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The last step where you manually do what the product is meant to do really works in 1% of products. Think of all the successful products today: Docusign, Snowflake, Wix, yeah.. not going to happen. It’s 2020. All the low hanging fruit ideas are gone. Any meaningful product idea requires a bit more complexity in implementing it.
With all due respect, a Facebook person's thoughts on validating a startup idea are pretty much irrelevant. Whatever thing you are building at Facebook starts out with 10 hurricanes of wind behind it. Startups begin with all the wind of a baby blowing a raspberry.
> Whatever thing you are building at Facebook starts out with 10 hurricanes of wind behind it. It's remarkable how often things still fail miserably despite hurricane-force winds behind them, as with Hobbi and Lasso. Facebook got their ass royally kicked by Pinterest and TikTok. July 2nd: "Facebook is shutting down TikTok clone Lasso and Pinterest rival Hobbi" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/lasso-shut-down-facebook.…
Practically anyone can build a racecar, or a startup. The race puts proof to the lie: not everyone can compete, and not everyone wins. The first issue is systemic; the second: hard work, capital, and dumb luck.
Life, like business, hopefully doesn’t have a checkered flag, but it’s a fact of life all the same. All anyone can do is race their best to win, for whatever your own personal winning conditions are. Choose your racing team wisely!
Personally, I've done startups longer than I want to admit (10+ yrs). If I was to start another one, the play book would look basically like this article.
Idea/Thesis, Hypothesis, Target, Test and some where later - build.
The problem I had when I started and why so many founders get it wrong is the steps usually look like - Idea => Build or just ... Build.
There is a lot of good advice here. Sure the numbers might appear insane (just replace, $1m, $300k, $300), but don't let that stop this from being a good framework. The goal is to remove as many assumptions about what you're supposed to build as fast as possible because chances are, more than not, the assumptions are wrong from Idea => Build. This is a good way to validate a number of assumptions and it's only just the beginning
The only thing I would have added is - ask for Money.
Ideas will iterate very quickly (or die) once money is involved.
Maybe this is good advice for mass marketed consumer apps, but I don't believe putting up a cheap SquareSpace template and faking automation instead of building the product is a good strategy for getting initial enterprise customers.
There are certain enterprise specific channels where you could run an ad to test. E.g. https://appsumo.com/
The last step where you manually do what the product is meant to do really works in 1% of products. Think of all the successful products today: Docusign, Snowflake, Wix, yeah.. not going to happen. It’s 2020. All the low hanging fruit ideas are gone. Any meaningful product idea requires a bit more complexity in implementing it.
So I'm not sure I agree with your hypothesis.
A number of the comments are saying this is bad because from Facebook, numbers are unrealistic ($100mm?!), signs tell you nothing. Personally, I've done startups longer than I want to admit (10+ yrs). If I was to start another one, the play book would look basically like this article. Idea/Thesis, Hypothesis, Target, Test and some where later - build. The problem I had when I started and why so many founders get it w…
This book looks into other techniques to do so: https://www.amazon.com/Bullseye-Marketing-Grow-Business-Fast...
Of course none of these can tell you the 'why' -- it might be something simple that you would never have thought of, but you end up pivoting too early. Or perhaps your marketing isn't polished. Or you're way early/late to a field. If you knew the 'why,' that can be worth far more than blowing a huge cash load on FB. I feel like techies flock to such techniques because it's easy and fits into the scale techno-narrative. It means that many will be mislead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Whatever thing you are building at Facebook starts out with 10 hurricanes of wind behind it. It's remarkable how often things still fail miserably despite hurricane-force winds behind them, as with Hobbi and Lasso. Facebook got their ass royally kicked by Pinterest and TikTok. July 2nd: "Facebook is shutting down TikTok clone Lasso and Pinterest rival Hobbi" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/lasso-shut-down-facebook.…
Startups are street racers: you never know who you’re racing next to. They might have bigger sponsors than their sleeper suggests. A NASCAR analogy would therefore apply to traditional VC centers like SF, NYC, etc. It’s hard to pass someone before a turn at 200 MPH, but if you don’t do it, plenty of other people can and will . Practically anyone can build a racecar, or a startup. The race puts proof to the lie: not e…
The last step where you manually do what the product is meant to do really works in 1% of products. Think of all the successful products today: Docusign, Snowflake, Wix, yeah.. not going to happen. It’s 2020. All the low hanging fruit ideas are gone. Any meaningful product idea requires a bit more complexity in implementing it.
This is a neat idea, and there may be some enlightening bits of feedback, but it won't tell you what matters, and that is if people, in a specific audience will like the product. Sign ups and likes are very noisy singals. There's just nothing that can take the place of market validation, so the 'new standard' model of 'release early' is probably the best way. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right user base and…
I agree different levels of "skin in the game" mean different signal. Simple link click is pretty lousy signal and I would ignore it. I think email is okay. Phone number is probably better. Somebody putting their credit card is really good. I didn't mention all of that for brevity. But you could device a point based grading system based on what signal you get.