anyhan asked: Thank you for putting together such a great resource. Do you happen to know if there's a similar website that tracks startup events in New York City? I haven't found one yet. Thanks.
no problem, it’s a pleasure :)
check out http://startupdigest.com for events in New York.
“On a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being ‘definitely not’ 10 being ‘fuck yeah’, how likely would you be to use this product?”
I know I always get that strange feeling in the stomach when I ask this questions at the end of a solution or MVP interview. And you know that the person sitting on the other side of the table is most likely feeling the same (not always). The whole point of the exercise is to learn and that involves asking tough questions, so how you feel is irrelevant, so suck it up tough guy.
What really matters is getting honest feedback. Some people will not hold anything back and tell you how it is straight into your face. I love those people :) However, a lot of people will want to be “nice” to you and not hurt your feelings. Nice is in quotes because they are actually accomplishing the complete opposite, waisting your time. So, when I see hesitation after this question, I usually follow it up with something like this:
1. (a little intro to break the silence)
“It’s important that you are totally honest. If you’re not, we can’t understand your needs and make changes to the product that are needed.”
2. (the easy bit)
“So, if you feel like you would use the product, tell me why, where you see the value and how you would use it day to day.”
3. (the important bit)
“However, if you don’t feel like this product is for you, is there anything that would make it more valuable. Are there any features that would add enough value to push you over the line? How would you create a product like this with yourself in mind?”
So, you break the silence, you give them an option to like it but with a caveat that they have to justify why and then you give them an easy way out if they don’t like it. What they tell you when they don’t like the product is marginally important, so don’t take down the list of features they suggest and run off to build them. More importantly you got your signal and that’s what matters.
Coming to LA from Sydney to work on Play Entourage has been quite an adventure. I’ll talk about this adventure in another post as I want to focus on my experience with the LA startup scene so far.
First thing EVERYONE here asks me is “Why LA? Why not San Francisco?”. My initial answer was that I had a feeling this was a startup community that’s on the cusp of breaking into the big leagues and because it wasn’t as noisy as SF. Both of these still hold true, but I’m adding one more thing, LA startup scene is FUCKING AWESOME!
Contrary to what I though before coming here, LA entrepreneurs are not stuck up movie types. They are the opposite of Ari Gold. They welcomed us with open arms and made us feel a part of the community from day one. I feel honored to be a part of this community and I’m extremely grateful to all the amazing entrepreneurs who call LA home.
If you thought there wasn’t much going on here, just check out the LA startup calendar I cooked up in the last couple of weeks. If anything, there’s too much going on.
Also, check out these incubators starting early next year if you want a great excuse to move here: Muckerlab, upStart.LA, start engine and Launchpad LA.
P.S. Living in Venice Beach kicks ass!
Being a bootstrapped entrepreneur, you are pretty much short on all resources. This is a huge challenge but at the same time it forces you to trim fat wherever possible. I like being bootstrapped, I feel like I’ve got an “environmentally friendly” entrepreneurial existence. It’s quite cathartic.
So, since I love Customer Development and find a ton of value in interviewing people and validating problem/solution/MVP, I’ve come to a simple conclusion. Even with a relatively random sample, meaning I’ve chosen people who only approximate the target market, the magic number seems to be 8. Yes, eight.
After 2 people you see the glaringly obvious issues, after 3-4 people you start seeing strong patterns, after 5 you’re onto most of the big issues and once you hit 8, you’ve got 85%-90% of what you need. That’s enough. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to interview more people later. You should never stop soliciting feedback from users, but you need to know when you have enough to get to the next stage.
Once you get to 8, you’ll probably hear more or less the same things you heard before and lots of new feature requests. This is where the art lies, knowing what’s essential to show your unique value proposition and what needs to go into the icebox with other future features and be processed later.
Halloween in Marina del Rey. Pretty insane. The kids are all over it.
In LA (Venice Beach) working on Play Entourage. If you want to reference anything from my old blog, it’s still available here. For all local startup peeps, I’m maintaining a list of LA startup events.