.

Speaker 1

31:11

She was talking about how like different, like at first, every single, every single, like TaskRabbit, you could just do anything with. But then they started realizing that some people really just wanted IKEA furniture set up. And so 1 of the things that she said that she was looking back and she was like, I wish we tried this at the beginning, was saying, what if we just made a landing page that was just like, get your Ikea furniture set up. And so I could imagine something like this really forcing that issue.

Speaker 1

31:37

And the cool thing about that is you can do that in a week. You already have built all the framework for it. You could spin up a landing page that's like, I want to, my hypothesis is that people really want to buy, you know, baby stuff on like a really short term basis because they can't run out and get it. So I'm going to use my existing website and the existing like whole thing that I've built and just test that 1 demographic with 1 use case.

Speaker 1

32:05

And then when to quit and start the search over again. What did Peter say about that? Because he did, they certainly.

Speaker 2

32:12

I think Peter said that if you can convince the critic in the company. But basically, he was like, identify a critic in the company. Identify a sign that would even convince the critic that there's something here.

Speaker 2

32:28

If you can't hit that sign within a period of time, you should move. So don't trust the faith of the optimist. Try to assume the pessimist role, and try to come up with an objective measure of demand. Or even that

Speaker 1

32:43

person would be like, holy shit, we

Speaker 2

32:44

did it. Yes, Even the skeptic would be like, yeah, OK, I guess we have to work on this. Like, that's what you're looking for.

Speaker 2

32:50

And for him, he tells a story in a segment, which was really cool, which was that the idea of segment he didn't believe in, and his co-founder did. And his test was like, well, OK, put it on Hacker News, and let's see what engineers think. And he thought it was just going to not get any upvotes and move on to the next topic. And the next day, it was to the front page of Hacker News.

Speaker 2

33:12

And he was like, oh, crap. Even as a skeptic, I must acknowledge that there is way more demand for this than I ever thought. That is a good mental framework. You have to get yourself out of tricking yourself that it's working when it's not.

Speaker 1

33:27

Next up, Crystal at Sightful. Along our journey, we've done surveys, interviews, and had many conversations with users. Once the MVP is live and we invite users to use and test our tool, what are the top methods you recommend for capturing and measuring feedback?

Speaker 2

33:42

I often think that startups try to scale this effort way too fast. The things that I've seen work really well are you call the users yourself personally, you invite the users to your office, you host a dinner for your users, you put your initial users in a WhatsApp group that you can all talk with together. But things that absolutely don't scale.

Speaker 2

34:04

Another famous 1 was Airbnb, where customer service was 1 of the co-founders Joe's cell phone number. This is the perfect area where you want there to be so much information flow from the customers to you that you have to do things that don't scale. You shouldn't be thinking about, oh, how do I get my ideal intercom setup and my Zendesk setup? In the early days, you do not need that stuff.

Speaker 1

34:27

But let me unpack something there, because It's easy to overlook, I think, why we talk about do things that don't scale. The, the reason in this case is actually you don't know the questions to ask yet. And so you want a really high bandwidth, a really wide, broad way of collecting feedback.

Speaker 1

34:46

Because you don't know the questions that you want to ask yet. And so by having this open-ended, like the example of the Airbnb is very cool because they're literally just like talking, like actually talking to users that have problems. So you can ask questions like when they phone up and say like, hey, can I get into my Airbnb? You solve that.

Speaker 1

35:03

And then while they're on the phone, you say, oh, by the way, how did you find us? How's your experience so far? Do your friends? You basically can hack the system.

Speaker 1

35:12

And instead of having to create the perfect survey, the perfect, you just talk. My recommendation is to write that all down and maybe on like a weekly basis, get together with you and your co-founders. Kind of debrief about these conversations that you have because like some of the times like during office hours, III really like talking to founders that have had these conversations. And we just kind of just talk through, I'm like, tell me about, like, this user's background, like, where do they work, how do they, and, and sometimes you can pull interesting insights out of this that can help you, like, tune and tweak your MVP to basically, like kind of to the point that we were talking about before, about these experiments that you can run, you could say, well actually, a lot of singles are using this tool, and I've talked to 3 of them.

Speaker 1

35:57

Maybe we could try something that just goes after this demo.

Speaker 2

36:01

Yeah.

Speaker 1

36:03

Next up, MVP as part of your startup pitch. Well, let's see what Spencer has to say. From Spencer at CarNuba, we're CarNuba, the first online Back office and field service management platform for independent car care professionals.