Should you put all eggs in one basket?
Or, occasionally, explore other ideas?
We probably spend 95% on coding, 4% on talking to existing customers, 1% on new customer outreach. Probably not the right distribution early stage…
Startup week in D.C.
Learned that defining your personal values, company values and product ethos is a means for scaling your team: It helps others make decisions that are aligned with the CEO’s vision of the company. Values and product ethos guide decision making.
Learned some things about outreach:
Another customer feedback call. Very helpful. After almost a year, the product that we should build becomes clearer. Every customer conversation lifts the Fog of War.
Thankfully, most of my initial hypotheses are validated. Empathy is important. More empathy = better predictions about your users.
When talking to customers, you must be careful how you ask questions. It’s easy to lead them to the answer that you want to hear.
Your goal is to find the truth. And truth is hard to find.
Customers may say ‘I need feature X’. But you should never just accept it. Question it. Dig deeper.
Why do you need it? What problem does it solve? How does the problem arise?
You want to solve the root cause and not treat symptoms.
Sometimes customers feel socially pressured to come up with a feature to “improve” your product. But it’s like in school, when the teacher forces you to give feedback to a presentation. You’ll say anything, doesn’t matter if you actually mean it.
Question everything.
Still don’t understand how you work together with big organizations as a startup. Talked to multiple big construction companies. We identified and validated a few BIG pain points. BUT, they only do ‘pilots’ with mature startups, like 2-3 Mio funding and more or less production-ready product (as per their company policies…). Don’t know how to partner with big organizations when you’re an early stage startup (<1 year, <500k funding).
Analyzed a competitor’s app today. It’s a sophisticated app with tons of features, catering to the bureaucratic requirements of large corporations. But the app is too complex for SMBs. The businesses we talked to find it “unusable”.
SMBs have different requirements than enterprise users. Enterprise users often have rigid requirements that must be fulfilled. They are fine when an app has more features and the time-to-do-X is higher, as long as the requirements are fulfilled. SMBs have less bureaucratic requirements.
An idea: Why not clone the complex niche app but with -50% complexity and +15% Voice & AI Features? Skip the “customer discovery” (takes months!). Instead: copy, sell, then iterate on the product.
That could be an entire business model: Search for highly complex niche apps, build a simpler clone, add a couple AI features, and sell for 1/2 the price.
If we streamlined our processes of building an app (best practices, library of AI prompts, more sophisticated AI coding setup), we could churn out a low-to-mid-complexity business app in 1-3 months. If that business worked, we’d drive down the cost of software.
Another (complementary) idea is to build personalized apps for SMBs. The focus on SMBs is important because: