nittin.dev
Published on

Notes from week 1 of Startup School W2020

This article will contain my notes for the first week of Startup School 2020. Startup School is a free online course for founders actively pursuing their own startup.

Startup School W2020 Orientation

The Actual video that I took notes of:

In This video, Eric Migicovsky talked about how the course is and how is it going to be. So I didn’t write it down. However I’ve written down the notes of what I felt as Takeaways.

One Liner for startup

It’s important to have one liners to describe the company quickly. The one-liner should be

  • conversational
  • with no jargons
  • clear
  • concise

Evaluating Startup idea

The Actual video that I took notes of:

Startup Idea

A startup idea is composed of three parts and they are

  • Problem: The settings in which the startup can grow quickly
  • Solution: What are the experiments in which the startup can grow quickly
  • Insights: Why is the experiment going to be successful

Problem

Some important aspects of a problem are (Note: we don’t have to check all the aspect):

  • Popularity(number of people who have a problem)
  • Growing market
  • Urgent problem that needs to be solved or not
  • expensiveness to solve
  • Compulsory problem to be solved or not
  • frequency of the problem

The ideal problems have:

  • Millions of users/people who have that problem
  • Markets that are growing at least 20% a year
  • people trying to solve it immediately
  • high investment
  • tendency to be solved multiple times a day / engagement on multiple times a day

Solution

We shouldn’t start with solutions because that makes us to search a problem for the solution. The acronym for that is SISP and it stands for solution in search of a problem.

Insights

An Insight must have answers to the following questions:

  • Why is this going to be the startup that grows quickly?
  • How can it grow quickly?
  • What’s so special about this startup vs other startups?

Unfair Advantages

Something gives startups unfair advantages and we need to find out if we have them by evaluating in numbers(for ex: one out of ten people have this amazing idea or something like that). Some of the things that can give us unfair advantages are:

  • Founders(can only a specific expert be able to help solve the problem?)
  • Market growth by 20%/year(it is the least unfair advantage to have because it should by default be able to grow with right customers and right solution).
  • Product(is the product 10 times better than the competition)
  • Acquisition
  • Monopoly(does this have a possibility for the company to get stronger and the value of product also grows?)

Behaviour in terms of startup

The three things that have to take place at the same time, to change someone’s behaviour and they are

  • Motivation(The problem to solve)
  • Ability (the startup)
  • Trigger(What’s the thing that give the feel of solving the problem with my startup) For example: For the three things to happen, most companies don’t send enough emails, newsletters, etc.

How to Design an MVP

The actual video that I took notes of:

The Goal

The goals of a pre launch start-up should be to:

  • Launch MVP quickly
  • Get Initial customers
  • Talk to customers and get feedback
  • Improve the Product

Minimum Viable Product

Lean and Heavy ones

We could have a lean MVP in most cases and the best way for startups is just that. The initial starting point of a lean MVP should:

  • be built in weeks not months
  • have very condensed set of functionality that users need
  • Appeal largely to small set of users
  • be reiterated

Whatsoever, in some cases we’d need to have a heavy MVP where:

  • There’s heavy regulation(like insurance, regulatory bodies, etc.)
  • It requires more than just weeks’ dedicated time(for rockets, biotech, etc)

No Matter or lean or heavy, MVP’s starting point can be launching a simple website

Launch

Launch can be in two ways like below:

  • Simple Launch: where we start getting customers
  • Press Launch: Where people start to write about the product and the buzz goes up

A lot of times, large companies do mix both kinds of launch(Example: Apple iPhone). Startups can just focus on simple launch. Learning from customers is easier with an MVP than without because it allows us to practically see whether it solves their problem.

Quickly building a MVP 🔥

To quickly build an MVP, we need to:

  • Write you specifications
  • Fix the specs into the schedule.
  • Cut the specs that don’t seem to fall in line, choose the most important specs for users to work on your schedule
  • Not Fall in ❤️ with our MVP
  • Remember It’s just step one in a journey
Discuss on Twitter • View on GitHub