Startup Lessons for Beginners (Learned the Hard Way)
Startups are hard. If there is one piece of advice that will help you overcome, it’s learn from your mistakes. That way, fail or succeed, you will always be moving forward.
Connectsy was a mobile app my Co-Founder and I launched with plans to take on the world. A year later, Connectsy is no more. Here are some of the lessons learned from that experience.
When we started Connectsy we didn’t spend enough time thinking about the problem we were solving. Once we started trying to raise money (after building our first, unreleased, version of the app), we needed to define our problem so we could explain it. When we did, we realized that we were attempting to solve a bunch of problems. There wasn’t clear value for a specific person with a specific issue. Our lack of defined problem was really a lack of vision.
Understanding the problem your solving is key. Not only should you put it on a white board, brainstorm about it, and think about it constantly, you should go out and talk to as many people who have that problem as possible. This is called Customer Discovery. The understanding that you can gain from talking to 50 people who are suffering from the issue you are claiming to solve will help you immensely.
It could even tell you that you’re not solving a problem at all. That’s what would have happened to Connectsy.
Our market was too broad. We assumed anyone with a Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare account would use our service. We weren’t focused tight enough to know who are target actually was. This made it very difficult to simplify our app and make it useful, because we didn’t understand who our users were going to be.
You need to know your market cold. It’s way easier to build something for a specific market then for everyone. If you know who your early adopters are, then so will they. It’s also important to know who you should be talking to when you’re doing Customer Discovery. Everything you do will become easier once you’ve defined your target customers.
We were so focused on building a product that we forgot about building a business until after the first version of the product was written. Thus our business model was shoe-horned at best. It relied on hundreds of thousands of users before becoming relevant. Although this may work for some it’s a much tougher hill to climb then a business with a clear vision of profit.
You must have a business model or at least have some ideas of how your product can make money. It’s not an easy task and there’s no simple recipe. At the same time there’s many ways to make money so don’t sweat it too much. Give it some serious thought, have some ideas and test them when the time comes. Just keep in mind from the start that you are building a business in order to make money, not building a product in order to gain users.
It took us a few months before we had something we felt good enough to show anyone. Even then we didn’t release it to users. We kept it tight to our chest and only used it amongst ourselves. We wanted too many features included which had us building and building and not testing with our potential customers.
Build something quickly and release it. It’s important to receive the validation that comes from people using and loving your product, because before you get that, you don’t really know that you’re on the right track. If people don’t want to use what you’ve built, you need to pivot, and learning that as soon as possible is very important. Once you do have a product that people love (and perhaps pay for) then concern yourself with nice-to-have features.
In the early days of Connectsy we weren’t talking to enough people. We’d hit up the local events and give the pitch when asked but mostly pitched other Founders in a similar position to us. We still got great feedback and honed our pitch with every one we did but didn't make any major realizations until talking to some seasoned vets.
While it’s important to have the resilience to withstand a bad pitch, and have the vision to know when someone just isn’t getting it, as with everything else, you have to be learning. Why was the pitch bad? Why didn’t they get it? You also need to have the humility to know that these people have been places and seen things that you have not. Often if you just listen to some good advice you can avoid a lot of wasted time learning the same thing the hard way. As a rule of thumb: always get value out of a pitch, even if it isn’t money.
Connectsy is now behind us and we wouldn’t be where we are today without the ride it gave us. The key takeaway for us is learn from your mistakes. We’ve learned a lot, and we’ll be applying these lessons to our new startup. Failure is not failure when it’s the beginning of success.
*Aron and I wrote this 8 months ago for a blog, but it didn't get posted. I hope you find it useful and stay tuned for some fresh learnings coming very soon.
