How are you planning your startup?
Hey! I am looking to get some insight into how founders around the world are planning and then executing their first startup. Specifically:
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How are you planning your venture and testing your ideas? - e.g. in your head, on paper, on a spreadsheet, or a full business plan
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What parts are you finding most difficult? - this could be conceptual, practical, emotional...
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Are there any tools are you are finding useful? - these could be templates, content or full-blown platforms
My goal is to develop simple "venture building tools", that will support first-time founders to plan and execute their venture, with less effort and more insight.
For anyone interested, I would be happy to swap your insights for any advice based on my 15 years building companies. Thanks for your help!
Hey Warren, great to hear that you're launching something! A few things that I use:
-- I love this article on founder discipline, and the cadence that the Front founder follows to stay disciplined. I do many of these things: https://firstround.com/review/the-founders-guide-to-discipline-lessons-from-fronts-mathilde-collin/
-- Viable Fit (https://www.viable.fit/) can be helpful for measuring your product market fit. I've found it to be very useful!
-- I send myself a daily "Why Talk Hiring can work" email so that I don't rehash previous strategy decisions, and outline why what I'm working on could be successful
Hey Warren, I've just launched a small GitHub site to create a community of tech people willing to spend some of their free time to have calls with people that need advice on your area of expertise.
Is this something that you could be interested in? I will share the link if you are. No money involved except donations that you could receive from the people you help.
Sure, feel free to email me some more details!
Also, highly recommend The Mom Test (http://momtestbook.com/) for customer interviews!
For me historically I just had the idea, and ploughed on with it. Very little planning, as such. And that was usually enough to work, but on a low level.
It's only in recent years that I've started to be more customer-led in my thinking. It's mainly informed by The Mom Test, and having lots of open conversations with potential customers. And that seems to serve me a lot better.
Unscientific evidence:
I currently have two businesses. One of them is about 10 years old, was never properly planned, and has just been trucking along with little intervention (but also not a huge amount of profit) ever since. The other one was much more "designed" by the customer, after having 50+ conversations with potential customers, and is already outperforming the old business, despite being much younger.
The process was to spend a few days analysing those customer conversations, looking for keywords, and identifying a few key problems that people were looking to have solved in that space. Once we'd done that, we built an MVP, and put it on Product Hunt, to some pretty great feedback.
What we've not been that great at (partly for bootstrapping/resource reasons) is iterating from there.
Thanks for the response! Do you do any financial analysis or planning? E.g. cost to build, pricing
Well, I'm a 9-6 worker, have as many of us quite a few financial responsibilities so I'm going for the long road here, building it myself, finding free tiers and thinking of ways I can reduce the cost to almost $0.
I theory I could keep going that way. I'll find out when I get closer to release a product.
So, short answer: no.
Follow up, I might be missing something here tbh. What kind of financial analysis is needed?
i think he is asking whether you predict revenues, cashflow, user numbers etc, in order to predict the potential for the business.
Excellent - how do you figure out market interest and size? Do you have any tools or frameworks?
I think I have confused your questions. I was thinking about how I "form" the idea of my startup biz. I think you are looking for what tools or processes that we use after we have decided on an idea, which is more about the execution (including testing, planning, etc.) of that startup biz. Is this the correct understanding?
Yes - more about you plan, validate execute.
I'm trying to build tools that increase the chance or project success.
That is a great concept, but is it doable - increase the chance of project success with tools?
Here are the possible factors that will affect the project success in a more drastic way, that is, usually, the more the better.
How do tools increase the chance of success in a drastic way? A tool can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of a process. That may lead to an increase of the chance of success a bit, but not likely in a drastic way. But if your tools are essential for the execution of a business, then that is another story.
Just my thought.
Great points. Yes, there are other factors, but process can help to mitigate them.
Take Lean Startup for example. It's a book, but it's helped thousands of founders to develop with less risk. I'm interested in how to turn these concepts into tools that are more powerful than books.
Lean Startup is a concept. Once you understand the concept, there are many tools that you can use interchangeably. The book teaching that concept is a tool. A course on lean startup that teaches founders understand and practice the philosophy is also a tool. These tools will definitely increase the chance drastically. But it is not the book or the course that does it. It is the concept.
If your tool does contain such attribute, it will indeed be a great tool:-)
Hopefully it will!
But I'm more interested in applying the concepts that exist in better ways than reading them. In the same way I can read about project management, but Asana helps me implement the concepts of tasks, gannt charts etc better.
Hi Warren,
Here are mine, hope it will help.
We just start working on our idea, without thinking too much. Now after two and a half year, we have a platform and AI which trades and makes money. At least until for now.
Corporate operations are time-consuming.
We have a board for each bigger component or project we work on.
Amazing job on the project! Do you have any financial modelling of revenue and cost? Do you rate new features against cost and value they create, or validate them in some way?
We created 1st financial modeling after about one year of work (when we thought we could raise money). It wasn't helpful at all at the stage we were. We made quite a big pivot as well. We changed completely the way how the product will be offered to customers. (So your product could also help first-time founders decide when to start doing such modeling and when it's too early with too many unknowns )
We rate features on how much time do they cost. It's hard to measure the value they create in the beta version, and we don't have a tools to measure. And one of the features is to create a way to measure.
I validate everything with customers at the moment.
Amazing - would you pay for better planning like this? E.g. plans that help you make better decisions about an idea, market, feature
yeah, I would give it a shot if it would look like it can help me to save time (nerves).
I usually start with an idea in my head.
When I have thought about it long enough to give it a name, I create a bunch of notes using a task management app (previously Wunderlist and now Microsoft ToDo) that I can access on my phone and computer.
Eventually I may be ready to write some code to implement the idea, so I will create the necessary project in my tool of choice (Visual Studio) and start hacking.
If the idea is still going strong I start thinking about money and there Excel comes in handy as I go over five or six iterations of financial models.
Through all this the most difficult part is the uncertainty: is any of this going to work? Am I wasting my time? Do these numbers actually make sense? Will this code hold up under pressure? Will aliens invade the planet and destroy everything?
If you are working on venture building tools, then helping people with the UNCERTAINTY inherent in all ventures may be very valuable!
Excellent thanks! Would you pay for a tool that helped you to clarify your ideas, test them, create financial models and set clear objectives for your work?
Absolutely! Bringing an idea to market is a lengthy process with many moving parts and its easy to forget a step or not complete it once started. A tool that can take me from A to Z along all the steps that matter would bring much needed structure to the chaos!
For example if your tool had a Naming module where it helps me pick a name, automatically checks the availability of that name as a domain and on the various social media platforms, allows me to rank the different names and add notes for why I like them, then ultimately pick a name...that by itself is a product I would pay for!
Another example: a Pricing module. If the tool could help me pick a suitable number of packages/plans (assuming a SaaS product), set the different prices intelligently then model the distribution of users across those plans so I can figure out how much money I would make assuming I had say 1,000 users? That is gold all by itself because it is really hard to do manually in Excel.
Make the "Microsoft Office" suite of starting ventures, with various modules/apps for different parts/stages (naming, pricing, marketing, hiring, etc) and you will be the hero of all Indie Hackers :-)
Thanks! Those could definitely be features that end up in the product. My first goal is to help with validation of ideas though, making sure the project is worth having a name - if you're interested we can DM and I can let you play with the very early prototypes in Google Sheets?
Sounds like a plan! I just sent you an email with the subject "Project Planning Tools" and I would be happy to check out the early prototype you have!
Interesting idea, Warren!
I'm working on a similar idea but without the tools its like a guide and path on what to do next in your startup.
Sounds interesting - how far along are you?
In the beginning stages, planning and thinking how the product should be presented. Also, trying to collect the data and resources needed to present the product.
Actually, I'm a first time founder (had so many ideas in the past and never acted on any of them) so this is a product that I can use which helps in making decisions on the best way to build it.
I still haven't taken any feedback from anyone regarding the idea. But I think at least I should have something to show people before asking for their feedback.
Good for you! I would suggest validating the idea with your target group as early as possible though. Creating "an app" without users is like cooking a meal without seasoning. It will look right, but people may not enjoy it.
Well, worst case I would use it for myself. But I'd like to validate by showing something with minimum features (only having the most important part of the app).
But thanks for your advise!
And all the best to you on your idea too!
I dog food my own app (Portabella) by planning out features, bugs, todos, etc there.
Once I land Gantt charts it'll also be easier to get a timeline of tasks.
Simple whiteboarding is enough for everything else
Hey Alex - thanks for the insights!
How about financial models and projections for resources? How do you decide how much to charge and how much you can spend on acquisition costs?
Great of you to assume I'm at that point.
This is my first product, so I'm not necessarily thinking about that aspect of thing as much as I maybe should.
These days with the cloud you can run pretty cheap, currently the most I've spent has been 30 euros on a domain name. I've copied pricing from competitors specced out some basic usage numbers but nothing super advanced.
Acquisitions I'm not sure what that refers to, but currently it's just me working on this.
Ah ok, clear. Acquisition = customers i.e. how much you spend to get a new user, versus the lifetime value of that user (profit)