Overall Guidance:
1. Startup launch process is very critical. It is very important to do each step right. If one step failed in the middle, the founder shall come back, and start over again. It takes a long journey to start a successful startup. So it is very critical to make correction in the early stage, instead of waiting until the last moment.
2. Startup is about evaluating founder's hypthesis.
3. Forgot about the process learnt in big corporation and textbooks. For startup, founders shall go down to earth and learn directly from startups.
2. Startup is about evaluating founder's hypthesis.
3. Forgot about the process learnt in big corporation and textbooks. For startup, founders shall go down to earth and learn directly from startups.
Process to launch startup
0. Recognized a problem myself in life and felt the pain and suffering of the problem.
1. Innovate idea/proposal/hypothesis to solve the painful life problems
- outcome: documented one sentence idea.
2. Research potential customers by talking to them to see if they have the pain.
3. Analyze consumer feadbacks
4. Adjust product and plan
5. Develop MVP
6. Demo MVP to consumers for feadbacks
7. Analyze consumer feadbacks
8. Share MVP to family and friends
9. Repeat steps from 6 to 8 until success.
Lesson Learnt in the failure process:
1. Remove business plan
2. Don’t design the complete product
3. Only implement a MVP
4. Define metrics to evaluate the progress, and validated learning.
Learning Source:
1. Research about startups
2. Discuss with other founders
Not Good Source:
1. Founders' Hypothesis
2. Process in Big Corporations
3. Text Books for jobs in big corporations.
Wrong Process:
1. Don’t spend one months to write business plan
2. Don’t develop the complete product; Only develop a MVP to test user bahavior.
3.
Old Failure Process:
1. Innovate Idea
2. Evaluate Idea
3. Write business plan
4. Review business plan
5. Design the product interface and features
6. Implement the complete interface and features
7. Promote the product to the users
8. Do production support, and add new features
9. Go dead
Mistakes:
1. After getting one idea, the team spends 6 months to develop a product, and then try to sell it to customers. Many people make the same mistake.
2. Engineering mindset is also very harmful for launching business, because the engineers try to solve business problems with engineers' mindsets.
3. Startup is unique. Big corporation and education books are not suite for startup. Doing startup is a unique category, which we shall directly learn from startups, instead of trying to apply concepts from big corporation and education books to startups.
4. Don't try to spend many time on documentation, communication, which are important to big companies, not startups.
5. The way to learn doing startup is to learn by doing it, and share with other founders.
6. Don't write a business plan, like big corporations, etc.
7.
Bad Mistakes:
1. Engineers try to use startup opportunity to learn new technology, and end up spending months to develop a feature which customers don't want.
2. Engineers shall have the ability to develop MVP in a short time, but they shall not do it until the time comes.
Wrong Process:
Lesson Learnt:
1. Failure is the best lesson to teach startup.
2.
Other Topics:
1. How to define MVP
2. How to research customers
