Practical lessons from studying successful product launches

I've studied quite a few self-funded startups to figure out what it takes to build a successful product without getting lucky. Here are some key lessons that apply to indie hackers / self funded startups.

on shoulders of giants
First off, if you are not familiar with Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) and Rob Walling (@robwalling), two patron saints of startup founders, I highly encourage you to consume every material from them you can get your hands on.

Here are two videos to get you started.
(Open the new tabs to watch them later, don't just jump into them now 😅)
Rob's talk: 'How to validate your idea & launch to $7k in Recurring Revenue'
Patrick's talk: 'Your first 60 days'

TL;DR / summary:

1. Validate your idea before building anything
2. Think in terms of minimum viable solutions, not products
3. Market your product from day 0

1. validate your idea before building anything
When you have an idea for a product you actually have an assumption: "I believe that if I build this, people will use it". And it's a great starting point, but you need to validate your assumptions as early and as cheaply as possible. More on the 'cheaply' part later.

👉 How do you validate your idea? You talk to people you think could be your customers, describe your product and ask them if they would pay $PRICE for it. You should get at least 10 customers before building a product. If you're building a SaaS aim for 25 customers.

For example, Rob Walling before starting drip.com had 17 conversations over 8 weeks to get to 11 pre-sales. To put things in perspective, Rob was not building his first business, he had the money to just start building the product, but knew better. He had the experience to know that you can't follow your intuition blindly and skip the idea validation stage.

If you're already building something, consider talking to people in your target market to see what they think of your solution. The earlier you get external feedback the less rework you have to do.

2. think in terms of minimum viable solutions, not products
Instead of 'minimum viable product' (MVP) think of 'minimum viable solutions'. What is the very next thing you're trying to solve? What's the simplest or cheapest solution you could build to test that.

During a hackathon a team told me they wanted to build an Uber for furniture delivery, so they basically wanted to replicate Uber's app and recruit some drivers then bring in some customers. Good luck with that.

Contrast that approach to how Doordash got started. They built a static website in one afternoon, uploaded a few menus from local restaurants as PDFs and ran a Google Ads campaign to see if people would place an order for food delivery. They had their first order the very same day.

Food delivery might seem like an obvious business idea now, but they got started when there weren't any food delivery apps.

Doordash's minimum viable solution was a static website with PDF menus and a Google Ads campaign as marketing. The site had no backend functionality, there was no dispatch system, nothing really besides a static frontend. So instead of waiting months to build an MVP they launched a minimum viable solution in an afternoon in order to test their business idea.

3. market your product from day 0

Startups don't fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a proven financial model.
— Steve Blank

Start collecting sign-ups the moment you start developing your product. At the very least that means setting up a landing page to capture potential users' emails.

If you think to yourself 'It'll be easier to bring people in once I build the product' ...perhaps, but you're still going to have to figure out the marketing aspect of it as some point. And it's best to figure it out sooner rather than later.

Zapier started off as a side-project built during a hackathon. Then came 9 months of evenings and weekends work on developing the product and onboarding the first customers. But while they were building the product they also collected emails from people interested in using Zapier. And when they were ready to launch they had a ~10,000 email list.

Just like making pre-sales, seeing a list of people wanting to use your product is super motivating. You're not alone anymore, now there are people waiting for you to launch your product. Also, you will have a much more successful launch day!

If you want to learn more I've put together a list of case studies. It covers self-funded startups that launched successfully on a budget. You can get it for free here: https://dasprodukt.co/guides/how-to-launch

Please let me know if you found these ideas actionable in your scenario. And why / why not. 🙏