Convert an idea into a sustainable business.
A startup is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model.
According to Paul Graham, a startup is a company designed to grow fast.
The purpose of a startup is to convert a great idea into a great product, and that great product into a great organization.
Sam Altman, the President of Y Combinator, explains what is a good motivation for starting a startup:
"You should only start a startup if you feel compelled by a particular problem, and you think starting a company is the best way to solve it."
Startup runway refers to how many months your business can keep operating before it's out of money.
Default alive is a startup company that is on track to make it to profitability with its current resources.
The burn rate is typically used to describe the rate at which a new company is spending its venture capital to finance overhead before generating positive cash flow from operations.
The burn rate is usually quoted in terms of cash spent per month. For example, if a company is said to have a burn rate of $1 million, it would mean that the company is spending $1 million per month.
A startup pivot occurs when a company shifts its business strategy to accommodate changes in its industry, customer preferences, or any other factor that impacts its bottom line. It's essentially the process of a startup translating direct or indirect feedback into a change in its business model.
A minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle. In industries such as software, the MVP can help the product team receive user feedback as quickly as possible to iterate and improve the product.
From 28:03 - 30:03
"You’re selling the vision and delivering the minimum feature set to visionaries not everyone." - Steve Blank
A pitch deck is a brief presentation, often created using PowerPoint, Keynote or Prezi, used to provide your audience with a quick overview of your business plan. You will usually use your pitch deck during face-to-face or online meetings with potential investors, customers, partners, and co-founders.
One way to think about creating an idea for a business is to identify something that people care about getting done (also known as a "job"), and build tools to make that job require less effort or produce a better, more predictable result.
This approach is loosely based on the Jobs to be done framework.
Great ideas usually consist of a solution to a problem matching the following criteria:
Also, the idea is not chosen primarily by my ego (something that it will be cool to tell my friends that I am working on).
From 2:38
An interesting idea is not neccessarily a good idea.
A good idea is one that matches a sufficient amount of the criteria in the skill "I can identify if an idea is worth exploring".
An interesting idea is merely something that someone considers intellectually stimulating.
If yes to one or more of the questions above, you may have yourself a great startup idea.
From 6:15-8:43
Takeaways:
Watch till 9:40. Short summary: Deep conversations with users is the best way to gain insights on how to improve your bussines. It is bether than both surveying them and/or theorizing about what they want.
Notes for review upon revisiting:
The purpose of a user interview is to extract as much useful information with the goal of improving the product, or marketing or positioning. Do not pitch or try to sell.
Liten carefully and take detailed notes.
5 great questions to ask to gain insight into the problems your customers have
Notes
Start 1:00
3:27 On the importance of aligning everyone in your company. Strategy is the only way to align people
6:55 -8:27 Every decision you have to make highlights a missing principle
You have to have a way to turn your decisions into principles other can follow and make the same decisions as you would, so you don’t have to make the decisions every time. Method.
11:31 -12:19 Importance of strategy continnues.
12:20 - Part 1: What to build?
Note: Wecomplish har high touch onboarding og low value per account. Vi løser dette ved å lage champions som kan ta seg av spørsmål på innsiden av organisasjonen?
16:50 Scoping
- Where should you start?
22:37 Summary on what to build
23:01 Part 2: Keep everything aligned
- Your business needs a mission (What we try to do)
(Trenger en mission for Wecomplish)
27:44 Alignment continues.
On the importance of aligning product, marketing and sales
If you let different department iterate in isolation, they will grow apart.
Sell what you build, and build what you sell
30:38 Summary on alignment
31:12 Part 3: Growth and maintenance
What got you here, won’t get you there.
You can no longer rely on intuition when you grow.
Roadmap for growth and maintenance
Be mindful of your products core innovation. Other parts are just there to round off your core. Have a «make it work»-mentality towards the round off-parts, and keep the attention to the core.
37:25 How to think about work?
Most work you do should have a reason. Revenue hypotese. Will this work
39:07 Be very of adding features to close deals.
41:38 Nothing will protect you against competition
44:18 The old and the new moats
New moats:
- Make a platform. Make other companies build on top of you.
- Build community
- A brand
These moats are hard to copy.
46:08-47:26 Summary of Growth and maintenance
«Get everyone aligned around the mission and the strategy, and the decisions all take care of themselves».
Question-round
The easy users are the ones who experience the problem we solve most desperately.
Who is going to go out of business by not using us? Who is screaming for something like this?
From 21:10:
From 01:01:16 - 01:06:01
Notes:
- Do I understand the idea?
- Am I excited by the idea?
- Do I like the team?
Be clear! A clear idea is a foundation for growth. The goal is that your company grows by word of mouth. That can only be done if you can give people a clear understanding of what your product is.
How to make things easy to understand:
A legible idea can be understood by people who know nothing about your business.
Avoid:
- Ambiguity
- Complexity (Simple idea is one idea)
- Mystery (don't use jargon)
- Ignorable
What you should do:
Questions we should have a clear answer for
What are you making?
What is the problem?
Who is the customer?
Should I use X for Y?
Lead with what, not why and how.
Be concise
In your description of what your company does, use nouns.
Startup
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