9 months ago we started building an online marketplace connecting entrepreneurs and virtual assistants, 4 months ago we launched and in April we made $900.
3 weeks ago, we started building a Slackbot called Tina (who can handle all of your admin tasks from within Slack), 12 days ago we launched and yesterday we hit $1k monthly recurring revenue:
In this post, I will outline the how, why and what we did to reach this milestone with Tina, and more importantly what we did DIFFERENTLY the second time around.
Idea
Much has been said about the power of the startup idea…
After years of exploring the importance of this, the best model I have discovered for understanding it’s importance comes from Derek Sivers:
Both idea and execution have a multiplier on the likelihood of your success, it’s just that your execution multiplier is an order of magnitude greater than that of your idea.
E.g. If you have a good idea (multiplier: 100) yet poor execution (multiplier: $1,000), you will build a business worth $100,000.
Though if you have a poor idea (multiplier: 10) and awesome execution (multiplier: $1,000,000), you will build a business worth $10,000,000.
With Tina, our assurance that we had a good idea was based on the following:
- Feedback from users of our first marketplace: entrepreneurs either don’t want to manage virtual assistants or are not very good at doing so
- Conversations with people that know about the concierge/bot business model
- Reading blogs about Slack’s explosive growth
Though once we came to the conclusion that Tina was a good idea, we put that to rest and focussed 100% on...
Implementation
You will be emotionally biased towards complexity when deciding on the features for your MVP.
The rule of thumb here is to detail all of these “necessary “features…
Then reduce this number by 50% to just include those that enable you to give the illusion that you have a product.
I mean, when we launched Tina, we didn’t even have anyone in place to complete the admin tasks themselves.
Users could simply integrate Tina, start a task, stop a task and pay us money.
To take this route, you will inevitably come up against push back from your developer/development team; ignore them, you know best.
The one feature that MUST be present is your ability to take payments, after all how will you know if you have created value if people cannot provide value in return?
Only once we had users integrate Tina with their Slack Team did we being to work on the system that would produce reliable and reproducible value over time.
The key to being able to construct a reliable delivery system in any business is to remove yourself from it. As soon as possible it is necessary to begin working ON the system and not IN the system.
So much so that if a task is assigned to Tina right now, I will not work on it regardless of whether we have capacity to deliver, we simply cannot afford to have my time invested in the delivery of the system when it could be invested in building the system.
Launch
This is simple.
Determine exactly where your perfect customer resides on the internet and then place your story in front of them.
Enough so that you can engage the response, but do not invest heavily in this, 100-1,000 visitors to your landing/sales page is usually enough.
For us, this was Product Hunt.
We enlisted the help of a PH influencer that has significantly more followers than me AND had previously posted a Slackbot that received over 300 upvotes to post Tina by reaching out on Twitter.
Once it was live, I wrote an emotional blog post about startup validation on the blog for the original online marketplace we built that linked to our Product Hunt listing and then shared this with our existing audience.
If you do not have the luxury of an existing audience then do NOT spend extortionate amounts on Facebook or display ads, instead reach out to influencers that have an audience of your perfect customers and incentivise them in some fashion to share your product (give free access, early access or some sort of recognition).
Future
What happens now?
Our original goal from our first product remains:
To give entrepreneurs back one million hours of their time by 2018
Tina is purely a channel to accelerate this, and we believe that with extensive automation of admin tasks, we can supercharge every Slack Team that is willing to invest in Tina.
We can bootstrap and reach this goal in the two years, or we accept the investment from firms that have approached us and deliver within 1 year (but with less control and ownership).
Our challenge resides in the computer/human ratio in which these tasks are completed, which in theory will converge from 95% human virtual assistant to 0%.
Learnings
Reduce time between idea and (real) validation
(When I say real validation, I mean people giving you money)
With our first marketplace, the lead time between idea and the product hitting the real world was 6 months.
6 months time and financial investment with little to no feedback as to whether what we were building would add value to the world. In hindsight, we should have stripped down the specification and release an unpolished version after 2-3 months.
With Tina, this lead time was reduced to less than two weeks.
Build something where initial customers can bring you more customers
I’m not sure how long Slack will still allow this, but when any Team integrates Tina, we are able to send a direct message to every member of that team with instructions on how to use her AND an referral link that will enable them to receive 5 free tasks for every Slack Team that signs up using that link.
Therefore, if Tina is integrated into a Slack Team (each Slack Team receives 1 free task for integrating Tina), we are able to place this instruction/marketing message in front of up to 100 people (some Slack Communities have 000’s of team members).
Build an integrated brand
This starts with understanding the person (perfect customer) that you want to connect with emotionally.
The more I study business and psychology the more I understand that we are emotional beings that make decisions based on how we feel and then rationalise them intellectually.
Thus, if you can make your perfect customer FEEL a certain way, they will make up logical excuses to use your product/service.
Therefore, when we were building out Tina’s brand, we spent significant time determining EVERYTHING that would affect the emotional state of our perfect customer (a 33 year old, single startup founder that had had 2 girlfriends in their life).
You may note that Tina’s name, colours, landing page design and even tone of voice (everything a potential customer would interact with) have been sculpted specifically to elicit certain emotions with our perfect customer.
In summary, for all you startup founders (or soon to be startup founders) out there, get some real world feedback.
Yes, you will get good feels when your mum or brother tells you that your new website looks really “nice”, but if you are going to build a real business, you need to step out of that bubble and have the marketplace tell you that you suck.
That you suck right now, but there are things that you can do to improve and ultimately build a business that helps people.
Thus the only questions that you should be asking yourself as you start having all of those awesome idea are...
Who is going to pay you for the value you create?
And more importantly, when are they going to pay you?
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