Executing on startups
The startup process can be broken down as
and we want to do this repeatedly as FAST as possible.
I made a fun acronym LIFT (Learnings, Ideas, Fast Tests)
The faster that we can repeat this process of:
Coming up with business ideas
Validating and testing our business ideas
Learning from our tests
Refining our business ideas
That’s how we ultimately succeed at our startup.
Let’s dive in:
IDEAS
How to come up with startup ideas.
I shared this process previously, but let’s recap:
1. Pick an industry with a big market size
2. Study 100 companies.
You can find 100s of companies in your industry by studying the Y Combinator startup directory, or searching Crunchbase, or Product Hunt.
3. Study their product
Go through every competitor product, every screen and UX flow and assess strengths and weaknesses.
4. Study marketing channels
Use SEMrush to see where competitors are getting traffic from.
e.g RocketReach gets a lot of SEO traffic for pages that provide contact data for people.
So we created our own page targeting searches for person name + email, e.g “Bill Gates email”
Study competitors’ advertising copy.
e.g the Facebook ad library will show me all the ad copy for my competitor Lusha.
Study social media accounts and learn from the content in order to create your own content.
Affiliate programs.
We were inspired by Apollo’s affiliate program and created out own partnership program.
5. Study sales process
Book sales calls with all your competitors, record it and use it as training for your sales team.
e.g we booked and recorded sales calls with Zoominfo, Apollo, Lusha, RocketReach and 20+ other companies
I’d also collect sales collateral from 20+ companies.
We take the best parts of all this and create own own sales collateral and sales process.
6. Talk to ex-employees, ex-founders
I’d reach out to ex-employees at competitors and ask them to mentor me.
e.g Santosh Sharan who was previous COO at Apollo and VP Product at Zoominfo advised our company. John Girard VP Growth at Connectifier also advised us.
7. Talk to 50 industry experts
Use sites like Intro. co, ADPList, clarity. fm
8. Talk to 100 users
What are the biggest problems? What does that day-to-day workflow look like? What tools are they currently use?
9. Become an expert and create a 10x better solution
Check out the next part about the process for TESTS and LEARNINGS
