Author: Startup Espresso

  🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN) It’s Paul.   🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN) It’s Florin. What are we grinding today?   🐼 Well, Florin, definitely today we’re not grinding specialty coffee because since it’s a crisis, we don’t have money anymore for specialty coffee.   🐿 Yeah, we’re out of it.   🐼 So if in the previous episodes we were actually grinding specialty coffee before episodes, today we grind it just regular coffee.   🐿 We couldn’t even grind coffee. So if you’re going to be fully transparent here, unlike other people from the cyber world, we’re going to say that we just actually got ourselves a cup of coffee down at the corner and it cost almost $1.   🐼 And this is not because we are running out of money, but because during a crisis.   🐿 We wanted to support the local entrepreneurs.   🐼 And you pay attention to your spending or your costs. Now, Florin, I think it’s worth discussing in this episode a little bit. If you’re a startup nowadays during these times, what are you do? Are there some advice? I don’t know. Do you, for example, how to say, put your startup on autopilot? You make sure that your ads budgets are having access to your credit card and you go on the beach and you relax and you stay away of all the problems...

  🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN) It’s Paul.   🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN) It’s Florin. What are we grinding today? Today, we’re grinding ways to get customers for your startup.   🐼 Wait, Florin, so you actually need to find ways to get customers for your startup? So they are not coming just like that?   🐿 Oh, no, sorry, I’m wrong. This must be the wrong episode. Actually, you just have to build it and they will come.   🐼 Okay, let me refresh.   🐿 It’s okay. You just have to finish working on the product and then you’ll be super successful without any work. Spoil.   🐼 A lot of it. If you listen until the end, you will learn from Florin how to buy a Lamborghini because that’s what I hope to learn from this episode of Florin, so no pressure.   🐿 Disclaimer, that won’t happen.   🐼 Okay, maybe a small purple Lamborghini.   🐿 Okay, we’ll get to that.   🐼 Okay, now, on a serious note, Florin, let’s say you know me, I’m a tech person. Together with a friend, we built a really awesome product that solves a really important problem. So we have this product built in a strong way. It’s a nice product, easy to use, it works perfect. Now what?   🐿 That’s nice. Well, if you were to tell me, because...

  🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN) It’s Paul.   🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN) It’s Florin. What are we grinding today?   🐼 Hey, Florin, back to our validation series. And for the listeners, if you just drop to this episode and you’re new to the series, to get more context, listen to our episode with interest validation. Continuing from there, Florian, now, if you remember, I had that list with 300 mothers which are interested in my idea of doing a medical app for getting advice for your kids. Now, I’m a software developer. I know that I need to talk with people. Everybody’s telling me, talk with your customers, with your possible customers. But I know to write code, that’s easy for me. Now, I know from your five phase validation method that in the next one, which is the current one that we are talking in the episode, I need to put questions to these.   🐿 People. yeah. And I guess you’re asking, what should I ask?   🐼 Yeah, because I’m not comfortable with asking and even more asking the right questions.   🐿 Yeah, that’s the key here because you could ask any question that you want, but some of them will lead you to false positives. Some of them will lead you on a very dark path that you will never recover from. Some questions, if you ask...

  🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN) It’s Paul.   🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN) It’s Florin. What are we grinding today?   🐼 Florin, remember in the discussion that we had after we recording the episode with the hip menu acquisition by Food Panda, you were saying that you should never give up and keep doing your best in this startup world. Could you give more details about this? Because I think it would be valuable for our listeners to understand this.   🐿 Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Actually, I had this conversation with a very dear friend of mine, and she was like, I’m not sure because sometimes it feels like you should just give up. But instead, sometimes it’s like the people who don’t give up, they win. Why is that? I was like, you know the problem with giving up is it’s like you’re on a path to achieving something, something that’s absolutely impressive or unnatural or disruptive, and you know that you can get there. But then there’s going to be a lot of problems, a lot of drawbacks, a lot of things that will make you fall down. Startup life is like roller coaster ride. You go up and then you go down. When you go down, you feel like giving up. And sometimes, if you really want to achieve the end goal, you will never give up....

  🐼 PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN) It’s Paul.   🐿 FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN) It’s Florin. What are we grinding today?   🐼 Florin, should we grind today some thought about validation? Because everyone is talking about it. And you gave me a few minutes ago some good example of books and people that are talking about it. Maybe you can say them again for our listeners.   🐿 Yeah, definitely. So we have great people like Eric Riis, Steve Blank, Ash Mayura, and a bunch of other guys have written some very interesting ideas on how to validate, on actually why you need to validate everything that goes on into the process of planning your brand new business, the brand new business that you are trying to launch. And instead of going and building something that nobody wants, they all teach you that you should validate every little thing, every little aspect. And this has created a very huge market for getting people to understand how they could do those validations. Because everybody asks me at conferences, at events, they ask me, Okay, so we get it, we need to validate, but how is validation done? How do you do validation? I need to validate this really small piece of my business model. How do I go about validating this exact part? And at all the events that I’ve been to, nobody could...