What's in it for you?
Nothing else matters other than this when closing deals
Howdy!
Lets kick-off but first - yes I’ve rebranded to Building Startups - it felt more appropriate and all the content will be around this topic - let me know your thoughts?
Today we’re going to talk through a couple of things
🔥TTPMF - Time To Product Market Fit, Derisking and Achieving success FAST
🔥Leveraging Knowledge Gaps
🔥Don’t Solve Every Problem You Find
Time To Product Market Fit
PMF = “When your customers depend upon your product so much that even a cheaper alternative does not lure them away”
We see this happen many times, people pay a premium for a product due to convenience, brand, better user experience or a certain uniqueness to a problem being solved.
Sean Ellis’ approach is “If 40% of your users will be Very Disappointed if your product didn’t exist tomorrow, you’ve hit PMF”
Most startups don’t achieve PMF and die before, so clearly you need to shorten your TTPMF (time to product-market fit)
Find products that solve a great problem and find a 20% difference
Twitter was a blogging system, literally - they’re 20% was the 140 characters
Slack took the poor UX of Hipchat and niched down - 20% being UX and Niche
Ensuring you pick the right 20% will decide your product value
Leverage Knowledge Gaps
The larger the knowledge gap the stickier the customer. Using knowledge gaps for idea generation is a great strategy because you’re solving existing problems.
Knowledge gaps DO NOT need to be complex. Use LinkTree as an example. Its nothing but a web app that lets you link a bunch of links to your other websites (products, twitter, facebook etc) on your Instagram.
Most developers will tell you that would take 8 hours to build, but the audience i.e everyday influencers would see that as an impossible task.
Canva is another great example - it lets you become a designer without learning design
And Adalo lets you build apps without code
Find knowledge gaps in your industry and fulfil them with a product/service
Don’t solve every problem
Solve problems don’t build solutions, but that doesn’t mean you solve every problem you see.
If my TV takes 3 seconds to turn on I wouldn’t angrily Google alternatives. Is it a problem? Yes - Do I care enough, No
Understand the difference between niggles and problems. If a user of your product will conveniently switch back to their old ways of operating you know you’re in trouble
Questions you can ask to confirm that it is a problem:
How often do you face this problem?
Have you tried to actively find a solution to this?
How much do you currently pay to solve this problem?
How much is this problem costing you or your team?
When was the last time you faced this problem?
Where do you currently go to search for solutions?
What is your current solution?
These questions are framed to verify its a commonly occurring problem, one people are willing to pay money to have solved. Also, people are actively searching for solutions.
That’s all for this week. Next week we’ll dissect how some popular companies acquired their first 100 customers (its pure hustle I’ll tell you that)
So definitely stick around if you’d like to know more
PS - Tip of the week:
Always follow the WIIFM model - What’s In It For Me
Anytime you’re in sales, applying for work - ANYTHING - WIIFM
Change your attitude from "I've got 4 years experience in xyz" To "I can make your life 10X easier because I've done this for 4 years"