How do you go from a business idea to an MVP (minimum-viable product) to a thriving business with thousands of happy customers?
The answer isn't taking a bunch of Harvard Business School Online courses, writing detailed business plans, or spending months writing code in your basement.
It turns out one of the most important things you can do early on (ideally before writing any code!) is focus on idea validation. This will allow you to know if prospective customers care enough about the problem you are looking to solve and avoid the trap of building a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.
Instead of sharing generic startup validation best practices, we’re sharing the story of how one startup founder, Ben Orenstein, actually started and validated the idea for what became a very successful company, Tuple.
Invest the time upfront to validate your idea
Here is a good rule of thumb: the longer it takes to build your MVP, the more important it is to attempt to validate your idea and find market demand with your target customers before you launch.
In the case of Tuple, they had a cheat code. They were building a better version of an incumbent software solution, ScreenHero. ScreenHero had a loyal customer base, but when they were acquired by Slack, it was shut down.
Even though Ben and his two co-founders had the advantage of knowing there was a demand for this type of product, they still invested heavily in validating the product in the pre-launch days.
This largely came in the form of pre-sales.
Ben’s approach to pre-sales
Pricing is the best lever for improving your business, and you can start running experiments as early as during pre-sales.
Many founders shy around from pre-sales or straight-up, thinking they can’t do it. This is rarely the case.
For Tuple, they were successfully pre-selling annual plans for a product that didn’t even exist yet. The earliest adopters got access to the alpha version plus one year afterward.
They also used pre-sales to start running pricing experiments, starting with the earliest offer of $149, and eventually got up to the $599 - $799 range. They also experimented with selling quarterly, annual, per seat, and a minimum number of seats plans.
Fun Fact: Did you know the first 10 customers for Tuple came from the MicroConf community?
6 founder lessons on validating and launching a startup
Here are some additional lessons that Ben shared from the first year(ish) of Tuple.
Managing founder mindset and attitude
When you are a software founder/co-founder, the highs can be much higher, and the lows can be a lot lower. More than half of the battle is managing your own mindset and attitude.
For instance, Ben shared the story about a particularly bad demo. He made the rookie mistake of deploying a new feature to production 15 minutes prior to giving a sales demo. Low and behold, the app kept crashing throughout the demo. He felt embarrassed and frustrated, thinking he blew the sale. To his surprise, the customer still signed up and immediately emailed back with praise on how well the product fit his team’s needs.
Stories like this happen all the time. It is not uncommon to experience some of your highest highs and lowest lows on the same week or even day.
Ship before you’re ready
It is basically impossible to ship too early.
Tuple officially launched on January 7, 2019. It took them 7 months to build the product. Ben admits that they could have launched a few months earlier, but they convinced themselves they needed to build some additional core features, like 2-mouse cursors, before they could go live. It turns out building 2-mouse cursors for a desktop app is one of the hardest features to get right. And, shipping a simpler, albeit less elegant, workaround could do the same job.
Also, no matter how buttoned-up you think your product development is, there will be bugs and embarrassing features that you forgot about, like being able to update billing information in-app. That's also why doing alpha and beta testing with real users is important (And why you should wait a few months, if not longer, before doing a big Product Hunt Launch).
Pro Tip: Here is how you can validate your startup idea in a month.
Save up enough money before going all-in on your startup
Looking back, one of the most important decisions that Ben and his co-founders made was having a big enough cash cushion / savings. This allowed them to focus on getting Tuple off-the-ground in the early days without having to worry about money or having a split-focus.
While the amount of money you should save up will vary based on your life circumstances and personal risk profile, the key is to set and reach your savings goal before you quit the day job.
Build an audience
Similar to Adam Wathan, Ben also spent years investing in building an audience before he launched Tuple.
When he launched Tuple, Ben had around 10,000+ Twitter followers, a couple thousand email subscribers, and a podcast with a couple thousand downloads per episode. He didn’t have a fancy strategy full of “quick-win growth hacks.” This was largely built up one helpful coding tweet, tutorial, or podcast episode at the time.
Having the audience made launching Tuple easier since thousands of developers (his target audience) already knew, liked, and trusted him.
Pro Tip: Not sure how to build an audience online? Pick something you are passionate about. Then, find ways to be helpful on the Internet that doesn’t feel like work to you. Don’t overanalyze it. Just start trying, and you’ll learn a ton. In Ben’s case, podcasting feels like no work to him.
Launch side projects and small projects first
As you're building your audience, experiment with building small projects on the side. This can be starting a podcast, blogging, creating a newsletter, or launching small, simple paid projects.
Ben made his first dollar on the Internet back in 2009 selling a Rails tutorial. That was almost a decade before he launched Tuple.
And, he was able to leverage these early audience-building and product experiences with Tuple.
Ask for what you want
The final takeaway is to not be afraid to ask for what you want. When you ask for something, there is a chance you will get it.
For instance, Ben shared the story of talking to a CTO who wanted a free trial of Tuple. He countered, and the end result was going from a “Free trial request” to a $500 subscription.
The same applies to marketing. When they asked happy early customers to tweet about Tuple with a simple click-to-tweet link, this has resulted in thousands of users sharing the app on Twitter over the years.
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Going from a simple business idea to a viable product takes a lot of hard work and perseverance. Validating your startup idea before you launch makes the process a little earlier.
Want to hear more about Ben’s story? Watch the full MicroConf Talk here.
