Dan Martell - July 24, 2017


5 Things All Great Startups Have

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Udemy
The Audience Triangle How To Create a Great SaaS Lead Magnet

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

195.57

Word count

1,264

Sentence count

60

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the 5 keys to a great product, a great startup, and a great technology platform that are required so that you can have the right foundation to grow and scale your business. These are the keys to startup success, and if you understand these 5 keys, then it will allow you to make better decisions and decisions in your business

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Startup domination, world domination.
00:00:12.420 Five keys to startup success.
00:00:15.040 Maybe you're frustrated with the progress you're making
00:00:17.320 or you feel like you should be two or three years ahead
00:00:20.080 because you have a friend that started at the same time
00:00:22.060 as you and you're like, why am I not making more progress
00:00:25.220 in your business?
00:00:26.060 Here's the thing is there's literally five keys
00:00:28.720 to a great product, a great startup,
00:00:30.800 a great technology platform that's required
00:00:33.700 so that you even have the right foundation
00:00:35.900 to grow and scale your business.
00:00:37.580 Now, I've been watching and studying
00:00:38.760 some of the smartest people in the world,
00:00:40.920 even though I feel blessed and lucky
00:00:42.440 to have started and scaled and exited.
00:00:45.160 My last two companies were venture-backed.
00:00:46.780 My third one was a consulting company
00:00:48.460 and literally invested, had the privilege
00:00:51.520 to invest in 30-plus other companies
00:00:53.260 like Intercom and Udemy and Getaround and Unbounce
00:00:56.820 and watch them grow their businesses.
00:01:00.340 There's really, you know, studying the Elon Musk
00:01:03.060 and the Reid Hoffmans from LinkedIn
00:01:04.320 and the Peter Thiel's, you know, PayPal and Facebook fame.
00:01:08.060 I just feel like there's literally a pattern.
00:01:10.880 And if you understand these five keys,
00:01:12.880 then it'll at least allow you to make better decisions
00:01:14.760 in your business.
00:01:15.400 So the first one is product founder fit.
00:01:18.960 Okay, a lot of people talk about product market fit.
00:01:21.320 I actually think you gotta go to the next level.
00:01:23.280 When I was starting my company Clarity.fm,
00:01:25.540 It was an expert network for entrepreneurs
00:01:27.300 that get advice over the phone.
00:01:29.000 Everybody kept saying to me,
00:01:30.380 Dan, I've never seen an idea and a product
00:01:33.580 that had better product founder fit
00:01:35.740 because I was so passionate.
00:01:38.520 Like literally, I mean, it's the reason why I do these videos.
00:01:40.360 I just love teaching.
00:01:41.580 I love connecting people.
00:01:42.780 I organize founder dinners.
00:01:44.540 I host events.
00:01:46.040 I mean, this is just part of my DNA
00:01:48.040 and to create a platform to allow people to do that,
00:01:50.780 I think it's a big part
00:01:51.820 and that's where I see a lot of people get into businesses
00:01:54.320 because of opportunities, financial opportunities.
00:01:57.360 And I just don't think that's the way to do it.
00:01:59.180 The biggest key, number one, is product founder fit.
00:02:02.560 Number two is the market need.
00:02:05.120 There's a pain, okay?
00:02:06.840 If you feel like you're trying to peddle something
00:02:08.640 that people kind of want but they don't really want,
00:02:10.460 like there's no immediate pull from the market,
00:02:13.280 it's probably because you built a nice-to-have,
00:02:14.900 not a must-have.
00:02:15.820 And I think that understanding the pain,
00:02:18.340 sometimes it's really just a positioning challenge.
00:02:21.000 Like the market's there, they have the problem,
00:02:23.480 Your solution solves the problem but you actually haven't
00:02:26.280 positioned it right for them to understand that.
00:02:28.780 I think that's a huge opportunity.
00:02:30.520 But literally the market, step one,
00:02:32.980 is that they need to have the pain.
00:02:34.760 So first is product founder fit.
00:02:36.360 Two is market need.
00:02:38.100 Three is a great product hook.
00:02:40.960 You know, every company out there from, you know,
00:02:43.860 PayPal to Facebook, they all had a very direct
00:02:47.640 and simple premise, you know?
00:02:49.340 You have a problem, they solved it and they got the user
00:02:52.040 to take an action that was logical, that was easy,
00:02:55.540 that got a feedback loop going, right?
00:02:57.780 From posting a tweet to sharing a project on Basecamp
00:03:02.520 to commenting in Slack to you name the product,
00:03:05.080 sharing a file in Dropbox, you know,
00:03:07.480 searching and saving to a list on Airbnb.
00:03:11.300 People don't understand that every product has a hook,
00:03:14.220 has something that you can get people to resonate with,
00:03:17.660 take action on, and gets them some kind of benefit,
00:03:20.400 some kind of dopamine hit.
00:03:22.020 So that's the third area that I want you to think of
00:03:23.600 in your product.
00:03:24.140 What is that hook that'll get somebody in,
00:03:26.460 get them to experience kind of the value
00:03:28.100 that I'm suggesting for them to go further
00:03:30.280 so then you can expand what's called
00:03:31.620 the surface area of the product.
00:03:34.540 And number four is they figured out
00:03:36.340 a scalable distribution process.
00:03:39.620 I mean, the challenge is that, you know,
00:03:41.700 at the end of the day,
00:03:42.420 you need to be able to grow faster.
00:03:44.300 Some kind of virality.
00:03:45.260 Things like, you know, embedding an image
00:03:48.100 or embedding, well, so Instagram was really distribution
00:03:51.800 through social networks, but you have YouTube
00:03:54.320 that was famous on using MySpace for their distribution.
00:03:59.160 So there's a lot of different ways to do it.
00:04:00.720 With Clarity, it was really about using the expert profile.
00:04:03.540 We called it EDS, expert-driven signups.
00:04:06.260 Engaging the expert to promote their profile
00:04:08.360 to drive more demand, which then introduced them
00:04:10.320 to their platform, which then kind of created
00:04:12.340 this snowball effect.
00:04:13.300 So really understanding what is your scalable
00:04:16.080 distribution model, that is the key, you know?
00:04:18.940 And I wanna leave you guys with a really important concept.
00:04:21.820 It was almost number five, but is more of a thought,
00:04:25.820 an idea, and that is to create a moat, right?
00:04:29.560 And that's the tip, is that there's something
00:04:31.960 about your business that has to be hard to copy.
00:04:35.200 If it's just as easy for anybody to just create
00:04:37.760 a features checklist of your product and copy it.
00:04:40.800 I mean, I've seen so many people, they're like,
00:04:42.800 can somebody on Upwork, right?
00:04:45.080 and people, I would get notifications
00:04:46.580 because I subscribed for the notice,
00:04:48.880 but people would literally write,
00:04:50.220 can somebody build me a copy of Clarity?
00:04:52.620 Can somebody build us a copy of Flowtown?
00:04:55.120 If it was as easy as any developer
00:04:57.360 just building those features, I mean, people forget this.
00:04:59.400 Do you remember Pounce?
00:05:00.800 Do you remember, literally, when Twitter came out,
00:05:03.100 there was so many different products
00:05:04.840 that looked exactly like Twitter
00:05:06.240 for different use cases, different verticals,
00:05:08.580 but there was only one that won
00:05:09.980 because they built the network, they built the moat,
00:05:12.180 they built that virality into it,
00:05:14.840 and they were first, and I think, you know, 0.95
00:05:16.640 even today, even as much as PayPal is a shitty product, 0.64
00:05:19.880 I mean, let's be honest, it's a bad product.
00:05:22.420 It's still used, it's still defensible.
00:05:24.320 There's very few people that have been able
00:05:26.020 to penetrate that moat, and I think that that is
00:05:28.220 something worth thinking about as a thought experiment
00:05:30.780 within your business, on your team,
00:05:32.200 when you're thinking about product direction.
00:05:34.060 How do you create a moat in your business?
00:05:35.600 So real quick, product founder fit is number one.
00:05:38.960 Number two is market need.
00:05:41.440 Is there a pain to solve, or is it a nice to have?
00:05:44.440 Three is a product hook.
00:05:46.040 Is there one thing you can ask your users to do
00:05:48.180 that gets them engaged in the product,
00:05:49.520 gets them some value to feel it?
00:05:51.480 Four is a scalable distribution model,
00:05:54.160 understanding how your product gets penetrated
00:05:56.920 into the market and distributed amongst different users.
00:06:00.060 And then as a thought experiment for you to really
00:06:02.520 take things to the next level is how do you create a moat
00:06:04.620 so that it's hard to copy?
00:06:07.060 As per usual, I want to challenge you
00:06:08.860 to live a bigger life and a bigger business
00:06:10.540 and I'll see you next Monday.
00:06:12.060 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel
00:06:14.240 to get other tips and strategies
00:06:15.640 on how to start and grow your business.
00:06:16.840 I'd also encourage you to join my newsletter
00:06:19.040 where I share exclusive invites to events,
00:06:21.620 free entrepreneurial training and other community contests.
00:06:23.780 If you're ready to get going, I got two more videos
00:06:25.420 queued up for you.
00:06:26.620 Have a great day.