“I’ve been in this game for years, it made me a animal,
There’s rules to this shit, I wrote me a manual,
A step-by-step booklet for you to get,
Your game on track, not your wig pushed back.”

— Notorious BIG

Rule #1: Solve Your Own Problem

By solving your own problems, you’re inadvertently empowering yourself to be able to solve those same problems for others.

Additionally, you have the advantage of being your own customer, and you’ll not lose the interest to pursue the idea. This can be described as a passion.

“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.” — Paul Graham

Rule #2: Don’t Skip Customer Development

Customer development is a way to reduce your business risks by challenging your assumptions about who your customers are, what they need, why and how they buy.

“Most startups lack a process for discovering their markets, locating their first customers, validating their assumptions, and growing their business. A few successful ones do all these things. The difference is that the ones that succeed invent a Customer Development model.” — Steve Blank

Rule #3: Start A Company With Disciplined People

Relying on motivation and enthusiasm only is a one-way ticket to fail. Instead, you should rely on disciplined people who are willing to go through the struggle, work their asses off and don’t give up until they succeed.

“Among idealists and visionaries, there is no shortage of good intent, but there’s often a shortage of discipline.” — Scott Belsky, Behance

Rule #4: Define The ‘Four Model Fits’ To Build A $100M+ Business

The difference between the $100M+ companies and those that struggle are the ones that are able to make four pieces in a puzzle fit:

Evidence of the four Fits is most apparent in the SaaS space. We can look at almost any category in SaaS and find multiple $1B+ companies who all essentially have the same core product. — Brian Balfour

Rule #5: Make Something Remarkable

Customers buy products because of the needs that the product fulfills and the problems the product solves. Features in and of themselves are useless — they exist to fill a need.

Customers will find product features valuable only if those features satisfy a need and if the act of filling that need is something which is valuable to the customer.

A marginally better product is worthless. It needs to be at least 10 times better . — Cliff Lerner

Rule #6: Focus On Retention, Make Onboarding Effortless

User onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product.

It isn’t a metric, feature or content, it’s an outcome — successful users.

Retention is the core of your growth model and influences every other input to your model. This is important because if you improve retention, you’ll also improve the rest of your funnel.

Retention is one growth metric that moves acquisition, monetization, and virality.

Retention will make or break your company. — Brian Balfour

Rule #7: Love Your Customers ( Invest In Customer Success )

Customer success is a proactive, holistic, and organization-level approach that leverages technology and real-time visibility into customer health to ensure your customers continually and increasingly receive value from your product over the course of their lifetime as a customer.

The ultimate goal of customer success is to decrease churn and to increase revenue and signups.

“Customer success means identifying ways clients could use your product more effectively, or spotting red flags — before someone reaches out for help.”

— Brooke Goodbary, Intercom

Rule #8: Automate Low-Touch Sales

If you want to have the ability to scale revenue growth without burning a lot of money on sales force in the beginning, you should create automated sales funnel and optimize until the low-touch sales start working.

Hire sales force later to tap into the enterprise market.

“Hire too soon and it could be a massive momentum killer for your self-serve business, hire too late and you’ll miss out on the potentially massive revenue growth that comes from going upmarket into the enterprise.” — Steli Efti

Rule #9: Find One Marketing Channel That Works and Double Down

Avoid taking a “shotgun approach” and dibbling/dabbling in a bunch of channels at once. Identify the one channel that has the most ceiling room and double down. Multiple channels creates overhead.

“What worked on Facebook 3 months ago, doesn’t work today. What works today, probably won’t work in 90 days. Same goes for almost every major channel.”

— Brian Balfour

Rule #10: Define, Track And Optimize Metrics

Everything is a funnel. From AARRR to Customer Journey you should identify all steps in all funnels and constantly experiment and test in order to optimize them.

“A/B test a shitload, measure for conversion improvement.”— Dave McCLure

We @ Infinity are building a Project Management SaaS. Follow our transparent journey.