Notes from week 2 of Startup School W2020

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

How To Talk to Users

The Actual video that I took notes of:

Common Mistakes

A lot of CEOs or CTOs who are founders hire people to talk to users but good founders maintain a direct connection to their users through all their phases. Other common mistakes are:

When talking to a user, we often try to make a sales pitch to validate an idea but we should get them to talk about their life and not our idea. We then have to extract information from their life
We generally talk a lot in the interview but we should listen

Fantastic Five Questions 5️⃣

“What’s the hardest thing about [doing a general thing]?”(This question will help the founders feel whether they are solving an active problem)
“Tell me about the last time you encountered [the problem]?”(Helps founders to know the context of different people)
“why do you think that solving a problem is hard?”(Helps founders to market the product)
“What have you done to try to solve the problem?”(Helps to find competitors and helps to validate if they care about that problem)
“What you don’t love about the solutions that you’ve tried”(Helps to know if we want to add/remove a feature)

Talking to Users at Different Stages

There are three stages of startup when talking to users and three stages have different motives to derive when talking to users

0(format) -> stage -> motive -> another motive
1 -> Idea -> We want to validate our idea -> We want to find specific target audience with problem
2 -> Prototype pre launch -> we want to Price the product -> We want to find if our prototype can benefit people with problem
3 -> post-launch -> We want to find product market-fit -> We want to know If they will be disappointed after discontinuing the product/service

How to Launch(Again and Again)

The actual video that I took notes of:

Launching (Again and again)

A launch doesn’t have to be very fancy with press. Launching again and again will allow us to

test our short pitch
see how users respond to product or new feature
know where and who the right users are

Types of Launches

There are actually 9 launches that was explained by Kat Mañalac. But I only noted 6 of them as I felt some were too related to other type of launch

Silent Launch

One type of basic launch we could do is silent launch and it will have

Domain name
Company name
Short Description
Contact

Family and friends launch

We could also do something called family and friends launch. Family and friends launch is where

We have an MVP
We want to see how they respond
We don’t want to stay in the same phase for too long(because the feedback might not be very useful)

Stranger Launch

We could also only launch to select strangers who have the same problem that the product is trying to solve. Getting feedback from these kind of strangers are quite useful.

Community Launch

We could also launch to particular online communities. These communities might have expert feedback coming to us. We might also get early users. In any online community to launch, it’s recommended to tell all of the below with increased minimisation of usage of jargons and marketing language. We should tell

about our company
what we’re building
who we’re building it for
why we’re building
if we found any interesting insights on talking to users
we can answer any questions

Another Launch we could do on the phase is request access launch, where we make the users to spread the information about the product. Somewhat similar to this is a social media launch, where we ask bloggers or influencers to write about our product. It’s highly recommended to not pay to them when we are in the early stage. Also launching continuously will make sure the buzz is on us.

Bootstrap Launch

We could also build our own community so we can share our product to our own community. This is not very time consuming as previous launches and has considerably good reach. For ex: we could create a mailing list and share our product with them. If they like it, they will start to spread information about it.