Dan Martell - March 21, 2016


How To Build A SaaS Product That People Love


Episode Stats

Length

6 minutes

Words per Minute

211.59207

Word Count

1,442

Sentence Count

71

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 How do you create a product that people love?
00:00:02.000 How do you ensure that you don't go and build
00:00:04.000 and spend a ton of money and a lot of time
00:00:06.000 building something that nobody wants?
00:00:08.000 How do you make sure that your company doesn't fail?
00:00:10.600 Because the truth is, when you start this startup game,
00:00:13.100 there's no guarantees.
00:00:14.600 I mean, honestly, from day one,
00:00:16.700 you're almost guaranteed to fail
00:00:17.900 because that's just the way it works.
00:00:19.900 So what I want to share with you guys in this video
00:00:21.800 is three different ways to essentially validate your ideas.
00:00:25.200 Because so many entrepreneurs, they start off
00:00:26.800 and they're like, okay, well, I've got this idea,
00:00:28.600 but I don't even know where to start.
00:00:29.800 I'm gonna walk you through my approach
00:00:31.900 and some of my beliefs around validating your startup idea.
00:00:34.800 The number one belief that I have is that I assume
00:00:37.980 that I'm wrong about some part of the business.
00:00:40.640 And it might sound crazy, if you think about it,
00:00:42.540 I start off by saying, okay, here's what I believe to be true.
00:00:45.140 There's a problem, there's a solution that could exist,
00:00:48.120 but I assume that I'm wrong about the solution.
00:00:50.720 And then what I try to do is I go out there and I validate it.
00:00:53.560 So one of the big difference between me
00:00:55.200 and a lot of other people is that I start off
00:00:57.420 with the assumption that I'm wrong.
00:00:59.160 Maybe you're like, well, how can you do that?
00:01:00.760 Because it's a little schizophrenic, think about it.
00:01:02.700 You've got on one part to be absolutely certain
00:01:04.960 that this is a good idea, to quit your job,
00:01:06.800 to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars,
00:01:08.260 to raise funding from other investors.
00:01:10.400 And on the same side, I'm telling you
00:01:12.140 to assume that you're wrong.
00:01:13.280 Isn't that crazy?
00:01:14.380 But what I'm saying is it's not wrong
00:01:16.340 about the overall problem and the opportunity,
00:01:18.880 it's wrong about the solution.
00:01:20.740 And what you want to figure out is what are the ways
00:01:22.480 that I can test and validate each step
00:01:25.120 of this product or solution in a way
00:01:27.320 that's not gonna cost me a bunch of time or money.
00:01:29.960 So the first one I'm gonna share with you guys
00:01:31.260 is clickable prototypes.
00:01:32.500 I learned this from a strategy called design thinking.
00:01:35.300 It's a whole framework around being creative
00:01:37.800 and building product, taking from kind of
00:01:39.340 industrial product design, and design thinking argues
00:01:42.900 that you should create paper prototypes.
00:01:44.540 So in the software world, the equivalent
00:01:46.240 is clickable prototypes, and I use Keynote,
00:01:48.880 or you can use PowerPoint.
00:01:51.320 Gosh forbid you have a Windows machine.
00:01:53.080 Just upgrade, do yourself a favor.
00:01:55.080 I know, okay, no more judgment.
00:01:57.480 Just create a clickable prototype.
00:01:59.180 And what's cool is you just, every, essentially,
00:02:01.560 slide becomes an interface in the product
00:02:03.620 and every button click just kind of links
00:02:05.760 to another slide that simulates the product.
00:02:08.560 That's a higher fidelity clickable prototype.
00:02:10.760 What I love about that is you can create a PDF document,
00:02:13.400 share that on emails, have people review it,
00:02:15.640 click it and give you feedback.
00:02:17.000 So it's real feedback based on something
00:02:19.140 they can put in their hands.
00:02:20.740 Most people, their validation is conversations.
00:02:23.480 And it's not even like a structured conversation.
00:02:25.880 Maybe you've done this.
00:02:27.080 It's kind of just conversations with friends saying,
00:02:29.320 yeah, that's a great idea, you should do it.
00:02:31.080 The biggest thing that you want to avoid
00:02:33.320 is spending six months of your life going down a path
00:02:36.720 because friends of yours said it was a good idea.
00:02:39.320 That is the fastest way to just lose morale, fail,
00:02:42.360 not build something awesome.
00:02:44.060 And this is why, to me, Clickable Prototypes
00:02:46.240 is the first of the three strategies,
00:02:47.980 but it's probably one of the most important ones
00:02:49.540 to just get your thinking straight.
00:02:51.480 Right, looking at these screens,
00:02:52.740 looking at the flows, thinking how the customer might
00:02:54.780 perceive the product and how they want to solve the problem
00:02:57.520 that you want to go out there and solve.
00:02:58.780 So clickable prototype.
00:02:59.740 The second one is what I call a pre-selling the customers
00:03:04.220 or using an EAP strategy or early adopters program strategy.
00:03:08.780 So a lot of people talk about pre-selling your product,
00:03:11.300 getting people to give you money up front,
00:03:13.520 but how do you do that?
00:03:14.960 And this strategy is a really simple way
00:03:17.640 because you go to potentially, my rule is 10,
00:03:21.440 if it's B2B, or 100 if it's consumers,
00:03:24.320 and you say, look, I'm working on this new idea,
00:03:26.720 it's early stage, but I think you'd be a great company,
00:03:29.620 you probably have this problem,
00:03:30.780 you can do some customer validation,
00:03:32.220 they say I have the problem, and here's the way it works.
00:03:35.060 Because you're part of the EAP program,
00:03:37.900 the early adopter program, we're gonna give you a discount.
00:03:40.460 You still need to get money from them.
00:03:43.160 Go through that learning experience,
00:03:45.160 purchase orders, receivables, legals,
00:03:48.060 like go through that experience of saying, okay,
00:03:50.660 and getting them to part with some money.
00:03:52.500 But by doing that, it'll allow you to co-create
00:03:55.140 the product with your customers.
00:03:56.860 It's invaluable.
00:03:57.700 So that's the second one, is pre-selling to customers
00:03:59.660 using the early adopter program.
00:04:01.780 The third is doing what I call a Mevo,
00:04:05.100 or a minimum economical viable offer.
00:04:07.820 Now, here's what's different.
00:04:09.120 In the world of lean startup, and most people totally
00:04:14.020 took this out of context, it's not what Steve Blank,
00:04:17.120 the author of Four Subsidy Epiphany says,
00:04:19.660 it's not what Eric Ries, who's one of my advisors
00:04:22.660 at my previous company, Clarity, and a good friend of mine,
00:04:24.900 a lot of entrepreneurs go straight to landing pages.
00:04:27.140 I'm gonna build a landing page and put the offer
00:04:29.280 and see if people will subscribe to my new startup.
00:04:33.200 That is the craziest thing ever, stop doing that.
00:04:36.580 That doesn't tell you anything because the truth is
00:04:39.440 is you're not gonna do any strategic marketing
00:04:42.120 of that landing page, you're probably gonna tweet it out,
00:04:44.220 you're probably gonna try to get some press,
00:04:45.820 and the people that are opting into it,
00:04:47.420 Maybe they have the problem, but giving you their email
00:04:50.880 address is by no means customer validation
00:04:53.560 in my humble opinion.
00:04:55.740 What I want to argue instead is you create Amiibo.
00:04:58.360 It's saying I'm gonna create an offer, a valuable offer,
00:05:01.720 in the minimum amount of features that I feel
00:05:03.940 that will get somebody to part with their money,
00:05:05.800 and I'm gonna create that landing page
00:05:07.820 and get them to sign up.
00:05:09.100 Even if the product doesn't exist on the back end.
00:05:10.920 It's what I use at my company, Flowtown.
00:05:13.300 And what you do is once they sign up,
00:05:14.720 if you have no product, just say,
00:05:15.720 hey, we're still early, we're releasing people
00:05:18.060 little bit by little, your credit card wasn't charged,
00:05:20.160 even though, again, you accept the credit card,
00:05:21.940 you can use different tools for that, like Stripe,
00:05:24.200 and say when we're ready, we're gonna let you know,
00:05:26.820 but that is true validation.
00:05:28.740 So real quick, I'm gonna walk you through
00:05:30.100 three of my top ways, and I kinda stack them
00:05:32.900 almost in this order.
00:05:34.100 The first one is creating a clickable prototype
00:05:37.240 using Keynote, or you can even use Balsamiq's a great tool.
00:05:40.700 The second one is doing pre-sells to customers
00:05:44.000 using the early adopter program, which is EAP.
00:05:46.400 It's just saying, look, let's co-create this together
00:05:48.400 because you're involved and you're giving us feedback.
00:05:50.400 We're giving it to you a discount.
00:05:51.740 And again, if at any point you decide
00:05:53.340 you don't want to build a company anymore,
00:05:54.480 you want to pivot away from that core customer,
00:05:57.080 you can do that, give their money back.
00:05:58.480 No big deal, no harm, no foul.
00:06:00.620 And then the third one is to really offer something
00:06:05.160 and get a credit card, get a transaction going.
00:06:07.620 Do a Meevo, a minimum economical valuable offer.
00:06:12.620 That is different.
00:06:13.400 It's not an MVP, it's actually getting people to land on a
00:06:16.640 landing page, you give them the offer and they buy it.
00:06:20.000 That is true validation.
00:06:21.800 If you know somebody that needs to learn these lessons,
00:06:25.820 please share this video with them.
00:06:27.880 I've had this conversation with so many entrepreneurs over the
00:06:30.580 last few weeks and I want to make sure that they understand
00:06:33.260 that doing a landing page and asking for emails is not
00:06:36.460 customer validation by any means whatsoever.
00:06:39.760 As per usual, I want to ask you to like and leave questions
00:06:42.660 below in the comments.
00:06:44.280 I want to challenge you to live a bigger life
00:06:46.100 and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.