Just wanted to privately share some tactics to help you counter Google’s aversion to opt-ins in your landing page MVP. It’s hard enough getting a startup idea off the ground, to have to deal with arbitrary Google Adwords funny business. If you are using the Launch Tomorrow process, email addresses have always been seen as…
If there is too much irrelevant information, the easiest way to stand out is to be relevant for the person front of you. Here’s how.
Lean Startup is based on the scientific process, albeit more business focused, focused on learning fast when you know little. It’s the fastest known way to validate a product idea. Consider this a Lean Startup 101 introduction to how to use it in your business. The first step of choosing a hypothesis to test is…
Remember the 80/20 rule? You get 80% of the results from 20% of the inputs. Well, 80% of the results from using Lean Startup come from running experiments, in my opinion. Meticulously. First, focus around the product; prove your value hypotheses. Then, focus on growth; prove your growth hypotheses. If you aren’t running experiments, you’re not…
The main thing about launches that I’ve realized is that people put way too much emphasis on them. They end up focussing too much on a one-off event, rather than on building a successful business. Sometimes, they end up paying a price for suboptimal trade-offs they make. The goal of a traditional launch is to…
When releasing a new product, the first step is to get a minimum viable product (MVP) released. The minimum viable product encompasses the essence of the Lean Startup ethos. An MVP helps go through one cycle of the Build-Measure-Learn loop. Eric Reis warns “Customers don’t care how long something takes to build. They only care…
You may not have not realized it, but launching a new product-based startup requires that you navigate a number of chicken-and-egg problems successfully. Which comes first? While seemingly logical, there are a number of preconditions which you need to meet in order to stop being a startup and become a real business. I once visited…
In a previous life, Elon Musk was one of the main creators of PayPal. He’s pretty open about how the initial idea didn’t actually catch on very well. When he was doing customer interviews, he’d get that glazed-over look. Yeah, that one. At the time, the team was approaching consumers. They were saying they aimed…
When your prospects first hear of your product, your message will make or break your whole business. That moment is crucial. You will repeat it many times. You will continue repeating it as long as you have prospects. The more successful you are at nailing that first impression, the easier it will be to ramp…
By definition, if you want to start a business, you need to sell something: the product, the customers, or the company. The sooner you start selling, the faster you’ll get useful feedback. Delaying the decision to sell takes away one of the most powerful feedback loops required to build a new business. Ideally, you want…