Week #4 ODNC – Customer Discovery
Hi, I’m Kavir! Here's recapping Week #4 of ODNC1.
If you're new here, I’ll be chronicling the 10 weeks of ODNC1 with key takeaways of events, noteworthy quotes, and my perspective while I build in public. Subscribe to get updates:
This week, we had founders, investors, and authors speaking to us — David Siegel from Glide, Yasmin Razavi from Spark Capital, and Rob Fitzpatrick of The Mom Test.
What a lucky bunch of folks we are, truly.
So much to learn. Let’s dive into 3 takeaways from the 3 fireside chats of Week #4!
David Siegel – Glide
David, the founder of Glide, talks about the story of Glide, how to do customer validation and some lessons from YC. Here are the 3 key takeaways:
Positioning of Glide
We could’ve made the headline about Glide like “build apps, no-coding required”. Maybe people wouldn’t pick up on that. But because we said from a Google Sheet, they were willing to try it.
This positioning resonated with people already comfortable with spreadsheets.
I've recently realized the importance of building something for a specific target segment. Especially in the beginning, you should cater to a niche to be able to drive a wedge and work from there.
Listen to paying customers
Based on our theory of where the business can go grow, we get a lot of customers that we don’t want to listen to at all
The example provided was to listen to paying customers that match the product and business roadmap, rather than listen to free users who want something else from the platform.
This reinforces the point shared in previous fireside chats to carefully consider who you are listening to for features.
There is a hierarchy of user feedback. Feedback from paying users should be weighted much more than free users to be able to build a sustainable business.
Lessons from YC
Launch as soon as possible. Ask yourself what prevents me from doing it tomorrow. If you don’t have a good answer, just do it tomorrow.
No-code gives you these super powers to launch something the next day.
While previously I would have waited 6 months to build a product, and then launch it to crickets. Now, I've done Twitter launches the same day to get feedback from users.
Yasmin Razavi – Spark Capital
Yasmin gave us a different perspective from being a Series B investor. So, she talked about startups and founders at the growth stage. Here are the 3 key takeaways:
Qualities of founders that stand out
From first principles, being able to explain why their business exists today, why it has a competitive advantage that will sustain over time, and that can generate revenues and higher percentage of profits.
As founders, being able to articulate the problem in simple words is very important. That comes from having key insights on the product and market.
Go-to-market strategy for B2B
Does it deeply embed itself in the workflow of the user? That gives you a wedge to grow out from.
One of the main reasons I decided against building a web app for the capstone project was that users at companies don’t want another tool to log into. They want solutions embedded into the workflow. That's why I decided to build a Slack bot to solve the problem. (More to come on that soon)
On the future of No-code
What I would like to see is something like Shopify, but applied to being able to build business apps.
Even no-code apps today expect some technical knowledge of database design, CSS, SQL, Javascript, etc. Glide comes closest to that reality at the moment.
In the future, I feel that more non-technical people will be able to build apps. Just like Emmanuel from Bubble and KP mentioned before, the term no-code might not exist 10 years down the line. It will default to being a builder. Code or no-code is just the means to the end.
Rob Fitzpatrick – The Mom Test
Rob, the author of The Mom Test talked to us a lot about customer discovery and validation. Here are the 3 key takeaways:
Quick Summary of The Mom Test
The book can be summed up in one sentence — What are they already doing, why are they doing it that way?
These questions will help answer what's a problem in their life, what are they using to solve the problem, and whether it's a real problem that they're looking to pay to solve.
When I first read the book in early 2020, so many mistakes in how our startup was operating came to the forefront. Even when I was the participant in a customer discovery, the bad questions popped up.
Best way to reach out to customers
Embed yourself in the community that your customers are already part of.
Where your customers are hanging out is the simplest go-to-market strategy. By putting yourself in these discussions, you gain a strong advantage over others.
That's why conferences were a big deal before Covid. Now that might be replaced by something like Clubhouse.
Customer Discovery is not sales
In the early stage you're not optimizing for revenue, but learning
Many of us have the mindset that customer discovery is only sales. But, in the beginning, it's more about learning than sales.
For more on this, I'd recommend reading 'The Mom Test', if you haven't read yet. There are so many insights in a short book that will change your perspective on things.
In addition to these amazing fireside chats we had "Just Ship It" and "How I Built This" sessions from a bunch of our fellows — Toby Allen, Madhuri, Carri Craver, Kieran Ball, and Kyleigh Smith.
My Build in Public Journey
I got distracted from my capstone project and started building a simple workflow tool in Adalo to solve an ops problem in a business that I own. The good part is that I was able to pick it up in a day.
I took the first steps to revamping my business’ landing page in Webflow. It is coming along well with the product page and city page still pending.
That’s it for this week! See you next time.
Follow me on Twitter @KavirKaycee!
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