[thinbeige]

> launching a mediocre product as soon as possible, and then talking to customers and iterating, is much better than waiting to build the “perfect” product.

Yes, yes and yes. But this is so easy said but still a struggle and need to be put into perspective. Let's say we do a super simple business, eg a resume writing service on scale (just for the sake of having a simple example). To be ready to reach out to first customers we need to...

- Setup a landing page, takes ten minutes with Squarespace but to get all the copy and visuals right or least good enough for some first testing, min one day, rather three to five

- Setup and prefill all social media channels, should take half a day incl getting the first 25 likes in order to save the name

- Create the first ads and iterate to some ads which actually convert at good CTRs/CPCs take multiple days because you need to let a campaign run at least for one day; so lets assume another five days

So just to test this stupid-simple agency business properly we need already two weeks.

Now imagine, you do something a bit more sophisticated, an actual app/SaaS/game/bot/whatever, you still need minimum two weeks for the 'Marketing' stuff before plus the time for the actual app. And being mediocre doesn't work in highly competitive markets.

So, if you are able to (1) build a first testable thing in 2-4 weeks you are very good. And you are even better if (2) you have the power and positivity to do 12 tests per year because you need more than one shot.

[adamqureshi]

https://onlyusedtesla.com/ I set up a landing page using WP with form and a basic email capture. I got 3 listings from tesla forums. I got a BUNCH of emails. I started using ambush tactics to get customers to list their for sale used tesla with me for free while in beta. Saying stuff like " we have a concentrated buyer exposure , notice buyers not shoppers. I used FB messenger for communications and email. I started running ads on FB for each listing. I started charging customers $150 for each sold vehicle, manually. Now 6 months later, i am building a new web app using VueJS hosted on DO. I tested charging from the get go and made a sale today. $50 to sign up list $50 to boost on FB. Boost on FB cost me like $5/$10. You can target location , interest , behaviors. I am working on new features . I made $150/avg just following up with customers , i was ranking first page organic for "buy a used tesla" kinda got lucky , who knows. I just wanna grab a "slice" from cars,autotrader they can keep the pie. customers started comparing my rinky/dink Wp site to cars, auto trader , they liked the simplicity and speed. I adopted the mentality NOBODY IS GONNA FUND YOU. Its everyman for himself. Good LUCKY!

[tomerbd]

how many .com sites did you register before this one? i mean is this your first shot or how many previous shots did you have if i may ask? how did they go? did people show interest? how did you get the interest of people to find your web site?

[jhgaylor]

Nice!

I wish I saw the battery size on each listing over by the price and mileage though. One of the first ones I ready even said it was both a 60 and a 90 in the description.

[tomerbd]

can you please say which wordpress theme you use and is it a WP plugin to do the listing and filtering? (if not now what was it initially?) thanks..

[laktek]

I struggled with this building Pragma. I was going to a crowded market with established incumbents. Most early talks with customers would always lead to "How is it better than Wordpress, Webflow, Squarespace, etc." So I started to feel we have to tick all the boxes and product never felt shippable.

However, two weeks ago I took a step back and thought what if we can ship a product in 48 hours and get people to pay. The result of it was Page.REST. In reality, it still took 7 days to launch it properly, but it had 10 people paid customers after the first day in business. That was a revelation to me and gave me a different perception of the approach.

I can attest being in the market is the best way you could learn and iterate a product (no matter how simple & rough the early version looks).

PS: I blogged some of my learnings from shipping Page.REST - https://www.laktek.com/what-i-learned-from-building-pagerest...

[justboxing]

This is cool! Thank you for the detailed blog post. Very informative. Now to scale Page.REST... !

[rgbrenner]

Who said anything about social media, and facebook likes, and advertising. Just stop. That isn't your product.

If your product is just a squarespace page... then that's the entire part of that step.

Do that, and then go talk to your customers. The rest of that is just procrastination, and frankly a waste of time and money at that stage... because there's no way you have product market fit that early, so why are you buying ads?

[thinbeige]

> Who said anything about social media

I don't care about Facebook and even if my product hasn't any relation to FB, Twitter, etc. At some point you probably need them anyway, eg for ads and then you must have a FB company page and thus a handle/account.

The best time to get those social media accounts is when you got the product domain name. The wise founder checked if the respective social media handles were free before he registered any domain name. You can also wait of course few months and register a cumbersome handle because somebody else took the the handle then.

My message was: Just setting up the foundation of a product and a company--and by foundation I don't mean the actual product--is already a lot of work.

[borplk]

"go talk to your customers" is much easier said than done.

[akelly]

The devils advocate position is that without a social media presence or ads, it can be difficult for some companies to find customers to talk to.

[briandear]

I agree so much! My little company does mental health practice management and communications yet it’s incredible hard to “start small” because your being judged against all the incumbents. Even if you have some clever tech (we do,) nobody wants to use it if you don’t at least compare somewhat to the existing competition. If I were building photo sharing in 2006, maybe that small, sloppy and iterative approach would work great, but when you’re taking on entrenched incumbents, it’s hard, especially in a space related to health. I guess you could build one feature and be really great at it, but users are rarely shopping for that specific feature, especially if it’s novel and they don’t realize they need it yet.

[wpietri]

Are you sure you're a startup, then? If you're going to build the kind of thing your future clients are already buying, then it sounds more like a normal new business to me.

Startups are pursuing some sort of radical improvement on the status quo. For that, there should be early adopters, people who care a great deal about your kind of improvement. People who are willing to sacrifice the normal kind of good for your specific kind of great.

There's nothing wrong with being a new business, with wanting to deliver a mousetrap that's 20% better than existing mousetraps. But it's a very different kind of thing than doing a startup, and I think it's dangerous to apply one sort of conventional wisdom to the other.

[erispoe]

> it’s incredible hard to “start small” because your being judged against all the incumbents

Then you're probably addressing the wrong market. I found _The Innovator's Solution_[1] by Clayton Christensen pretty useful to understand that. You want to address a market that is underserved or not served at all by the existing big players. Often, it's by providing a service that is much simpler, much less powerful, but cheaper and/or more accessible than the existing solutions.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Solution-Creating-Sustaini...

[Mz]

Anything in health care is hard, in part due to HIPAA.

You are welcome to join Health Techies:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?nomobile=true#!forum/health...

[tomerbd]

how do you get the first 25 likes, do you reach out to people showing the facebook page? paid boost?

[brianwawok]

Friends and family round!