Start at the End
Product Advice for Startup Founders
Your time as a startup founder is your most valuable resource. Choosing the right work to do is crucial. But how do you know you’re doing the right work?
Here’s a helpful idea for you: start at the end of your product development cycle and optimize for learning.
This is a question I put to nearly all the early-stage startup founders I work with…
Imagine you already have this magical product you’re dreaming of and want so badly to go and build. Now what? How do you reach your first customers? How do you get people using it? How do you know if it’s what people need or want?
Almost always, this is where you should start. Everything else is potentially bullshit. Not definitely, but potentially any other work is wasted time. And that’s the point — you don’t know yet what the right work is. The faster you learn that, the faster you’ll get to product/market fit, the less resources you’ll waste, and the more likely you’ll be to get there before you run out of time or money.
You can use Learn Startup techniques like creating landing pages and using Google or Facebook ads to test how hard it is to reach your target customers. Or maybe you plan to directly approach people in a community. What if you try these things and discover you can’t reach anyone? That has serious implications for your business and, possibly, your product, right? You didn’t have to build a product to learn that.
Make Learning the Goal
When you make learning, not building, the goal, you’ll face the hardest things first. And that’s what you should do. If you fail, you won’t fail because of your strengths, you’ll fail because of your weaknesses. But, you can control what you focus on and what work you do, so don’t let that be one of the things that defeats you.
How about a concrete example. Let’s say you have an app that gives home buyers a VR tour of properties for sale. (Hmm, interesting idea! I just made up this example, but I’m sure people are working on that.) Most founders will want to dive into building the product and focus on the buyer’s user experience. How will we display listings? We should test to learn the most popular use cases ASAP. Where will the listings come from? We’ll need MLS access and an API. How will we produce the VR content? Wow — we’re making real decisions and getting shit done! And, hey, if consumers don’t like this, that means the startup will fail, right?
But, here’s the thing — realtors and home sellers need to pay for this product for the business to succeed, too. So what’s more risky: building the consumer product and then finding out no realtor will ever pay you, or building nothing and talking to realtors and finding out they’ll never pay you? Obviously, the former. You will have wasted countless hours and dollars building something that can’t succeed as a startup. How many times can you afford to make that mistake?
So, why do people neglect to do this kind of customer development work first? Because it’s easier to do what we know. If you’re good at product, but suck at marketing, guess what work you’ll default to if you don’t make a conscious effort to do otherwise? Also, talking to customers can feel like marketing, which seems like something you’re supposed to do after you have something to offer.
There’s surely all kinds of reasons people don’t do it, and it’s a common mistake founders make. It’s easier to face smaller problems first, but if easy always worked, startups would always succeed.
If learning what to work on is the desired outcome, rarely is building your product the fastest way to learn.
Are You The Exception?
For the skeptics out there, I’ll answer this: when don’t you need to do this?
When it doesn’t matter if you fail. It doesn’t really matter sometimes if you fail or succeed. Maybe you’re making a fun side project with friends in college. Maybe your goal is to learn a new skill like coding. If you have a family to support or you’ve recruited employees to work with you, it does matter if you fail. Before you build anything, get clear about your goals and the risk involved if your project fails to become a black swan startup.
When it’s easy for you to build your product. Maybe you’re making a tool for developers and you’re a developer. There’s little risk in building your product since you can get value out of it, and that may be a fast path toward validating a market. Or maybe you have enough money that the risk is low for you to pay other people to build your product for you and find out if people want it or not.
I still recommend you start at the end. It may not be ruinously risky for you to do something else first, but you should ask yourself if that’s truly the fastest way to learn the things you need to know in order to succeed.
I’m a freelance product designer who helps startup founders learn and move faster using Lean and design tools. Looking to rent a designer co-founder? Need help thinking of how to start at the end and face the harder problems first? Get in touch.
Oh, and if you’re into startups and making your work matter, give my new podcast about remarkable startup cultures a listen: Mission & Values.
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