Creating a startup is a gruesome process like many of you have learned who are in the startup world. I myself am a self taught programmer with a dream of having my own business. In the coming days, I want to document the work of getting an idea off the ground start to finish. I’m a big fan of #buildinpublic hashtag. This hashtag is most popular nowadays on twitter, so I will document everything I do if I can, but also keep a little bit of mystery to keep you guys coming back for more.
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Idea Phase
Let’s start with the idea. In reality, you don’t want to create an idea in isolation. Find the problem, then provide a solution. The hardest part is finding a problem. Once you have found the problem, you can go after it to provide a solution. Before you go fishing for your problem I suggest you solve one thing first. The one thing that no one talks about is distribution.
When you are a venture funded startup you can take care of distribution by throwing money at it. What happens if you don’t have a star studded profile to get the seed funding to get your idea off the ground? Because 9 times out of 10, investors are looking at not only the idea-market fit that you are providing but also your credentials. If you are self taught programmer, like I am, it becomes even more difficult to convince someone to invest in your idea and you. Unless you have created a repertoire of open source GitHub projects, and like me don’t have profile to sell with your idea, I suggest you forget about funding and think about only one thing: distribution.
If you get distribution and enough customers, investors might start overlooking your background because you are already showing growth and that is the one thing they are looking at (Of course there are other metrics like churn rate and lifetime value but that’s not the point I’m trying to make).
How do you get distribution?
There are quite a few ways to get distribution. One way is to document your journey, like I’m trying to do and find others who might be interested in your product. Another is finding a community and staying active in it. Make sure the community is large enough to support your idea. Another way is to create an open source project on GitHub and provide ancillary services like a subscription.
What’s next?
Once you have figured out your distribution strategy you might think the next step is to find a problem to solve for your distribution. Hold your horses there mister/misses. The next step is actually now to create a persona of your ideal customer. Why should you create a persona before looking for a problem? If you look for the problem, you might not be able to provide an optimal solution to your ideal customer. I suggest to find your ideal customer aka persona first, then look for your problem to solve.
Persona
Finding personas sometimes is a difficult task. I suggest you start with a persona that you can talk to, observe or at least relate to. Why would you want to do that? Well, if you ever want to do the Mom test, you need a way to talk to your persona aka your customer. I suggest another alternative than the mom test if you are shy like me. The observation test (I made this name up). The observation test is basically observe your persona in the wild. This is where the statement comes from “Your customer does not know what they want” or “Your customer does not know the answer to their problem”. I would say sometimes “Your customer does not know what problem he/she is having”. By observing your Persona in his/her natural environment, you start picking up on his internal desires. This is where you can apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to figure out what needs your persona is trying to fulfill in his/her natural environment.
Online Personas
If you are like me, a solopreneur, I suggest you look for your distribution online instead of offline for one simple reason: virality. Growing your business is easier online and it allows you to be location independent. What are some common Personas? The ones I found interesting and more likely to be available are the ‘Marketing’ persona, the ‘Technologist’ persona, the ‘College Student/Young Graduate’ persona, and the ‘Business Owner’ persona.
Let’s dive into each personas. I’m pretty sure you have your observations, but these are mine so here I go.
‘Marketing’ persona — The marketer is always online and is always looking for business and doing business. If you fulfill this personas needs, he/she is most likely to empty his wallet because his/her living depends on it. Their main job is marketing on your favourite social media sites. They use tools like blogging, marketing content, SEO and facebook ads to show conversions. Guess what kind of tools they are willing to spend money on? Yes, that is correct, any tool that allows easier reproduction and distribution of marketing content. Some examples include Hubspot, Canva, ahrefs, and so forth. There is plenty of room for providing a better tool in this space. I would suggest if you develop a saas, to put this persona in your priority list as every company that does any kind of business online has at least one of these personas.
‘Technologist’ persona— the technologist or developer is also always online. He is looking for solutions to his problems related to his tech stack. Learning new tech stacks to keep up with the latest trends in the job market. He/she is also creating GitHub projects to sell himself/herself. Some tools that he/she uses are hosting, developing, blogging, slack, stackoverflow and so on. This is the second most likely persona to spend money online related to his project or career. Some examples include udemy, data analytics, aws/gcp/digitalocean. This persona is also blogging, podcasting and so forth just like the ‘Marketing’ person. The ‘technologist’ persona is also a priority persona for saas products. One issue for developing saas products for this persona is that it is a very competitive field with many solutions already available. It becomes very difficult to provide a solution that is 10x better than previous solution to this persona.
‘College Student/Young Graduate’ persona — the college student is mostly active on social media such as Instagram or Reddit. This persona is very broad and more difficult to target. This persona needs to be broken down further into mini personas to provide a product that can be useful. You can find mini personas on reddit. By targeting a specific subreddit you can further characterize mini persona to whom you can create a product for. It is important to realize that it is really hard to sell a saas product to this persona. One reason is the buying power does not yet exist. Eventually when this persona starts having a stable job, he/she will more likely be able to spend. How can you start a business around this persona? Start with an ad-based product and then eventually add premium features as a subscription. There are always power users you can target who are willing to pay premium features.
‘Business Owner’ persona — the business owner is likely creating and launching a brand. Most brands are service oriented or product oriented business. This is also a large persona and you will need to find a mini persona. A real good mini persona is the shopify/amazon business owner. The shopify/amazon seller is usually selling a product or a range of products under his/her brand. Tools such as apps for shopify is a good place to create a saas product. This persona also heavily relies on facebook ads and now amazon ads as well. With the 14.5 iOS update, it will become harder to sell via Facebook and more users will resort to SEO and amazon to sell their products. Again, to sell to this persona is also very competitive. Many saas apps target this persona. There should always be some kind of space, you just need to keep your eyes open.
That is it for today. If you enjoyed this article, I will continue to keep blogging to see where this goes so please do follow me. Thanks!