notes for SSO - Summer 2019
WEEK 1
Startup School 2019 Orientation
How to Evaluate Startup Ideas Pt. 1
How to Talk to Users - video
- The Mom Test
- Talk about their life, not your idea.
- Talk specifics, not hypotheticals
- Listen, don’t talk
- 5 great questions you can ask in every user interview
- What’s the hardest part about [doing this thing]?
- Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem…
- in details, when where why how
- reference back to real life example and to see if your solution can solve this specific event
- Why was that hard?
- understand how to market the product, customer don’t buy what, they buy why.
- What, if anyting, have you done to try to solve the problem?
- What’s don’t you love about the solutions you’ve tried?
- Talking to users is useful at all stages:
- Idea stage -> find user with the problem
- yourself, friends, coworkers, intros
- dropy by in person, just show up, zoom interview
- industry events
- tips
- take notes, or bring someone to take notes
- keep it casual
- careful with their time
- Prototype stage -> identify best first customer
- find numerical answers to:
- how much does this problem cost them(user’s ROI, portenial savings to user)
- how frequent is the problem (daily, monthly, quarterly?)
- ability to fix: how large is their budget($ and authority)
- find numerical answers to:
- Launched -> find product market fit
- Superhuer’s PMF
- tips
- ask for phone number when signup
- don’t design by committee(have a way to verify, e.g. premium paywall, ask for credit card, or ask for signup for new feature)
- discard bad data, ignore compilements
- define your own goal
- What does success look like for you and what does being on track look like to you?
- Goal:
- fast initial growth
- how long it takes to sell (enterprise sells from months to days)
- organic(discovered worth of mouth) vs paid growth (avoid it in the early stage)
- exponential(startup sould look for this) vs linear
- Tracking progress
- timebox of obsolete goal, e.g. what you want at the end of startupschool, then go back to get your weekley growth goal
- print out and put it everywhere, bathroom, desk…etc and update it every week.
- it’s okay to not hit the goal in two weeks in a row as long as you know “why”. if you don’t know why, the best way is to talk to users, don’t spin in the circle and talk to yourself.
- Idea stage -> find user with the problem
Week 1 Lectures Q&A
WEEK 2
How to Set KPIs and Goals - Adora Cheung
every week in startup school we’ve asked you in a software to fill out, to define your primary metric, and then update its current value. By definition, you can only pick one, one primary metric, and it’s the metric, if you had to, you’d be willing to bet the whole company on. So, why just one metric? It’s a way to focus and keep things very simple.
- a good metric
- represents delivery of real value - revenue is the best
- captures recurring value - does user come back, MRR for SaaS, DAU for daily newspaper
- lagging indicator for success
- usable feedback mechanism
- Revenue(MRR is the best) & Active User(Free user give different feedback, paid user gives more serious feedback)
- social network or your product need social effect(e.g. a marketplace), then DAU is maybe a better matric
- Two side platform: find a matric that can represent value of both side, night book for Airbnb, weekely rides for Uber
- Secondary metric
- metrics
- Retention
- Revenue Churn
- CAC
- Payback period
- NPS
- Email conversion
- Organic as paid users
- Referral rate
- Contribution margin
- Gross margin
- GMV
- ACV
- TCV
- Burn rate
- metrics
- You need to launch it first then matrics later.
- Set a weekly % growth goal, so you can break down a ultimate goal into weekly pieces
How to Plan an MVP - Michal Seibel
- course, slide
- Talk to your users before writing code
- not 3 yrs research
- some versation helps, it will be awesome if you are own user
- Goal of pre-launch startup:
- LAUNCH SOMETHING BAD QUICKLY!
- Get Initial users, just get anyone use the product!
- Talk to your users and get feedback
- Iterate (improve the product)
- Lean MVP
- VERY FAST to build (weeks not months)
- very limited functionality
- appeal to a small set of users
- A base to iterate from
- Example 1: Aribnb MVP
- No payments, no map view, part-time CTO
- Example 2: Twitch
- Only video and chat, only 1 channel, low res video, no video games
- Example 3: stripe(/dev/payments)
- no bank deals, few features, founder would come to your office and setup up for you
- some cases: Heavy MVP
- industry with significant regulation(insurance, banking)
- hardtech - rocket
- biotech
- moonshot(dig tunnels?)
- your MVP can still be just a simple website, explain what you want to do
- launching
- there is no special launch moment, nobody remember when twitter/google/fb launched
- launch = start getting customers!
- the idea is that learning from customers is easier with an MVP than without, that’s all.
- heacks for building an MVP quickly
- timebox it
- write your spec!(otherwise it’s so easy to change without noticing it, you need to write it down, so you know what you change)
- cut your spec! make sure you launch and roll out something, otherwise, it’s so easy to change
- don’t fall love with your MVP/idea
- Q/A
- Q: I talked user but their feedback kinda even out
- A: never ask user for features, ask for “Problems”! There must be an overlay with problem!
- what’s the problem
- how much you will pay
- do anyone else have that problem
- how often
- even user talk some features from other products, keep digging into the issue and scope the problem
- A: never ask user for features, ask for “Problems”! There must be an overlay with problem!
- Q: Stuck in the cycle of changing and not launching
- A: sometime, just don’t think it’s less special, just not change, dont think about being special or perfect.
- you want to find out a shirt and paint and destroy it, you don’t want to tailoring that one shirt
- A: sometime, just don’t think it’s less special, just not change, dont think about being special or perfect.
- Q: What to answer in the build learn cycle.
- A: This is a simple question, does it solve the problem you want to solve. (recurring is a metric for this)
- Q: post MVP, should you work on grow or retention?
- A: Both!
- Q: How do you know when is product market fit?
- A: At the point that you don’t need to worry about distribution any more, at the point that you are lost how to help the upcoming users tmr, there are just too many users coming! I am pretty sure we are going to die if we have too many users.
- and the fact is, almost no one gets product market fit.
- A: At the point that you don’t need to worry about distribution any more, at the point that you are lost how to help the upcoming users tmr, there are just too many users coming! I am pretty sure we are going to die if we have too many users.
- What happens if you learn more about the problem and the problem expands as you start interacting with users?
- A: founders usually make the mistake, is they think they have to solve the problem for all users.
- Founder needs to keep two things at the same time, e.g. Vision big, MVP small, Grow and retain…etc
Analytics for Startups - Ilya Volodarsky, co-founder of Segmen
- Founder needs to keep two things at the same time, e.g. Vision big, MVP small, Grow and retain…etc
- A: founders usually make the mistake, is they think they have to solve the problem for all users.
- Q: I talked user but their feedback kinda even out
- Why analytics
- test product market fit
- focus on the team
- operate/grow the company
- Funnels
- signups
- re-engaged week over week
- MRR
- Collecting Data
- Top 3 Metrics - PMF methodology
- tools