Dan Martell - August 22, 2016


How To Validate Your Startup Ideas

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Balsamiq Keynote
How To Hire Top Startup Talent (Technical & Developers) How to Create Your Agency's Positioning Strategy

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

202.23

Word count

1,175

Sentence count

66


Summary

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

In this video, learn how to go from zero to selling your first product in 6 months. This is the most important video you're gonna want to watch. If you've ever thought about starting a software company, maybe you have one. Maybe you're struggling with finding your best idea to pursue, or maybe you've built something way too complicated. I'm gonna share with you in this video the simple framework on how I've built companies over the years.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.120 People get excited about an idea
00:00:03.000 and then build the product
00:00:04.920 and then find out six months later
00:00:06.800 that nobody else was excited.
00:00:19.280 How to go from zero to selling your first product.
00:00:23.080 This video is the most important video
00:00:25.240 that you're gonna wanna watch.
00:00:26.160 If you've ever thought of starting a software company,
00:00:28.800 Maybe you have one, maybe you've gone to the market,
00:00:30.780 your customers aren't buying.
00:00:31.920 Maybe you're struggling with finding your best idea
00:00:34.680 to pursue, maybe you have built something
00:00:37.800 way too complicated.
00:00:38.980 I'm gonna share with you in this video
00:00:40.500 the simple framework on how I've built companies
00:00:43.800 over the years.
00:00:44.640 I've done 1,300 clarity calls talking one-on-one
00:00:48.020 with entrepreneurs about their top challenges.
00:00:51.260 Here's the deal, a third of those calls
00:00:53.760 were entrepreneurs that did this framework backwards.
00:00:57.060 They built the product, six months,
00:00:59.420 tens of thousands of dollars invested.
00:01:01.080 They put it in front of a customer
00:01:02.180 and their customer said, that's cool,
00:01:03.740 but it doesn't meet my needs.
00:01:04.680 Or, that's really neat,
00:01:06.260 but I don't know if I understand how to use it.
00:01:08.840 It's too complicated.
00:01:10.380 They built something for somebody that didn't exist.
00:01:13.000 They thought that there was a pain in the market
00:01:15.120 that was just a vitamin.
00:01:17.060 And that's what I wanna share with you guys in this video.
00:01:19.120 Number one is how do you come up with the best idea?
00:01:21.860 Because you might have no idea, which is totally cool.
00:01:24.840 A lot of entrepreneurs run into that.
00:01:26.320 or you have a number of ideas
00:01:28.560 and you can't figure out the right one to do it.
00:01:30.020 Well, here's a quick three P framework
00:01:32.200 for thinking this through.
00:01:33.320 Number one is you need to know that you have the problem.
00:01:37.740 Like I would never start a company
00:01:39.540 if I didn't have the problem myself
00:01:41.700 because at the end of the day,
00:01:43.340 you need to understand the mindset of the customer
00:01:46.480 and where they're struggling with
00:01:47.780 and here's the reality.
00:01:49.080 If it doesn't work out,
00:01:50.140 at least you'll be a customer for the product.
00:01:52.580 So number one, you have the problem.
00:01:53.820 Two is the pain.
00:01:54.940 Make sure it's not a vitamin.
00:01:56.520 Make sure it's a painkiller.
00:01:57.800 Make sure it's a must have, not a nice to have.
00:02:00.640 Alright, so that's the distinction of a great idea.
00:02:03.120 Is this something people really, really, really want
00:02:05.260 and are gonna beat down a path to your door?
00:02:07.000 Or is this just kinda something,
00:02:08.380 maybe they would like it to make their life better,
00:02:10.700 which are usually typically hard to monetize
00:02:12.840 and make money from.
00:02:14.200 The third area is passion.
00:02:15.540 At the end of the day, if you're not passionate
00:02:17.300 about your idea, then you gotta make sure
00:02:19.400 that you find one that you are,
00:02:21.060 because the problem is what's gonna get you excited,
00:02:24.180 not the solution.
00:02:25.240 Finding a customer that you would love to serve
00:02:27.000 and being passionate about that, that's key.
00:02:28.620 So that's the first part of the strategy
00:02:30.940 is make sure that you focus on the right idea.
00:02:34.020 Number two is get feedback from the right customer.
00:02:36.800 So when you have an idea, most of you, you get excited,
00:02:40.320 you talk to your friends, they all go,
00:02:42.000 that would be awesome, yes, totally,
00:02:43.680 you should pursue that.
00:02:44.760 What I do that's totally different is I find customers
00:02:47.940 that use my competitor's product.
00:02:50.700 So if you wanna build innovation, that's cool,
00:02:52.600 but you're probably in a market and you can find customers
00:02:55.500 that currently pay for that solution and ask them
00:02:58.880 about your specific approach to solving that problem.
00:03:01.340 Because those people actually have put their money
00:03:04.120 where their mouth is, whereas if you just go
00:03:05.780 to a general market and you ask people for their advice
00:03:08.540 on your idea, they're gonna be kind.
00:03:10.320 I'm from Canada, Canadians are super polite,
00:03:12.960 they will never tell you that your idea's a bad idea.
00:03:15.580 Do you realize that?
00:03:16.460 Do you know how much risk you incur by asking people,
00:03:19.360 hey, what do you think of my idea?
00:03:20.960 No, you wanna talk to customers
00:03:22.160 that have the problem and get their advice.
00:03:23.960 That is the second one, getting feedback from paid customers.
00:03:26.760 Third is prototyping and not building a product.
00:03:31.400 The problem I have with the word MVP
00:03:33.400 or minimum viable product is it's got the word product
00:03:36.140 in there.
00:03:36.980 What I would suggest is build a clickable prototype,
00:03:39.300 something that you could sit down and design three core
00:03:42.480 features of the idea, not the future vision.
00:03:44.980 Look, in five years the truth is the world's gonna change,
00:03:48.360 innovation's gonna take hold.
00:03:49.860 You don't know what that's gonna look like.
00:03:51.180 just sit down and say, okay, what could we build
00:03:53.340 in a six week product sprint?
00:03:55.260 What are the three core features that'll deliver value
00:03:57.880 for our customers?
00:03:58.720 And you sit down and you build a prototype.
00:04:00.180 You can use tools like Balsamiq or UX Pin or even InVision,
00:04:05.000 but you wanna build a clickable prototype.
00:04:06.860 I've seen people use Keynote and PowerPoint.
00:04:09.160 So super simple, build the prototype.
00:04:11.900 Then here's the key is you wanna run a pilot program.
00:04:15.300 You go back to those customers that you've talked to.
00:04:17.780 You go back to people that you think are interested
00:04:19.740 and you get them to pre-buy the product.
00:04:21.840 People ask, well what should I charge?
00:04:23.440 My suggestion is 50% off of the first year cost
00:04:27.860 that you're eventually, when you launch it.
00:04:29.300 And here's the deal, if you put that clickable prototype
00:04:32.060 in front of the customer,
00:04:33.100 you've nailed their pain point in the market,
00:04:35.460 you're excited and passionate about the problem,
00:04:37.980 and it's something that you wanna solve yourself,
00:04:41.620 they're gonna resonate with that
00:04:42.860 and they can join that pilot program.
00:04:44.560 You only have a limited amount of seats
00:04:46.040 because really all you're looking for is feedback
00:04:48.020 as you co-create it with them.
00:04:49.840 You do that two cycles and eventually
00:04:52.080 you launch your product public.
00:04:54.060 That is the framework from going to zero
00:04:57.040 to selling your first product.
00:04:59.060 Hope that served you.
00:04:59.980 Really excited to share that with you
00:05:01.260 because it's one of the top questions,
00:05:03.260 the top frustration, the problem that I have to address
00:05:06.100 every time I talk to a new entrepreneur
00:05:07.800 that's already out there doing it.
00:05:10.020 So excited for you, excited for your future,
00:05:12.280 excited for you to sell the first version
00:05:14.360 of your product pilots all the way.
00:05:16.620 As per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
00:05:18.960 and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.
00:05:21.320 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel
00:05:23.800 to get other videos on how to start and grow your business.
00:05:26.340 I'd also like to invite you to join my newsletter
00:05:28.860 where I run community contests,
00:05:31.020 I give you exclusive invites to events,
00:05:33.200 as well as other free training videos,
00:05:34.740 and if you're ready to get going,
00:05:35.920 I've got queued up two other videos
00:05:37.780 to help you along your journey.
00:05:39.300 I'm excited to have you here, and I'll see you next week.
00:05:46.620 You