Most startup projects fail because they never even get off the ground.

Market first, code later

Most startup projects fail because they never even get off the ground. Ideas stay in the brainstorming phase on the back of napkins and never make it to the actually-talking-to-prospective-customers phase, which is the critical moment when a startup takes its first breaths of life.

There are usually a litany of excuses that go along with the premature death of a startup idea: I don’t have a technical cofounder so how will I build my product? How will I have time to work on this with work or school? What if someone just steals my idea? Nonsense.

Let’s get a few things straight.

• You don’t need a technical cofounder to start talking to prospective customers about your idea. In fact, what good is someone who talks to computers and writes code all day going to be in talking to people. Talking to people is your job; get used to it.

• There is never a “good time” to start working on your startup. You can wait for things to ease up at work or to be done with school and before you know it you’re married with kids, sitting in a cubicle talking to your coworkers about how you once had this great idea. Lame.

• No one cares about your idea. Literally no one, except maybe you, cares about your idea. Your belief that someone is going to steal your idea is an illusion based upon the bias of your own perspective. Besides, ideas are completely worthless. Execution is what matters.

Since your first ideas will probably suck anyway, use them as a vehicle for learning how to execute. Climbing the steep learning curve of modern, digital entrepreneurship is what’s going to turn you into a full-stack marketer that’s a force to be reckoned with. The further you climb, the more skills you acquire for dealing with challenging situations and traversing uncharted territory. And the failure you’ll encounter along the way will innoculate you against the idea that failure signals finality; failure is just table stakes for getting into the game.

The only way to learn to climb is to start. There is no other way.

So cut the rope.

The full-stack marketer doesn’t wait for anyone’s permission to get started. There isn’t time for that. So he breaks certain rules to put himself into a position where his startup can take shape and grow. Here are four rules you should get comfortable with breaking if you want to convert your ideas into realities.

#1. The first rule to be broken: be ready to talk to customers about a product that does not yet exist. Spending time with your idea on your own in a vacuum will not take you very far because it’s not based on anything other than speculation; this is why talking to real people about your idea is critical. Getting relevant feedback on your idea takes a bit of showmanship because you have to create the illusion that the product either currently exists or is about to.

In order to do this, you’ll need to have something to show them—ideally a semi-functional, well designed front-end that is interactive, but at a minimum some screenshots that you’ve spent hours in Photoshop or Illustrator trying to perfect. Hell, use Microsoft Paint if it’s going to get the job done. Wireframes are an absolute last resort because they put the kibosh on the magic trick of making something that doesn’t exist appear out of thin air (if you really can’t push pixels, Balsamiq is a great tool for sketching out your ideas).

#2. The second rule to be broken: get customers to sign up for a product that does not yet exist. This may seem the same as the first broken rule, but it’s not because you are actually testing whether or not people would sign up for your product. In order to do this you need to build an elegantly simple landing page with the following ingredients: 1) a halfway decent domain that’s not my-enterprisy-tool.biz 2) a nicely designed logo that establishes your company’s brand 3) a screenshot of your app in the context of the appropriate device 4) one or two lines of product positioning (for example, Medium’s is “A better place to read and write things that matter ” 5) a simple email form to simulate a sign up (if you ask for too much information in the form, you will lower your conversion rate, so stick to the basics).

Simplicity is king in this case. Mattan Griffel’s blog post on the “The Minimal Homepage” is probably the single clearest articulation of why minimal copy, large background images and a singular call-to-action will convert best. The great thing about the exercise of building a landing page and driving traffic to it is that you are killing two birds with one stone. In addition to testing your concept’s demand, you are deploying a range of distribution tactics and building out the plumbing for a distribution infrastructure that will retain value as you move towards an eventual launch. There are some simple hacks you’ll want in your back pocket for this phase:

• Run ads to test use cases and positioning. A great hack for determining whether people care about your idea or not is to run Facebook ads with different use case copy as a proxy for determining relative interest. For example, if you are unsure whether your hypothetical product’s value proposition is “Hire a midget to run your errands” or “Uber for clowns”, run both ads and see which one has a lower cost-per-click.

• Drive traffic and start a newsletter. Get a free email marketing account—MailChimp is the best. As you drive traffic to your site, start collecting these email addresses into a mailing list. Many startups make the mistake of not building up their email list early. Don’t.

• Build social media channels. This one should be obvious but in many cases people don’t do it because they want to stay “in stealth mode” (stupidity) or they don’t know what to say. Set up Twitter and Facebook accounts for your brand and start building some of the same relationships online that you have been offline. Sean Percival lays this all out very well on the 500 startups blog in his post “Getting Early Social Media Followers”. A growing social media following can help build some social proof and momentum around your new concept that will help convert more sign ups.

#3. The third rule to be broken: recruit an army of prospective customers to help you iterate on a product that does not yet exist. Capturing the sign up isn’t the end of your test, its just the beginning. Once you have the customer’s email address, personally email them (I use my gmail address so it’s more personal) and ask questions about how specifically they would use your product. Or include some more screenshots of your app to ask about the usability of the design. Accumulate all this feedback into a spreadsheet and keep a running account of all customer communication. This is probably the single most important asset you will build pre-code.

By pulling a group of early adopters into the the design process and giving them a stake in the product’s development, you are essentially crowdsourcing the first product management role in your company, hiring a bunch of mini-product managers to assist you in the nascent stages of your product’s incubation. As you iterate, you can continue going back to the well to have them validate or invalidate your assumptions. The best part is that, unlike someone on your team who has a financial stake in the success of the company and has drank a ton of the company Koolaid, your crowdsourced team of mini-PMs’ only stake in the product is its inherent usefulness, so you are more likely to get honest, unvarnished feedback.

Keeping the conversation going with prospective customers is one of the single most important things you can do to continue learning. As Ryan Hoover mentioned in his recent post “Blog-First Startups”, there are an entire crop of recently successful startups like Mattermark that started as blog posts and got traction because the ideas they contained resonated with real people.

#4. The fourth rule to be broken: find a full-stack developer to partner with you on a product that does not yet exist. Now that you’ve tested your assumptions about your product with real people, you’ve either determined that there is an appetite for your product or there isn’t. If you’ve determined that you are pursuing something people want, it’s time to find a full-stack developer that can help you turn this early-stage concept and customer base into a real company by delivering a functional, minimum viable product.

No one thing mentioned above will be sufficient for getting you to the point where your idea is ready to be built, but together they get you to the point where you are ready to start writing some code. Convincing a full-stack developer to join your cause isn’t going to be easy. It never is—even under the best of circumstances. But if you’ve absolutely crushed the three breakable rules above, it’s going to be far easier than if you hadn’t because you will have saved your eventual cofounder from writing thousands of lines of wasted code.

If a prospective cofounder isn't convinced by your work, don’t worry about it—they aren’t the right fit anyway. The person who joins you on this journey is going to need a passion for the problem you are tackling to get through the inevitable tough times. They are also going to need enough humility to recognize that they need your full-stack marketing skills just as much as you need their full-stack development skills.

And entrepreneurial humility is a two way street. Without the partnership of your full-stack developer, all you have is a batch of .PSDs, a few spreadsheets, a worthless website and a bunch of emails piling up in your gmail account.

So when you do find that right person, give them half the company, get in the arena and don’t look back.

Read more posts by Kyle Tibbitts