The startup process
The startup process can be broken down as
- IDEAS
- TESTS
- LEARNINGS
and we want to do this repeatedly as FAST as possible.
I made a fun acronym LIFT (Learnings, Ideas, Fast Tests)
Today we’ll talk about:
LEARNINGS
After we tested our business ideas, we’ll have new learnings about what worked and what didn’t work. And then we’ll form new ideas and test those.
Tests should not take longer than one week to complete.
We should break things down into one week experiments as much as possible.
The goal of this is to learn something every week and improve our business ideas,
instead of being stuck for six months, building a product only to find out afterwards that nobody wants it
Here’s what this looks like at ContactOut:
Every Monday, everyone at our company posts an update on a Slack in our “Goals” channel.
We write about the goals that we each accomplished last week:
the tests that we ran
what did we learn? What can be improved?
tests and goals that are planned for next week.
Some of my goals have included:
Releasing an AI email writer feature that uses Chat GTP to automatically write personalized emails that are based on a person’s LinkedIn profile.
Improving our sales operations, our lead assignment, lead scoring processes and studying the AI courses from Stanford.
S o, what I learnt was:
for sales operations, we needed to focus on things like reply rate, book, meetings, sales pipeline, we’re building a new dashboard for this.
We also need a better product roadmap overall, that includes AI features
An example of my goals for next week include:
working on a two month product roadmap
studying all the other AI applications out there and validating if they are useful to our users.
Here’s some more examples from the team:
Our account executive Ersun is focused on testing out different email messaging in order to book more meetings.
One of our product teams is working on improving the speed of our search portal, SEO and growth metrics and optimizing our mobile site experience.
We aim to push code every week, but realistically we ship every two to three weeks.
Our product designer Siren is working on usability testing for some of our new AI features.
We tested the product with eight users. We got the feedback on what parts were hard to use.
And now Siren’s goal is to implement some of these changes and hand off to engineering
Finally our head of content Joseph is working on creating courses for recruiting sales and cold outreach.
What we learnt was that we could use ChatGPT to combine competitor articles as a shortcut
However the output wasn’t actionable enough.
So Joseph’s goal next week is to include step-by-step guidance, add screenshots and examples from ContactOut.
