Startup School
Building a Product
What is the problem you’re solving?
- You have to know what problem you’re solving
- You should be able to describe what you’re solving in one sentence
- Have you yourself experienced the problem that you’re solving
- Can you define this problem narrowly? Know the use case
- Is the problem solvable?
Who is your customer?
- Not everyone should be your customer (figure out ideal first customer)
- How often do they have the problem? E.g. frequency of buying a car (infrequent) vs selling a car (frequent)
- How intense is the problem?
- Are users willing to pay? If you want to know if its a good problem to solve, make it a little
harder to use (e.g have a price or a slightly higher price)
- How easy is it to find your customers?
Does your MVP solve your problem?
- Build quickly (e.g. in two weeks) and test by giving your product to customers - will minimize product drift
- You’ll have a bad product and in turn will find your more desperate customers
- If you’re not dealing with desparate customers, you’re doing it wrong
- Whose business will go out of business without you
Identify bad customers
- Constantly complaining
- Unrealistic expectations
Setup Metrics
- Use Google Analytics AND something else (e.g. for identifying actions)
- Google Analytics is good for knowing how many people visited
- GA is not good at identifying actions done (e.g. clicked on this button)
- You want an event-space metrics product (e.g. mixpanel, amplitude, heap)
- With something like Mixpanel, you’ll know what people clicked on, how they used the site
- Pick 5-10 important metrics (e.g. for Instagram, opened the app, created an account, shared a photo, applied an effect)
- Make measurement a part of your product spec
- Almost always measurement should be revenue (if you charge money), otherwise number of users (if you don’t charge money)
- Measurement is Key Performance Indicator (KPI)