Good growth starts with good validation

Wonderful read @iammarcthomas - Ive started a research in the validation process. Would love to hear your opinion. Is your DM on Twitter open? Let's start a conversation. Here's my profile :)

Another advantage of calendly is you never need to think about time zones again. Just pop your schedule in - I recommend having space first thing in the morning and then later at night - and anyone in the world can probably find a suitable time. It’s a massive benefit compared to email + zoom + negotiating a time and thinking about time zones and waking hours. The free calendly version does the trick for this purpose.

Read this blog post by @NeilC over the weekend. Neil's a guy who has helped me a lot and has driven home the importance of validation to me.

Define your customer – 1 hour
Read a book – 3 hours
Write your hypothesis – 1 hour
Create and distribute a survey – 4 hours
Speak to people (properly!) – 10+ hours

One thing I've noticed from growing my company is that good validation is essential to good growth.

I can give you an example: we laboured for a long time to create an anonymous polling tool and sell it into a broad market. That was rough. Getting customers was a grind and not enjoyable.

Then, we took a step back and asked: is that core feature (anonymity) something that people we're selling to actually care about? And do they know what a poll is?

Turns out, nope. And... nope.

So here's what we did: we added the ability to collect open text and demographic data from respondents and switched out language out to focus on surveys.

The growth kicked in at that point and we've been increasing the rate of growth at doopoll ever since.

Is that purely validation? No. Some of it's positioning too.

But I think Neil's points in this post are super relevant if you're at the place in your company where you haven't yet built.

Key takeaways for me:

1. Read The Mom Test by @robfitz – heartily recommend this too. It's the basic validation bible.
2. Use Twitter to expand your networks:

Twitter is a search engine for human beings. Want to find people interested in, for example, medtech? There’s a ton of hashtags these people will use, and that info may also be in their bio. It wouldn’t take too long to tweet a few hundred of them with a polite message, asking them to give you 2 mins of their time to fill in the survey, as they’re interested in your area of research.

I think that's super smart.

Anyway, it's a quick post but it'll save you a lot of grief!