Ash Maurya's Blog, page 9
June 28, 2015
You Don’t Have a Traffic Problem
Finding prospects is a top stumbling block for many.
They focus too much attention on where to find them.
Prospects are everywhere.
You can fairly easily find, buy, and/or borrow
more starting traffic than you can handle.
The real challenge for most isn’t a traffic problem,
but a conversion problem.
The real challenge is knowing who you want to find,
when they want to be found, and
what change they are looking for.
Answer these three questions,
and you’ll find it a lot easier to
drive the right prospects to your offer.
Odds of Success
People often ask me if the odds of success are getting better?
Whether “lean” has made a dent?
My take is that in the short run,
we are going to see more resets on ideas,
than home runs on ideas.
This is still progress.
Good ideas are simply hard to find,
but quick resets are still a success in my book.
More people are starting.
More people are doing and
More people are learning.
I distinguish between
building better products and
building better entrepreneurs.
If we stay focused on the second.
The first takes care of itself.
June 27, 2015
Product Naming Rituals
We spend a disproportionate amount of time
trying to find the perfect name for our products.
We look for something
simple but clever,
descriptive but not too verbose,
memorable but not hard to spell.
It needs to be
pronounceable, alphabetically prioritized, and SEO optimized.
It needs to
represent us, be inspiring, paint a picture of our vision.
If you do stumble on a half-decent name,
you rush to check if the domain is available.
It’s usually already taken.
Don’t get me wrong. Names can matter.
But searching for the perfect name
at the start of a project is premature optimization.
Rather than wasting your precious brain cycles
on naming your product,
Spend your precious cycles on first
finding a product worth naming.
June 26, 2015
Email and Spreadsheets Have Killed More Startups Than Other Startups
Most first-time entrepreneurs celebrate being first.
They celebrate having no “obvious” competitors.
But once you think in terms of jobs,
We hire products to do a certain job.
It’s that simple.
Jobs are timeless and transcend categories.
When we hire product A,
we fire something else.
This may not be the shiny new startup
down the block from you,
but a homegrown system
cobbled together with email and spreadsheets.
Email and spreadsheets have killed more products than startups.
Email and spreadsheets are free and ubiquitous.
The real question is not
how will you compete against the next startup,
but how do you get people to fire their existing
habits of the present and
establish your product as the new habit.
June 25, 2015
There are 3 Basic Business Model Archetypes
When people bring up business models, they often use a whole bunch of terms like: software as a service (SaaS), enterprise, retail, e-commerce, ad-based, freemium, viral, social, not-for-profit, marketplace, etc.
The reason we end up with dozens of business model descriptors is that we attempt to label the myriad of combinations of how a business model creates, delivers, and captures value.
For instance, the difference between a SaaS, Enterprise, and Opensource business model is how they deliver and capture value. Even within a SaaS business model, one could implement a freemium or trial-based pricing model.
Trying to create a list of business model types gets complex pretty fast.
Instead categorize business model types by the number of actors (or customer segments) in the model.
Using this approach, you find there are just 3 basic business model archetypes that can describe any type of business: direct, multi-sided, and marketplaces (which are a special variant of multi-sided..
June 24, 2015
On Getting Better [30 Day Milestone]
This blog (experiment) is 30 days old today!
I thought it would be a good time to explain the motivation behind the project.
GOAL: Create something daily
If you want to get “better” at something,
Identify the super-power you want to hone,
Create a non-negotiable daily ritual
for exercising that ability,
Share your output with people
other than yourself, AND
Give them a simple way to
provide feedback.
PROGRESS = DELIBERATE PRACTICE + EXTERNAL ACCOUNTABILITY
Sources of inspiration:
– Seth Godin (who has written daily for the last several years)
– Steven Pressfield (Author of The War of Art and Going Pro)
– Jerry Seinfeld (Don’t break the chain)
June 23, 2015
Don’t Feed Your Vanity
One of the reasons measuring the “true progress” of a product is hard is because we prefer reporting good news over bad. We like charts that trend up and to the right, which isn’t all that bad by itself, until we start devising charts that can go nowhere but up and to the right.
Cumulative counts, like the total number of sign-ups since you launched, are the perfect example. These numbers can flatline but they can never go down. That’s the first tell-tale sign that you have a vanity metric on your hands.
In the interest of fairness, there is a place for vanity metrics. It is often used with great effect on marketing websites to build up social proof and ward off competition. You run into problems though when these same metrics are also used as internal measures of progress.
June 22, 2015
Making Good Decisions
While traction is an effective metric for tracking progress in relation to the business model goal (like a milestone marker), it is not very useful by itself for making day-to-day decisions.
This is because the terrain of innovation is riddled with extreme uncertainty. As you start rolling out your business model, lots of things can and do inevitably go wrong.
Waste is everywhere.
The common tendency is to want to collect and analyze as much data as possible. But in a world where we can measure almost anything, it’s easy to drown in a sea of non-actionable data.
We don’t need more data but actionable insights that lead to good decisions. In order to make good decisions, we need to be able to answer the following three questions:
Are we making progress?
What caused the change?
How do we improve?
June 21, 2015
Constraints are a Gift
We view constraints as limitations
that keep us from achieving our goal.
We either fall victim to these constraints
and revise our ambition downwards, or
we confront these constraints head-on
and look for ways to eliminate them.
But there is a third option:
To embrace our constraints AND
still find a way to achieve our goal.
In the early days,
Southwest Airlines had to sell one of their planes.
The could have accepted downsizing or
knocked on many more investor doors
but they instead asked themselves:
“How can we keep our existing routes with 3 planes instead of 4″?
They did this by reducing gate turnaround times
through a new boarding process with no assigned seating.
They didn’t stop there.
They kept optimizing for gate turnaround time by
imposing additional constraints on themselves:
Like flying only a single type of aircraft,
and flying only short point-to-point routes.
These constraints turned them into
the most profitable airlines in the industry.
Embracing your constraints
creates space for innovation.
June 20, 2015
Value Before Growth
Do you know how much Facebook spent on servers in their first few months?
$85/mo.
Today they spend billions of dollars on their server infrastructure.
Do you know how Facebook paid for their initial servers?
With Google Adsense and banner ads.
Today they have their own auction based ad system.
You don’t need to first build scalable infrastructure
in order to build a scalable business.
You don’t even need to start with a unique business model.
You can piggy back on others until you figure yours out.
The single domino early in the business model validation journey
is delivering on customer value
even if it’s only at micro-scale.
If you can demonstrate this repeatedly,
do you then get a crack at building for scale.
Establishing repeatability is a necessary pre-condition for growth.
