Successful product startups

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Have you ever found yourself mired in thisprocess?

1. Come up with idea!
2. Build idea!
3. Put idea online…
4. Wait for sales…
5. … wait for sales…
6. Double down and try to figure out “product-market fit”, in other words: Who wants to buy this?

Over the years, I’ve watched countless friends & acquaintances get stuck in this process. If you make it to Step 6, you’re an outlier. Most folks get stuck between Steps 1 and 3. That’s where the worst doubt & (a result of fear) set in. Some folks have been re-running Steps 1 – 3 over & over for years.
If you do make it to Step 6, though, you come face to face with the high of Hidden Step 7: Give Up, wherein you struggle to find a repeatable source of sales… and can’t.
Lots of strategies have come out to “fix” this process. These strategies fall into two camps:

1. Get you past Step 3: Ship The Damn Thing more often, faster (“Lean”)
2. Hopefully carry you from Step 6: Flail to actual sales, instead of the nearly inevitable Step 7: Give Up (“Customer Development”)

Oofta. These approaches are both flawed — they start off by accepting the validity of the original process, and trying to modify it.
The real trick is to bypass this process entirely
Because the original “process” (such as it is, formed of unconscious wishes and unicorn spit) is not valid. Not in the slightest. It has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Let’s not waste time polishing a turd.
In 30×500, Alex and I teach our students a better way. And today I’m going to teach it to you. I used to think of this as a process… but it’s nothing so linear or fancy. It’s really a set of questions, and techniques and tools for answering them.

You need to answer just 3 simple questions

And these will form the backbone of your success. Yes, really. You just need to know…

1. Who am I serving?
2. What do they need/want, and are ready to buy?
3. How can I reach them and persuade them?

These are big questions, true. But they are simple. And every time you answer one of them, your path will become clearer & clearer.