Building product in the leanest way possible

One strategy to build quickly is to provide one product line first.

For example. Amazon started with early selling books before selling everything else.

The Rounds, which is a grocery delivery service started with only delivering cereal because it was easy to deliver and everybody needed it.

Zapier, which is an application that connects 6,000 other applications started with only one integration, which was: after a person fills out a form on a website they are added to an email newsletter.

Another approach is to:

white label or rebrand a competitive product, and start selling that to learn the sales channels before building your own product.

For example, KubeCost monitors your cloud server hosting costs.

The first product was built over a weekend using a open source software from GitHub called Grafana.

Open-source software gives a great head-start because you can build off of it, rebrand it and charge for it, and you don’t have to pay any fees!

Another example:

Airalo is a provider of virtual SIM cards that allow you to buy data for over 100 countries in the world.

And you just download the eSIM card to your phone. Physical SIM not required.

You can start a similar service by using a white label provider like KeepGo,

where you can buy wholesale mobile data and resell it.

We could have gotten started with ContactOut a lot faster by buying competitor, contact data, aggregating it and reselling it, but we didn’t do that.

When you’re working on a moonshot project and you can’t build the first version in under four weeks, you still want to pick the smallest thing that you can build.

For Space X, Elon went to Russia to try to buy and repurpose a intercontinental ballistic missile.

That was the first thing he tried before deciding to build his own rockets.

It’s the same thing for Tesla. Building a car takes a really long time.

For the first version of Tesla, instead of designing it from scratch, they used the body from the Lotus Elise

and they used an electric drive train, which was already developed by a separate company.

And they just put the two together.

The point of all this is to:

avoid building stuff that nobody wants.

So we build something really fast. Get it into the hands of users and prove that people will buy it.