You might be an entrepreneur if…
Many people have attempted the “what makes an entrepreneur?” theme, but I’ve never heard Kevin’s first two requirements before. Telling off your boss isn’t something I’d recommend wholesale, but hey, from an “iterate constantly” perspective, it’s one thing you could try.
This weekend, more progress happened on swi.ms, including an initial user flow and a little cosmetic upgrade. The first call to action is sign in, of course, with the promise of swimming tips and a custom profile.
Even though no functionality has been added yet (the Facebook login button/link doesn’t work), it’s important to continually improve and make changes. Not only does it give you a great sense of accomplishment, but it also reminds you of how much more there is to do. In no time, we’ll have a basic funnel set up to test with people.
I know what you’re thinking. We can test the basic user flow now, on paper, before any of it gets developed. And you’re right. That’s very #leanstartup of you.
Technology used so far:
Next steps:
Thank you for using Swi.ms. We collect the minimum information required to improve the website experience for you. We don’t share your information with third parties. If you have any questions about how your information is handled, please email me at vanessa @ swi.ms.
Breaking: Swimmmo is now Swi.ms.
It’s a Sinatra app running on Heroku. Today, it says “Hello, world!”
Candidly, I wasn’t confident an idea would show up. But it did, of course when I wasn’t thinking about apps and startups but instead as I was becoming deeply interested in something else. Last year I started learning to swim and became fascinated with the sport. My “personal” Twitter account became a “swimming” Twitter account. Now I always have a swimsuit with me, and life became optimized for swimming.
And Swimmmo showed up.
(First it was Flipturn, but then I shopped for domain names.)
Swimmmo is just an idea, but right now that’s all I need. According to the leanstartup thesis, I just need to see if anyone’s interested.
Details to come.
— Alex Krupp, “How I got into YC as a non-technical single founder.” Never give up.
My technically minded friends advise me to tread carefully when it comes to finding a developer for my iPad app. They argue, probably wisely, that many non-technical founders insult the intelligence of engineers and other highly skilled people by expecting solutions to difficult problems with only a little money and no credit.
Derek Sivers gives some good advice for working with a developer on projects:
How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen
Essentially he argues the following:
If you’re a developer who has ever done freelance work, I’d love to hear suggestions for what a nontechnical founder can do to be the perfect client to a freelance developer.
Photo by JoshuaDavisPhotography.
I’ve just added Facebook Comments to encourage discussion here on iPad apps, customer development, and the like.
Thanks to Gil Goldschlager for his excellent tutorial. Integrating Facebook Comments took only about 20 minutes.
Add Comments to your own Tumblr: Like-Button & Comments-Box tutorial
One great way to test ideas before building a product is to send users to a landing page. Landing pages are often used to align messaging between offers (such as ads) and sites. That is, if you’re inviting customers to take advantage of an offer or benefit, the customer should be directed to a page with more information on that offer.
In this case, I’ll be using landing pages to measure interest in a fake product, in order to determine if it’s worth the time to build that product.
All this requires is a pitch and a contact form — no software development necessary. The landing page approach requires two parts: 1) the offer for the product idea being tested, usually an ad; and 2) a landing page that requires a goal conversion like an email signup.
The goal conversion piece is important. It helps you more accurately measure true interest in your idea, and it supplies you with leads you can contact if and when you bring your idea to fruition.
Right now I’m building landing pages for my three ideas that I’ll be testing in the next phase of the customer development process. Then I’ll advertise them and see if anything sticks.
The tool I’m testing out right now to build my landing pages is Unbounce. So far it’s going well — Unbounce has several landing page templates and a WYSIWYG editor.
Landing pages are so simple that you could probably adapt a lot of free tools for the purpose — tumblr, flickr, or free portfolio sites.
Can anyone suggest a good process or tool to try out for building simple landing pages like this?
Here’s a “visual worksheet for early stage startups” to “document [the] evolving business hypothesis.” Cool.
(via @jm3)
Overall, the first app research survey was unsuccessful. Why? I was testing the wrong thing.
In an effort to create a iPad app using customer feedback, I thought starting with customer ideas would be useful. A customer survey can help you test hypotheses for product ideas before doing too much work on them. However, a survey won’t do the hard work of generating product ideas.
The survey results show why.
My original question was: What iPhone or iPad app do you wish existed? Tweet back or answer a 3-min survey: [survey link]
Most of the app requests I got, while thoughtful, were either iPad versions of branded apps they already use or apps irrelevant to my interests and experience. See a sample.
Best answers:
Overall, advertising on Twitter was a good way to generate traffic for a customer survey.
The final stats for my ad, which I ran on the 140 Proof Twitter network (PS I work there, so I’m totally biased):
Overall 75 people responded to the “What iPad app do you want?” question in the space of 2 days. However, as noted above, the survey didn’t yield useful insights.
There are at least two ways to improve on this process.
#1 is easier, so I’ll start with that.
