Category: News

 
🐼 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 until the crisis is over.
 
🐿
I know that we keep joking, so as the episode dropped, we kept joking and stuff, but that’s a very good question, the one about autopilot. So while in usual and normal times you can leave things on autopilot and do other things, you can no longer do that during the crisis because all of your metrics are wrong. Nothing that you repeated last month can be repeated this month, and it won’t be able to be repeated next month, and you can’t actually repeat things from one week to the other. So you got to keep improving, keep implementing, keep looking at what you’re doing, and nothing can be on autopilot. Not even your drip campaigns that you keep sending on and on. They also need to be changed to address the new market conditions, and nothing will work as it used to work.
 
🐼
Florin, sorry, we’ll continue on this, but I think there might be listeners who ask themselves a drip campaign.
 
🐿
Yeah. So drip campaign is what’s called the drip email marketing campaign, the full name of it. And it’s where you have a couple of people who signed up somewhere and you keep sending emails to them in a sequence of emails. Usually when you have a winning sequence of emails, you keep sending that on and on to all the new people who come and join your audience.
 
🐼
Basically, from what you said, it’s pretty important during these times to keep an eye on them, to make adjustments here and there, so you make sure that they are working or still working?
 
🐿
Yes. Because most probably they are not going to be working anymore. It’s like it always is, right? You need to keep changing your product, adapting. Even if you’re not having a product, you’re offering a service, you need to keep adapting what you’re telling people because communication doesn’t work as well as it used to work, and people are stressed about a lot of different things and a lot of different subjects like nuclear war threats and others, and they will not be as receptive as they used to be. So if you had a conversion of 3 %, you’re not going to have that conversion anymore. And if you want to get that conversion back, you need to keep putting in hours and keep putting in work to make it work. And maybe you need to change your offer, maybe you need to change your product, maybe you need to change your branding. You could be doing a lot of different things to get the 3 % conversion back, but you will not keep having a 3 % conversion on your automated campaigns anymore.
 
🐼
I was laughing because when you said they are worried about nuclear wars, I wanted to say, or the eight dollar or how is it now?
 
🐿
The Twitter checkmark. That’s people’s greatest concern these days. Oh, man, we’re doing startup Espresso, we don’t have a blue checkmark. And if we’re going to get a blue checkmark, we’re going to end free speech forever. So we don’t want to do that.
 
🐼
But you can buy us a few coffees so that we can buy coffee and not the blue checkmark.
 
🐿
Yeah, please sponsor us so we can buy coffee from square mile again from London. And if we don’t do that, at least buy us an army of Twitter bots so we may sponsor this podcast and promote this podcast like all the other cool kids are currently doing on Twitter.
 
🐼
Now, getting back on track. Let’s say my emails are not converting as they were before.
 
🐿
I am certain that if you had emails, they will not be converting as they did before. I’m 100 % certain of this.
 
🐼
Okay. Do I drop them completely? Do I shift delete them? Do I.
 
🐿
Paste them? You can do that if you replace them with something else.
 
🐼
Okay, but I think it wouldn’t be the most best thing to actually delete them because there might be nothing wrong with them. But the fact that the things are as they are nowadays, it impacts them definitely. It might be that, I don’t know, in a few months, in a year, I don’t know when this will end, they will work again. So probably, I don’t know, an idea would be just them or just create a new one. Just pause them. Just post them. Just post them, exactly. Experiment with them from time to time.
 
🐿
That’s a good idea. Basically, you could pause your existing campaigns and try new campaigns during the times of crisis. And then when crisis is over, go back to your previous campaigns.
 
🐼
Yeah, because I think this is a trap in which quite a few are falling because you might even see, for example, churn rates increasing and you say that there are some issues with your product, which might be because I don’t know, for example, you did something, you annoyed your clients and the churn rate increased. But it might be that because they are cutting cost, your product might be one of them.
 
🐿
Yes. Churn rates definitely. I mean, at the Skurley company, we have quite a few products and we are seeing a lot of churn and in most cases it doesn’t have anything to do with the product. So if we got stressed and panicked over this, we would try and invest more in making changes and we would be using the budget for something that can’t be won. It’s inevitable that you will have churn. Now, the good news is that once the financial crisis is over, many of those people who churn right now will come back to you, especially if you keep a very active line of communication with them and you’re actually awesome to them. You keep doing great things for them via email, social media, wherever you’re communicating. If you’re using your phone, just keep calling them, keep doing what you’re doing, because when the crisis is over, they’re going to come back to you and they will still keep ignoring your competitors. So that’s one thing to do. You will see the churn coming back, so don’t get too panicked over it. Now, I guess in crisis mode, it’s a lot harder to build a product when you don’t have a stable product because you will not understand what’s going on with churn.
 
🐿
That’s why you need to invest a lot of your time in talking to customers, which you don’t usually have to do yourself as a founder, especially if you’ve got a huge company and you’ve got other people handling this stuff. But now it’s a good moment to actually get back in those trenches and talk to people because you might learn that it has nothing to do with your product, with your current pricing. They’re just shutting down their businesses and they can no longer afford to buy from you, or they’ve been laid off and they can no longer purchase because they have more pressing concerns regarding their finance.
 
🐼
Actually, it’s interesting. So you basically said that it might be hard to build a new product, but I was thinking in the same time that it might be a great opportunity because you might give it for free to your early adopters because they don’t have money enough to spend on your competition and they could help you with advice, with feedback, improving the product.
 
🐿
That’s true. I was just talking about churn, so you can test the churn and you can make decision based on churn.
 
🐼
I wanted to clarify this a little bit so that we don’t get misunderstood on this part.
 
🐿
Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of conversation that can be had around this topic. Maybe you guys are going to go to startupespresso. Live. Maybe you’re going to go in the main menu and click on the Facebook group and let’s have a conversation inside the Facebook group for entrepreneurs because it’s very interesting. You have people like Andrew Chen, who is a really smart dude in the startup area, who’s been writing essays on a lot of things that made a lot of sense and they’re still applyable today, which is very interesting because not a lot of entrepreneurs can say that they’ve written something and it’s still good today. One of his things was to actually cut some of the marketing spend where it makes sense and develop something new because then when the crisis is over, you’re going to have something new to sell and it’s going to be a new line of revenue for your business and then you’re going to easily get back on track, which is a lot smarter to do than to keep spending money on ads, for example. Of course, it depends from business to business, but it’s one avenue to build a product.
 
🐿
Now, as I’ve said, the problem with building a new product during these times is that you cannot test chart. And even if you’re going to have very low conversion rates for your paid product, it may not be that the paid product has something wrong with it. It may be, as I said, businesses are shutting down, clients are being laid off, they don’t have money to spend with you anymore. And the other part, the ones who still have some money, maybe they don’t want to spend on what you’re offering, not because they don’t need it, but because they’re currently buying shares in Amazon because they have such a low price. And it’s a great time to make investments if you have a lot of cash laying around.
 
🐼
Hopefully you’re not buying Bitcoin now.
 
🐿
Yeah, and Dodgecoin.
 
🐼
Disclaimer, this is my personal opinion only. Now, Florin, you said that you might cut costs for marketing, for example, but let’s think a little bit, is there any way, for example, for me to still making good marketing or trying a few other things regarding marketing that maybe help me, but in the same time reduce my cost. I don’t know, for example, social media, can I use it in a way in which it will help me with the sales, with being still present?
 
🐿
Yeah. So social media will definitely help you prove that you’re still active. How you… So a lot of people are now looking at companies and they’re saying that they’re having financial troubles. So if you haven’t gotten a new investment to generate buzz around your startup, then a lot of people might think that you’re already gone out of business. Now, if you manage to use social media to make, I don’t know, a new giveaway, to make some games for the community, to offer something to different communities on the web, then those people, your main audience that you haven’t converted to clients yet, they will still see that you’re still being active and they will want to do something with your business. So either promote it or start buying something from you or discussing with you about anything or offering you feedback. So a lot of things that you can still use.
 
🐼
Actually, regarding this part we’re discussing with you, I think that would be nice if, for example, you or some of your employees or your co founders are just going in, I don’t know, different groups on Facebook and giving advice based on their expertise.
 
🐿
Yeah, you should do that if it’s brandable.
 
🐼
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. As a brand, I was saying so not from their personal accounts. Not from.
 
🐿
Personal.
 
🐼
Accounts.
 
🐿
Using your brand. People are not really going to remember you. And that’s the most honest.
 
🐼
Way to say it. No, and I think this is a valuable advice that you’re given here, which I took it for granted that when you do this, you do it from the brand account and not from your personal account, because in the end you want to promote the brand.
 
🐿
The only way… I guess you could actually do it from a personal account. It doesn’t seem very branded. In the case where people, if they hear your advice, they instantly go and DM you. They direct message you. So that can happen. I’ve seen industries where this can happen. You go in with your personal account, if it’s looking good, you don’t have weird pictures on your profile and you have something that’s more maybe more professional, more professional, like an industry influencer, a thought leader. If you have something like that, people will trust you, they will believe you. And they will message you and you will actually be able to make a sale from that interaction. So that’s even better than going and promoting landing pages or blog posts or thought pieces where you then convert them via email and they join your audience or you use retargeting pixels or stuff like that. So it may be valuable. And even from a personal interaction, you may obtain leads who then bring new business.
 
🐼
To you. The only thing to take in consideration when you do this is that it will take a lot of time because you need to reply to those persons, engage in conversation. So that takes time.
 
🐿
Exactly. And you need to be active. So if you dropped your sales skills for a while, this is a good time to pick back on your sales skills.
 
🐼
Any other ways of using social media? For example, I don’t know, would you spend more on ads on social media? I know you said in the beginning of the episode, but…
 
🐿
No. So I would go to Education Cloud Plus. I would create a free account and there I would place the code called DM 10K to learn all about using hashtags on social media and also social media communities in such way that I will be able to promote my message and not get banned from the groups. So there are very clear strategies, very clear ways in which you can make people actually engage them and love the content that you post without the content looking spammy or annoying whatsoever.
 
🐼
So basically I think if I’m saying correctly, this is a course that will teach you how to use social media without blowing your budgets.
 
🐿
Definitely. It’s going to be basically your time, so it’s going to be free. Especially if your time doesn’t make a lot of money right now. There’s not a lot of cost of opportunity. It’s the perfect time to actually invest in doing.
 
🐼
Something yourself. Because that will give you results.
 
🐿
Yeah, that will give you results. And that’s what you need. So even though they’re not the best results, it’s still better than destroying the runway that you still have.
 
🐼
Ferraro, you said at some point that maybe it’s harder for you to take investment or you don’t have enough money still secured or something like that. Now, the reality is that actually it’s quite harder to take investment nowadays.
 
🐿
Yes. So I’ve learned pretty recently about something called discounted cash flow. And that thing works against you during times of crisis because any respectable VC when they invest, they are going to place discounted cash flow on the sheet when they make the investment. So usually that’s a percentage and it takes into account the financial downturn and the financial problems of the time and of the years during which the investment is supposed to bring a return. And if that return is, I don’t know, they expect to make 10 X the size of the investment in 10 years during financial crisis, and it’s very clear to everybody by now that we are during a financial downturn and that it’s going to keep going down through 2023, they’re going to have a very big modifier there. And with that modifier taken into account, they will basically expect in 10 years not a 10 X return. Maybe it will be an 11, maybe it will be a 12, maybe it will be a 15 X return. And if they actually place your next investments, your next rounds, or your next payments for the investment, and they make metrics that you need to reach or goals that you need to reach, and they place this into your contract, you’re going to be in a very bad position.
 
🐿
So you read a lot of startup news, somebody got an investment of $20 million, they didn’t get $20 million in the first day. So they’ve had multiple milestones that they needed to reach. And if they factor the discounted cash flow into this, then you’re maybe not going to be able to hit those milestones and the whole investment will fail. So it’s a lot more dangerous for you as a founder to take the investment.
 
🐼
Yeah. So I think it’s even more important to keep an eye on the cost and on the cash flow.
 
🐿
And during this time, you actually need to be certain that you’re going to make that return happen because it’s not as free floatinging money as it used to be until now.
 
🐼
And I think you can also pay a little bit of attention, for example, of your development costs or seeing, for example, if the servers that you’re using are costing way too much for basically your current usage because probably you won’t grow at the same pace as before. So you might reduce a little bit this. Now, regarding the cost of the development, I think you can keep an eye on basically the features which are not the most interesting or the most used and maybe now even more caught from there. I don’t say that you need to do this during times like this, but nowadays even more. And actually, you were saying something interesting a few days ago when we discuss about features like this. You even had the name for them.
 
🐿
Yeah, I was just thinking about the dogs. So you’re going to have features that are basically dogs. So they’re not helping you grow right now. They’re not producing a lot of money right now. And they might do something in the future, but you’re not certain. So that’s when those features that you’re currently trying to do, they are just dogs. And you need to quit investing in them. So if you have something that currently generates a lot of money, keep that on the table, milk the cow as much as you can. If you have something that you think will grow, you can still spend money on it if it keeps driving growth, but not as much money as you do on your cash cow because you currently need cash and that’s what you’re missing. So in normal times, you wouldn’t really care about the dogs because maybe you know sometimes maybe something comes out of that serendipity, all of that stuff. Sometimes just by experimenting a lot, you become lucky and you find a new feature that’s going to drive most of your growth. Maybe you make a spin off, maybe you make a new product.
 
🐿
You can do a lot of things with the dogs and that can be done. We’ve done it countless times at the squarely company and we’re very lucky to be able to keep experimenting. And that’s how we kept growing and reaching the point where we are today, because without doing that, we would have died a long time ago. But during times of crisis, you only need to care about the cash cow, keep investing in that, making sure that that keeps working perfectly, do any tweaks you need to do to the cash cow, and then focus a little bit on growth. And if you have something that seems really nice and in the future will grow really well and you’re super excited about it, just pause it for a while and start doing that only after the crisis is over. So you need something that’s certain and that’s right now. It doesn’t mean that you need to change other things, like you don’t want to reduce the amount of time you spend on branding because branding is long term. You don’t have to destroy that just for the short term. But in terms of features, the features that would be really cool in the future, maybe not invest in them right now because now you need something else.
 
🐼
But keep in mind that it’s good to stick to your roadmap and to the future. each year is which are important because you don’t want in a year from now to actually have a product which is bringing no added value anymore. It’s still the same product because you just milk that cow.
 
🐿
That’s why I’m saying that you need to think about the features that are bringing growth.
 
🐼
At the moment. I think this is very important to keep in mind. Something that could bring.
 
🐿
Growth, something that is already bringing growth and just really focus on that.
 
🐼
Yeah, and also I think it’s really nice because you also said about experimenting, to try to experiment with different things in your product to see if something might increase conversion or help you with sales inside your product. For example, it can be, I don’t know, a nice offer which is not intrusive and all these small experiments that you can do without affecting the user experience.
 
🐿
Yes, and there’s a very good way to do that. We’ve done this on Education Cloud Plus quite a lot of times now, and it worked in getting us Premium Pass members to actually pay for Education Cloud Plus to get access to all the courses inside. And how we’ve done this is we didn’t go and say, We have this great offer. Come and join Premium Pass now. It’s the best price you’ll ever get. And none of that stuff. So we just offered immense value in the emails. The emails got the users to the platform. They logged in or they signed up. They had their free accounts. And while they were playing around with their free accounts and the information we provided via email, they saw an offer which they could click to go and buy. And it was very non intrusive. All of the marketing and communication was made for helpful stuff. And once they enter the platform, they could see something that’s very small. And if they want, they click it. If they don’t want, they don’t click it. It’s that easy. They’re not being pushed for a sale. And that actually generates great sales even during times of crisis, because if you get somebody from their email, from their inbox, and you say, You need to spend money, they’re going to be like, I don’t need to spend money.
 
🐿
The inflation is huge. I’ve got all of these problems in my business. I’ve got all these problems at home. I need to think about electrical energy and gas for my home during the winter. So there’s a lot of things that I need to take into account. I can spend money on what you’re offering. But if you show the value first, they understand that there’s value and they could get even more value by going after something that’s discounted, then maybe they will take you up on the offer.
 
🐼
Or not, because even if it’s not an offer at that moment, you can just basically allowing them to purchase the premium subscription because they saw enough value and they decided that I want to upgrade my account. So I have an easy way to do this from the product.
 
🐿
Yeah. So hat we’re trying to suggest here is, maybe instead of doing only sales emails and sales events and product launch formulas, the love product launch formulas, but maybe they don’t have a place in the market right now because nobody gets excited about new sales because they don’t like sales at the moment. You can do things that boost your monthly active users. You get a lot more people in to your free accounts, especially because most of you are doing a lot of apps where you also have a free plan or membership sites and you can get everybody into the accounts and then they get a lot of value. And then they remember, Oh, yeah, I actually wanted to buy this. So this is actually really cool. And you’re going to stand out from all of the other desperate marketers who are targeting people’s inbox because they need to make cash. And you’re going to break through the noise and you’re going to drive people to your app, which is always great. And they might decide to buy.
 
🐼
And I think, Florian, that in the end, we need to not forget the fact that you need to provide value because if you will provide value, your users will stay with you. And I think that in these times, the ones that were great at marketing without providing value will see things going down. I love it. But if you provide enough value, I think you won’t have issues.
 
🐿
Right. So I really love the direction that this conversation is going because this is exactly it. So people will want to see you during these times. They want to see that you haven’t gone out of business, so you need to keep engaging them. Now, instead of being desperate about obtaining sales, you can do what we’ve suggested earlier, or you can do things that are enchanting. So we have a thing called enchant, where we try to enchant the audiences and we’re thinking about Taylor Swift and I feel enchanted to meet you and all of that. But the thing is that this has been the biggest driver of growth since the financial downturn started because instead of going after sales, we kept providing price drops, games, giveaways, a lot of gamification, a lot of great things to our audience. And our audience said, Well, these guys have helped me during these very hard times. So let’s see what they’re offering at the moment.
 
🐼
Will we edit this and cut you when you sing or not?
 
🐿
No, I have a great voice. I think that Tay Tay would totally love to have me on stage with her.
 
🐼
Okay. Yeah. So basically, I think this is something pretty important.
 
🐿
We play her song during every meeting that we have on the Enchant segment, so she’s a very important person.
 
🐼
I think I’m getting older. But yeah, I think that if you provide value, you won’t have so much of a big issue as if you’re not. Because if until now people were not really careful where they were spending money, now they might be, and they actually are.
 
🐿
Yeah, and we have I mean, as people, we have lots of different problems every single day due to the financial downturn and everything else that comes along with it and that determines the financial downturn. So when we see that there’s just a bunch of people going after our money, we’re not really happy about it, are we? But if we see that somebody still keeps offering value and we keep engaging with their emails, you know, they become top of mind and they can’t lose the top of mind even though the invasion still continues and more wars are about to start at the moment. And even if those things are happening, we still care about the people who are currently trying to provide value and they’re doing their best to help us and we will never forget them. So this is interesting to see because if you’re the guy who just pops up and just tries selling, selling, selling, selling, we will instantly forget you. No matter who you are, we will forget you. And you’re going to become completely irrelevant when people are going to see your emails in their inboxes, your ads on Facebook, your messages on social media.
 
🐿
They’re going to instantly disconnect. But if you can keep providing value and finding new ways to provide value during these times, you’re going to make money during the prices. And after the crisis is over, a lot of the people who churned right now, they’re going to come back to you.
 
🐼
I think Florin wants a musical career because he was beating the drums also. So if you hear something, it’s Florin trying to do drums while he sings.
 
🐿
I used to be a drummer, so yeah, bad habits.
 
🐼
Florian, anything else that you think we should tackle? Because I think there was quite some good information here and I think it would be really nice to see what our listeners are also doing now. So I think it would worth seeing their tips or their advice on the Facebook group.
 
🐿
I think they should go to startupespresso. Live. They should go and click on the Facebook group and join us in a conversation to see how many of them are doing ads, how many are trying to acquire new users, how many are trying to reactivate older users, and how many of them are still engaging in constant conversations with their audiences. So I think it’s going to be interesting for everybody to see and for everybody to talk about this so that all of us as a community of startup founders and entrepreneurs can learn more about options for our businesses.
 
🐼
Drop your messages and start conversations or reply to conversations on the Facebook group. And until next time, drink good coffee, but.
 
🐿
Even more. Yeah, let’s grind better coffee next time.
 
🐼
Pay attention to your startup and invest the time in it. See you next time. See.
 

 
🐼 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 at all these things I need to know, like your particular use case or what you’re going to try to use it for or how many customers you need to get. So in your opinion, how many customers or users would you need to get?
 
🐼
Let’s say I just build a product based on a problem that I have. A couple of my friends are having that problem and I actually need, I don’t know, I think in the beginning I need, let’s say, 3,000 users, 10K.
 
🐿
Yeah, that’s a lot. Everybody would like to have those numbers, right?
 
🐼
You’re smiling so I shouldn’t start at those numbers?
 
🐿
No, I don’t think so. Basically because you don’t have an existing customer base. You don’t have paying customers, right?
 
🐼
Well, I have my friends that are using the product and they are telling me that they are willing to pay for it, but not paying.
 
🐿
All right. So then we should start from, let’s say, the first 25 users. How do we get the first 25 users? It depends. If it’s users or customers, maybe the first time around it’s 25 users. Then you have 50 users, and then you will need to focus on getting 50 customers, and then move on from that to 100 customers to 1,000 customers, and then sky is the limit depending on the app.
 
🐼
So this is very interesting. to swing. So you’re telling me that actually the first users who are using my product, but they are not paying for it, I can’t consider them customer. So I don’t actually validate you that I can sell my product.
 
🐿
Yeah, exactly. You don’t even know the usage. How often will they use the product? Will they use it daily? Will they use it on a weekly basis? Are they going to drop using it after three months into the app? After three months, maybe don’t offer enough value and they will just stop using it. So all of these things need to be taken into account. So that’s why maybe first you need users to actually use the product and then to start getting customers. Once you see that users actually like it.
 
🐼
Okay, so those 50 initial paying customers.
 
🐿
I think we can make a whole episode about it. I think that in different stages, we can make different episodes and just talk on an individual episode level on how to get those. But normally, if you want to get customers, you should start with things like… Actually, nobody knows the answers to that. But for the first 25, what I can tell you is that you can definitely go to LinkedIn, to networking meetings, to book clubs if you’re selling something related to books and authors. You can go to coffee shops if you’re selling something related to coffee or that industry. So it really depends on where you can find the most people who are passionate about the subject you’re talking about.
 
🐼
Can we call them some direct sales? It’s actually investing, I guess you invest a lot of time for this.
 
🐿
Yeah, you would invest a lot of time for this. So the first 25 customers, you could even acquire them easily I mean, get them easily to join your startup, but it would be a lot of wasted time because you have to spend a lot of time with them to get a lot of learning so that you can build a better product so that you can attract the first 50 customers. So you need to be able to move from 25 to 50, and then you need to start making those people to actually pay for the product, which is a whole different thing, and you need different things for this. But in the first case, if you want to get customers, the best way would be to go where your customers are and just basically invite them over for coffee, tea, or beer, or whatever, and just discuss about the problems like we talked in the validation episodes, right?
 
🐼
Yeah. So if you want to listen that, just go listen the validation episode and then maybe get back to this or listen this and then go and listen that episode also. Okay. So that’s one way of actually acquiring some customers initially. Now we know that actually as you grow, you need to increase the numbers. But maybe in a future episode, we can discuss, as you said, how you can get your first, I don’t know, 25, 50, 100, and so on.
 
🐿
Yeah, I think it’s going to be interesting to see how you can do it step by step. I mean, step by step is the best way, especially if this is your first startup, or if it’s a startup that has only one product. When you have more products, maybe it’s going to be much easier to get customers for all of the products than it is for when you have just one company with one product. But if you’re a company with one company with one product, then you definitely need to go through those steps. Otherwise, there’s ways to get customers. There are lots of ways.
 
🐼
Another way is that I hear a lot of it. I make a blog, I write content about it, and everyone will pay for my product that I advertise on my landing page or blog.
 
🐿
This is like the biggest myth that’s been popping around everywhere on podcasts and videos, even online training programs. A lot of people will tell other people that, Hey, you have a startup so you need to start blogging. So it’s like blogging about what? Even better, how often will you blog? Because a lot of people are like, Okay, so you’ve built a startup, you will create two blog articles this month and you’ll be successful. And I will go to those people and I’ll be like, Damn son, teach me how to do that. Because I really don’t know anybody who’s ever done this. And it sounds so far fetched. I mean, this could work if you have an audience like if you’re Rihanna and you have 100 followers on Twitter, then you’re definitely going to write a blog post and people are going to buy. But we’re not talking about Rihanna here, we’re talking about a startup that’s basically starting up and starting from scratch. It doesn’t have following and stuff like that. So if you don’t have following, then you shouldn’t focus your energies on writing two very great blog posts that nobody will ever read.
 
🐿
Because what it turns out is, if you have a blog post, it’s the same as having a product. For a blog to be read by people, it needs to get to people. So how will you get that blog post to people?
 
🐼
Seo. I pay an expert to do SEO for it.
 
🐿
That’s a perfect way to waste money.
 
🐼
And you’ll be paying an SEO expert to bring me sales?
 
🐿
Yeah. Well, there are multiple aspects of this because, for example, you can pay the SEO expert to drive sales, but the SEO expert will drive traffic to the site and a lot of people will come and see the site, read the content and the stuff you offer. But your conversion rate optimization is busted, then you don’t have product market fit and then nobody will buy and you will instantly place the blame on the SEO guy for your insuccess, but it’s not his fault, it’s your fault because you don’t have validation and you didn’t reach the steps until you get 100 paying customers. So until you do that, that’s what you need to do. You don’t need to go and do SEO on a blog because you don’t really know what you’re doing. Now, how you could use that, the SEO guy and the SEO stuff, and maybe a lot of content, maybe 100 or 200 pages on the site, is to actually use it to get traffic and then make pop ups and stuff for the people visiting so that they start subscribing to a place where you teach them about the solution you’ve created.
 
🐼
Nice. So you actually grind them to say like that.
 
🐿
Yeah, exactly. That’s good.
 
🐼
They’re paying for your product.
 
🐿
Exactly. You don’t really want to go directly into sales. What I’ve seen other teams doing is actually they’ve used the SEO guys to drive leads for the sales team, and then nobody was successful and it wasn’t the fault of the sales team or the SEO guy because there wasn’t a process for the sales team to follow because the product couldn’t be sold because the product wasn’t buyable. So it’s not the salesperson’s fault that nobody will buy the product. So that’s why founders in the early stages, they should be the ones doing the sales, the SEO and doing everything because they need to get a working model first. That’s why we call them MVPs. I mean, it’s a working model, but it’s like a working model for the whole business, not just for the product. So when you have a working model that’s done by the founders, then you can start scaling the team, adding in experts for SEO, adding bloggers, writers, salespeople, and other marketing stuff.
 
🐼
The next one, and I see it quite often. I have the user persona that I assume I made it for my startup, so I know who’s my target audience. I have money and I go on Facebook and try to target that persona with quotes, to say like that. I invest money in Facebook ads, or Google ads, or YouTube ads, or whatever ads.
 
🐿
It really depends on the type of business. If you’re in a market where there is not a very well perceived notion that people need your product, you shouldn’t do sales on Facebook and Google. You shouldn’t do ads on Google and Facebook. On the other hand, if you’re starting a saloon or maybe a car shop, an auto shop, then you would definitely want to try to do ads and Facebook ads and Google ads and stuff like that because it would directly help you increase your sales because people already know that you’re one of the guys in town who does that. So obviously they will be interested in trying your service, especially if it’s close to them and for other related matters. But if it’s like a real innovation, you won’t get your real innovation being bought and purchased by other people by doing these ads, especially in the first stages of the serve. You might get to this after you’ve completely validated and obtain product market fit. But pre product market fit, you should usually stay away from ads. Now, there’s a lot of people that say you should go for ads and somebody was successful, but nobody was successful and they were just churning out money and their investors should basically punish them.
 
🐼
Okay, I’m assuming for a certain stage, as you said, probably this makes sense because the cost are so well optimized that you can actually are making money from.
 
🐿
Those ads. Exactly. And you have so many metrics in place that make the whole thing to make sense for your business.
 
🐼
Actually, regarding the metrics, and I will deviate a little bit from making money, but actually, what metric would you suggest to actually look? Is it like the amount of money that I’m making every month? The total amount of money that I made?
 
🐿
It’s the money that you’ve earned per customer versus how much it costs you to bring that customer in.
 
🐼
Okay. Should I look, I don’t know, month over month, how much that customer brings me?
 
🐿
You should look at an individual level and have every user… This is the best case scenario, right? Where you have every user, you know exactly the source that brought you that user. So if it was paid ads or if it was SEO, if it was SEO, if it was content, or social media or email marketing, or I know influencer stuff. So how did you get that user? How did you get that customer? Then that customer ended up paying now, how much money did they spend with your company? And that’s like the total lifetime value. That’s the lifetime value, how much time the customer spent with the company and paying the products of the company. So basically you would have lifetime value of maybe $300 or $1,000 or something like that. And then you need to place this and see how much money it costs you to bring one of those people. And if you have lifetime value of $100, because that’s the case for a lot of startups, especially in the early stages, you have $100 lifetime value and you pay $200 to bring users and you have conversion rates. So basically you actually need to spend $200 because before you can bring somebody to pay and the average amount that somebody will pay you is $100, then you’re busting $100 per customer.
 
🐿
Every single time you bring a new customer, you have huge losses. So that’s easily going to want to reflect poorly on every report that you make.
 
🐼
So if I understand correctly, I need to pay attention how much money each customer brings me, how much it costs me, and I need to do this per channel to say like that. Now, what that channel would be, we can see also because we currently discuss about ads, content marketing, or that SEO specialist. But in the end it cost me because if I pay him or her $1,000 and brings me a user who give me $100. So I spent a lot of wasted money from.
 
🐿
This perspective. Exactly. So they may even bring you a lot of traffic, but none of that traffic converts to paying customer, then it doesn’t really matter that they’ve managed to do their job. It still won’t help you because that channel doesn’t work for your business. And this is the thing. There are lots of businesses. I started an online store at one point. I only did SEO. I didn’t do anything else. Nothing. We didn’t even have Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and stuff like that. And we were making money because we were on Google for every single item that we’ve had inside the store. And we’ve made money from day one when we had the products and we got indexed by Google because people were already searching for that stuff. We were on the first page and they entered and they bought and everybody was happy. So our cost to acquire those customers was like very cheap because initially we spent some time creating the content, but then once it was created, we didn’t spend any more time and money on the content to keep it running. Now, when you do ads, you need to constantly pay for ads.
 
🐿
But with SEO, you pay once and then you can start getting lots of results. Of course, it depends a lot on many different aspectsthat we don’t have time to discuss on a single podcast, but that’s what we’ve done and it worked. But I’m telling you, for other businesses, they will do SEO, they will do it as well as with it, and it will not work for them. So it really depends on a business to business case. And that’s why usually when you have growth hackers in your team and people who are oriented on growth, they will try to identify channels that work for your startup. Not all channels will work. Maybe you will have only one channel that will work and then you will spend five years not being able to find another channel that will work. So there are multiple types of channels. A channel means a way to get a customer like SEO or driving traffic via social media, email marketing or Google ads. But it might not work for your particular startup. So I’ve seen startups that only had success, real success, once they did TV ads. And you’re saying, TV ads?
 
🐿
Who does TV ads? And they were successful only with TV ads. So that was their biggest engine of growth for their company, the TV ads. And don’t expect this. I wouldn’t do this, ever. But they’ve done it and it worked.
 
🐼
I would do it if I make enough money to buy a Lamborghini.
 
🐿
Definitely. But you would have to place the price of maybe 30 Lamborghinis to actually find a working model even for that channel.
 
🐼
Speaking about growth hackers, I know that at the end of episode, you have a surprise for our listeners, like a code that will give them access to a couple of marketing hacks on a very nice platform.
 
🐿
Yeah, actually, they should just read the description inside the video, like the description of the podcast. So the description of the podcast and they will find the link towards the platform and also the code that will give them access to 151 hacks to be used to grow your startup. So it’s super interesting because you’ve got a lot of different ideas on what to try for all the kinds of channels that you would ever think of. So ways to get in touch with potential partners, way to get more customers, ways to be awesome on social media and attract attention, ways to do advertising with very little budget spend. And it’s a super great collection of 151 hacks.
 
🐼
What I think is nice to mention is that they’re actually validated. So they were used and not written.
 
🐿
Yeah, that’s true. Basically, you will learn from startups actually apply them. And some of them we’ve applied ourselves and we’re successful using those methods. So you get stuff from Zappier, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Neil Patel. Then you get a lot of stuff from other agencies and all sorts of different companies who are successful using those methods. And we tell you exactly how much success they had and how they’ve done it.
 
🐼
You mentioned at some point about influencers. I will make the subject a little bit more broad to say like that. So I would call them affiliation. Should I use affiliation as a startup? And if so, when?
 
🐿
After product market fit, as always. But there’s also a way to use influencers before the product market fit, and you can use it as an engine to drive product market fit, basically. So it’s really pretty broad. Affiliate marketing is pretty broad. There are many types of affiliates. So even like influencer marketing, it could very well be a affiliation, but not like a classic affiliate marketer. So your influencer might be an affiliate marketer, might be your affiliate marketer, might be the affiliate marketer of a third party who worked with you, or the influencer might be somebody that you actually end up partnering up with on a real partnership level, not through a platform that divides commissions. So it’s really tricky to define this. Maybe we should have a whole episode just on this subject because I know that influencer marketing is very popular these days.
 
🐼
And everyone is an influencer.
 
🐿
Yeah, and everyone. Everybody is an influencer. But you can definitely use influencers before product market fit. If you, for example, use them to drive hype towards a landing page that talks about your launch event. So if you prepare a launch event and a product launch formula, I think that we keep mentioning the product launch formula on the podcast, but if you do that, then you can be insanely successful if you have people driving other people towards your launch. That’s basically how we launched squarely SEO. So we’ve done 100 people who got tickets to our event or launch event. We got them ourselves. And one of our influencers, who is also an investor, brought us 300 people. So we’ve managed to gather 100. And because this guy was an influencer and he was super popular, he brought 300 people who ended up using the product, given us feedback. And then after we launched the stable version, they bought the product.
 
🐼
So I think this is very important to have someone from that industry, from that problem space, who’s an authority there. If it recommends you.
 
🐿
Then you’re awesome. I agree. Actually, when you’re looking at an influencer like we did, we already knew that he was a very big authority in that field and especially in that country in Germany. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have worked. I mean, if we just took a random blogger or a random YouTubers, it might not have worked. He was an authority. So I know that there are YouTubers who are authorities. Now, those are the YouTubers that you need to target. I may get, I know, 1,000 or 10,000 views on a video, but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to be the perfect channel to promote your product, right? So you need to figure out if that’s the right audience and if that audience would think that that person is an authority in the field because otherwise it just won’t work.
 
🐼
I completely agree on this. But I know you said that we were discussing in another episode about affiliation, influencer marketing and everything. But if you would be, let’s say, to name one affiliation platform, let’s say I definitely need to do affiliation marketing for my startup, I’m in that position. Now, should I build my own affiliation platform? I don’t know. Should I go somewhere to do this? What would you recommend in this space? I know how to.
 
🐿
Recommend this because we’ve done three completely different types. So we’ve completely built our custom affiliation platform. Then we’ve used the paid affiliation platform where we pay a monthly subscription so that they give us access to their system so that we can invite affiliates who will join our program, which is a hybrid between building a custom thing and going to a marketplace where they have affiliates. And we’ve also went to a marketplace that has affiliates. So what I can tell you is that usually the marketplaces that have affiliates are actually the ones that actually work. So if you go to the AveneGate affiliate network, or if you go to ShareA sale, their affiliate network, they are usually very hard to understand. You need to spend a lot of time researching and finding out how those things work. But once you do, they will actually bring you people. And if you have some validation for the product, they will bring you customers. It depends, of course, on a lot of things. Sometimes they will bring you lots of customers and you make a lot of money. Otherwise, they will just bring you some customers. So there’s not guaranteed recipe for success.
 
🐿
It depends on a lot of things. Even like being on share sale, you need to know how to convince affiliates to join your program. So then you need the product market fit between your product and the affiliates because you’re basically telling your affiliates to invest time and money into your products and it’s like almost the same as getting customers. So you need to make sure that everything looks good for the affiliates and to do validation with affiliates because otherwise they will not love your program anyway.
 
🐼
Yeah, because in the end, if you have an awesome product with an awesome affiliation program, but they’re in the same place, nobody knows about them, then it comes the question, do I promote the affiliation program? Do I promote my product? I think the take away, it’s actually that there is no silver bullet. So actually it depends a lot on what stage you are with your product and with your startup. And for this, you need to apply.
 
🐿
Different.
 
🐼
Strategies to call them like this. But I don’t know, do you think there will be something else that we should mention, or you should pay attention as a founder when you try to find ways to acquire customers.
 
🐿
Yes. O ne of the most helpful things that I’ve ever studied was a thing called what’s happening inside your business, like who are the key players, what’s required to do something related to your business? F or example, of course, I will give my example with Squirly. In order to deliver our software as a service that’s also a plug in, we usually go and tackle the plug in side. In our case, we will look at… Okay, so somebody will take the plug in. Once they get the plug in, they will go to our software as a service. Awesome. So so what do we do? Well, who’s the customer? Well, the customer is business people, small business owners that’s like 66 % of our whole market. And basically these business people, they go to different events, they listen to different podcasts, they go to different meetings, they hang out somewhere, maybe they read different magazines, and those are your acquisition channels. So if you’re thinking about ways to get customers, think about how you can get in front of those people who you know will buy your product by using the things that you know about them. So you need to do a lot of customer profiling.
 
🐿
But in the case of the plug in, for example, it’s a lot easier because in order to have a WordPress site, you usually need to have a developer. So then we can basically think, where do we find developers? Because if we get a developer, the developer will get us customers. So where do developers hang out? What do they do? Do they go to meetings? Do they attend different events, conferences? Do they listen to podcasts? They read different blogs. They read a magazine. Do they have favorite places to hang out? Maybe it’s not Twitter, maybe it’s Discord, or maybe it’s Facebook and not LinkedIn because nobody uses LinkedIn because everybody wants to recruit you if you’re a developer. So it depends on a lot of things. Then once you have a developer, you need hosting. So you need to go to hosting companies and think about how do I find hosting companies? Where do they spend their time? What do they look at? And this is the thing. You want to get in front of your customer. There are multiple ways to think about getting customers by actually thinking, how can I get in front of my ideal customer, which is a fancy way of saying, who’s the dude that’s going to buy my stuff?
 
🐿
And basically, once you know that, once you have that profile, then you can go and see how you can get in front of that particular person. And if you have multiple persons, then you definitely need to think how you can reach all of those individuals. And in order to reach them, you need to figure out where they spend time, what do they read, what do they listen to, what do they watch. And once you know this, and who do they listen to? Because as you said with authority, who do they listen to? And once you have this figured out, you can figure out a lot of ways to get customers for your startup.
 
🐼
Yeah, I think it’s a very good advice. And it should be the take away, I think, of this episode.
 
🐿
Yeah, definitely. Because this solves the problem of should I do ads? Well, if your customer doesn’t spend time googling stuff every day, then you shouldn’t do ads because they won’t see your ad because they’re not actively searching for solutions. But if you’re a car repair store or something like that, and you know that people are usually searching for how do I repair my car in this particular area, or I need to find an Indian restaurant in Los Angeles, then you can definitely do ads. But if it doesn’t make sense for your customer because the customer won’t look there, then it also doesn’t make sense for your business. So this basically replies to, Okay, so you’ve talked about many different channels. Now, how do I find out which channels I should tackle first? Well, think about the customer and think about how you can get in front of that customer, and that will be your first thing.
 
🐼
Yeah, because I think there is a point in which it makes sense to do a product hunt campaign. It makes sense, I don’t know, to do Facebook ads if you’re at a certain level. Definitely. If you’re an e-commerce website, probably it makes sense to do Google ads or SEO for the products because people will buy that product and will search for that product. I think there are a lot of ways in which you can do this. It’s very important to apply the right strategy at the.
 
🐿
Right time. Yeah, exactly, at the right time. Even if you’ve done some super hyper localized campaign where you attracted a lot of people that you need to attract and they came to your site. It only makes sense that you would start Facebook ads and Google ads to those people because you know that there’s already interest from their part and maybe you can reach out to them later by ads or invite them to your email list so that you can reach them via ads and email as well. And that’s how you will get customers using these methods. And you can even do this in the early stages before validation, basically, because you know that they’ve already had interest, they didn’t decide to do anything, maybe not bring them to buy a product, but maybe get them to, I don’t know, download an eBook, get their email address, get some contacts, download the report or download the course, get them signed up for something. And then you can This will be your users and they are genuine users that you’ve reached via ads, and you will also get something out of that. So it won’t be wasted money.
 
🐼
And I was just thinking now, and I think we can make a whole episode at least about should I start local? Should I start international from the beginning? Do I focus on a market, conquer it, and go international? Do I apply the Facebook model? I think there can be a lot of discussion around this also.
 
🐿
Yeah, that’s actually very interesting because Facebook at first, they didn’t even want to go to other different states. They just wanted to stay in one state and that’s it.
 
🐼
Yeah. So I think there can be an entire discussion about this. When it makes sense to go wild from the beginning or start small and then conquer that market and go to the next one and so on and so on. Because, for example, I just thinking it might be at some point, you white label your solution, you do all these stuff.
 
🐿
But again, it depends a lot on the… Yeah, definitely. You can also white label the solution. And that’s a way to get customers. And you can get tons of customers by using that method.
 
🐼
Any other thoughts?
 
🐿
Well, I think that there’s going to be other thoughts on the other episodes. I was just thinking now that I didn’t talk anything about partnerships, right? Yeah. Did we mention partnerships?
 
🐼
No. It’s sad only that you could do some partnership, but I think we should go a little bit into them.
 
🐿
Yeah, so partnerships. The best way to think about them is now that you know what your customers, your ideal customers are looking at and how it can get in front of them, you need to think, who are those individuals that already have the interest of my people, of my ideal customers? So who are they? And if you can identify them, then start offering different types of partnerships to those people because they already have your audience. Maybe they’re selling other kinds of products that make sense for them. Maybe they have an email list with all your ideal customers. Does it make sense to build your own email list? Maybe. But those guys already have the email list with all your ideal customers. So why not reach out to them and tell them, Hey, we can do an email blast together and we can split the commissions that we get out of all the sales. And that’s a great starting point. And then we can definitely do an episode only about this.
 
🐼
I think you can call this a hack. And I think that material that they find on the education cloud about those hacks definitely can be applied in different.
 
🐿
Stages of a startup. Yes, we basically call them hacks because it’s a very neat idea that was tested and it was basically decomposed. So it was put together by somebody, but then it was decomposed and explained every bit of it, how it works and why it worked. And that’s what you’ll find inside the education cloud if you click the link and you get the code.
 
🐼
So don’t forget, click on the link in the description, enter the code found in the description, and you will get access for free actually, right?
 
🐿
Yeah, to the whole thing. So to all of the hacks, to all of the great.
 
🐼
Marketing ideas. Awesome. I really hope that you found this helpful. At least for me, I think I’m closer to buy.
 
🐿
That Lamborghini. Yeah, because of the TV ads.
 
🐼
Actually, if I will manage to buy a Lamborghini from TV ads, I would definitely come back and make an episode about how I made ads.
 
🐿
That would be nice. That would actually be nice. This was a light roast of everything that we’ve discussed according to ways to get customers. But then that would be a really heavy roast, a very dark roast on how you got a Lamborghini by doing TV ads.
 
🐼
Now, seriously, try to apply the right strategy for the time that you are at and let us know if you want to hear us talking about other methods that work for us or for other people that we know. Do this in our Facebook group.
 
🐿
You can join the Facebook group by going to startupespresso. Live and you will find the link to the Facebook group on top of the site.
 
🐼
And if we are enough, maybe we’ll convince Florin to tell us how we can buy.
 
🐿
A Lamborghini. Yeah.
 
🐼
Speak to you next.
 

 
🐼 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 them, you will get fun responses, fun replies. You will feel good about having a conversation, and then you go home and you’ve learned nothing. So the idea is how can you ask questions in such way that you will validate true intent of that certain customer and their true desires? And people, they can never tell you what they want or what they need. They can never say that. They can never place it into words because if they could do that, then you would be out of a job as a business developer or as an entrepreneur because if they could realize what they need, they would build it themselves. But you build it for them to serve them because you find better ways of helping them out with the problem that they have. They can’t do it themselves. That’s why they can never tell you, Well, you know what I would like?
 
🐿
I would like this. And then you just go and build that and you’re super successful. Because if it were that easy, everybody would be super successful.
 
🐼
I totally agree with this. So can you give me some specific example? What should I ask those person from my list?
 
🐿
Yeah. So the people from your list, they signed up because they had a specific problem that they need solving, or they have a certain need that is currently unfulfilled. In your case, there’s a bunch of parents who don’t know exactly where they should find really solid advice related to how they raise their children or how they offer them any medical assistance in cases of fever or other or other problems that they might experience. Of course, everybody knows that they would go to the internet to look for advice, but you shouldn’t be so cocky about thinking that all of those mothers go to the internet to seek out advice because many mothers these days, they know that internet advice is crap and they don’t believe it anymore. So in order to get out of your own head and really start seeing what’s out there in the world and you already have 300 people that you could ask questions, these are the questions you should be asking. What do you think about problem? Now in your case.
 
🐼
That would be, what do you think about the mothers which are not finding validated medical advice for their kids?
 
🐿
Yeah. And if you think about it more, you could even formulate it in such way that, what do you think about getting medical advice for your children?
 
🐼
Okay.
 
🐿
What do you think about this? How often do you interact with this need of knowing how to get medical advice for your children? How often do you feel that you need this? Have you ever talked to other people about receiving medical advice for your children or helping them out or anything that’s related to this stuff? So this is usually why I just say have you talked to other people about problem? Because it all depends on the problem that you’ve identified and that they can relate to. Then there’s also, are you actively looking for a solution to bypass the problem? In this case, in getting medical advice, one of the solutions may be to look out to the internet to see blogs and forums and personal ideas. Or another way to bypass it, you could learn from the mothers, would be that instead of going to the doctor themselves, they would just rather ask a friend who’s also a mother and who recently went and sort out medical advice.
 
🐼
Basically, I need to see what is their opinion about the problem, how often do they get the problem, if there are other mothers that they are talking about with this person about the problem, so other person, mothers or something like that. I f they have some a shortcut that helped them to currently solve with the codes, the problem that bypassing that you’re referring at.
 
🐿
Yeah, because your clients will always be very creative, even if you believe that or not. They will always have different ideas that they have on how they can bypass the problem. Because as humans, this is what we tend to do. Instead of facing something that heads on when we can’t do that, we just think, What’s the shortest route to take? How can we bypass this? How can we skip around? How can we bend these rules to get to the certain thing that we need? And if you ask them, you will get so much great and valuable insight which can totally shape the next steps of you building your business.
 
🐼
Let’s say I pull these questions. I have valuable feedback that I have it in notes written now.
 
🐿
Are.
 
🐼
There any other questions that you would advise me and also the listeners that they can ask?
 
🐿
Yeah. Now, these are also very important and some of them might be even more important than the other ones because two of these questions will validate the magnitude of the problem. Does it keep you up at night?
 
🐼
What does it mean if it keeps you up at night?
 
🐿
Do you always find yourself thinking that you need faster, greater, or cheaper, or maybe on the spot, like, if I need this right now, I need to get this right now. Do you often find yourself thinking about it? So as a mother, if you have certain issues, something scares you about your child’s health, how do you relate to that? So let’s say that your child has a fever right now. Can you really sleep that night? What would you like to happen? Just listen to the answers. You don’t have to imply any answer, but maybe the answers that you will hear is like, No, I really can’t sleep at night. Because in this case, it might actually be this. It might be literally that they can’t sleep at night thinking about how they can get the medical advice. So that’s why in some countries there are hot lines on which you can call to solve this problem. And you should know if it keeps them up at night. And if it does, and they usually find themselves thinking about solving this problem, then you’ve got a very clear market. And now there’s another one that’s important.
 
🐿
Is it one of your top three problems right now?
 
🐼
Okay, so if the problem is now in the top of priorities that I need to solve. Yeah.
 
🐿
And for you, it might make sense because your target customer has recently just become a mother and that completely changed her life. It changed, especially if it’s for the first time, it completely changed her life and disrupted her day to day life and everything like that. So you might have a really huge chance of being in her top three problems.
 
🐼
Right now. If each of the problem is not in the top three problems that my user are having, should I found the top three? Basically, what are the problems more important than the one that I’m trying to solve in order to get the entire context?
 
🐿
Especially if you know that this is the target market that you need to serve, then maybe you will not work on your 10th idea, the idea that’s ranking only on the 10th position in their heads. Maybe you can find a third or a second problem that they always have, and maybe you can focus on finding solutions to that other problem which is in the top three.
 
🐼
Actually, it’s interesting because with this question, I might focus on the problem that I’m trying to solve, which is a small problem for them, but seeing that the majority of the users that I’m trying to serve are actually having another problem that I didn’t know about, but just asking them what are their top three problems right now that they’re trying to solve and I actually found a better problem to solve.
 
🐼
This.
 
🐿
Might be very good for you. If you ever go and find this type of information, you are working on something that’s ranked only on the 10th position, but you’ve also stumbled on something that’s one of their top three problems right now, maybe you should build what’s in the top three problems because you already have 300 people interested for which you will solve a really interesting thing and that might lead you to a much faster route to you receiving money in your bank account.
 
🐼
Interesting. Does it matter for me if anyone else tried to solve that problem? Should I ask this?
 
🐿
Yes. This will yield a lot of valuable data, so it will not necessarily tell you if there’s a direct competitor, but there are many direct competitors and you should totally look out for indirect competitors. Even if the only piece of information you will get is, Yeah, so the way I’m solving this right now is through an Excel file because it’s usually Excel files. But there may be some other thing that you have never thought about which will give you so much valuable information into your market and how they think and how they relate to the problem that it will totally help you build a better business and a better product for those customers. And the question is, to ask them is, is there anyone out there trying to solve this for you right now? And trust me, if there is, your customers will know about them. So when you pitch to investors, you will always say, No, we have no competition. We have never had competitors. There are no competitors. We are the only smart guys in this room. Only we thought about doing this.
 
🐼
And outside of this room, not only the smart guys in this room.
 
🐿
Yeah. Your customers will know them. And if your customers don’t know them, that’s even better for you. And that’s something that you could totally brag about to your investors because then you would clearly show them that your customers are unaware of any other solutions, which is a really great point to be at because… Let’s see, for example, we went into the social media space with my company because we’ve realized that nobody knew what the buffer was or what the hood suite was. And we were like, Is that even possible? Because those guys have been around for as long as the internet has been around and there are still people who don’t know about them. And that creates a very interesting opportunity. So our user base, they never knew what the buffer was, what the hood suite was, they never knew about Meet Edgar or a lot of the platforms that we know about. They were completely blind to all of those solutions. And when we came with our solution, it was a first for them.
 
🐼
Okay, that’s really nice because actually they had the problem, but they didn’t know that someone already solved it for them because they didn’t reach them. So the opportunity for you there was to reach them faster and actually.
 
🐿
Be.
 
🐼
The first.
 
🐿
It’s really good to find a market where there isn’t any Uber yet because this is the thing. And the ride sharing thing, you have Uber and blah, blah, blah and others and you will not necessarily want to compete because everybody knows them and it’s hard. But if you go to a market where actually the customers, they don’t know who else is trying to solve this for them, that’s a huge opportunity for you to grab all of those customers because you can be a lot faster than they are.
 
🐼
Interesting. Any other ideas of what should I ask the people from my list?
 
🐿
Yeah. Is this the problem, getting medical advice in this case? Is it something that you started thinking about every waking hour, or every day, or every week, or every month, or every year? And according to this answer, you might have an idea on how your retention will look like. Because if this is something that they think about in every waking hour, then you’ll have huge retention. If it’s something like an app that reminds you to make certain checks to your car which only occur once a year, then that app will not have a lot of retention unless you have a huge fleet of cars.
 
🐼
Interesting. Actually, the answer to this question will impact also the product.
 
🐿
Yeah, it.
 
🐼
Will definitely impact the product. Because, for example, in this example that they will do the check up every year, it might be a solution to just create a reminder for them that they will pay to be reminded every year that they need to do that check up.
 
🐿
Exactly. And the only ones who will pay for this are those who have this problem every year at different dates for different assets.
 
🐼
Yeah, because if I’m trying for this person to build an app that try to get them every hour to check this, they won’t do it because it’s not something that they’re thinking about hourly.
 
🐿
Yeah.
 
🐼
Interesting.
 
🐿
Now that you will have answers for all of these questions that you’ve just asked.
 
🐼
I was just thinking now that I might be in the position which I have basically a lot of answers, but it’s blurry. I’m thinking a little bit like, okay, I need to process all this feedback in order to see if the problem is more clear for me or if it’s actually getting more confusing.
 
🐿
And trust me on this, it can actually become a lot more confusing. So you usually, it becomes much clearer. But we’ve recently stumbled upon a case building one of our products where it actually became a lot more confusing after getting all the answers because instead of getting one problem that we needed to solve, according to different use cases and types of customers that we’ve interviewed, we actually stumbled upon about four different products. So instead of building a product, we could now build four different products and all of them would work, hypothetically.
 
🐼
How would I know that the problem is well defined and I can move on? Is there something that I can check? Can I?
 
🐿
Yeah. It’s actually what we’ve also used in the confusing case to define different problems, different types of customers, and different possible solutions is like for each group, let’s say that in your case is just one group to simplify the discussion. Let’s say there is just one group. The idea is do all of them feel it? Do all of them feel that problem, feel that need? And do they feel completely different things about the problem? Because maybe all of them feel the need or the problem, but all of them think completely differently about all of the other aspects that you’ve just asked. So if all of them feel like they need medical advice, but all of them are telling you completely different things, then maybe it’s not very clear for you at the moment. It could be clearer, maybe it could be clearer, but maybe it will also be confusing. So you really need to think about that and keep it in mind whenever you’re thinking about building the solution. Because if everybody relates to the problem in the same way, that’s like your golden ticket. Because then it’s easy. Otherwise, you might have a really solid problem that you should fix, but maybe the solution will not be one solution.
 
🐿
Maybe there will be five solutions, or maybe the solution will have to be presented in very different ways to very different people.
 
🐼
Let’s assume that for this specific group, the problem is clear for all of them. They feel the same. What would you advise me to do?
 
🐿
I would advise you to move on to the next phase.
 
🐿
Okay. So the next phase will be really thinking about coming up with a solution. But we can still discuss about one more thing here. You could even ask them if there’s one thing you could change about the way you, in your case, get medical advice, especially if some of them already get medical advice in some form or another. If there’s one thing you could change about the way you get medical advice, what would it be? And this is the best question to ask in an already defined market or in a crowded market because the answer to this will give you insight into the solution that you should build.
 
🐼
It’s interesting because we started in the first phase with the interest, we validated that. Then with all these questions that you were telling me about, I defined more clear the problem. But now also you’re helping me how to ask the users so that they give me valuable feedback that will actually transform in features that I might not have even thought about them.
 
🐿
Exactly.
 
🐼
Yeah. I’m using my future customers to help me build the solution for them and not me trying to guess the features that they would need.
 
🐼
Exactly. Now, about the solution, I think we will discuss in another episode in which we’ll move to the next phase also. But if you think there are some ideas that we should share with the people because I’m thinking, for example, that we were saying that we should ask them, we should discuss with them. And probably since we’re doing the startup Express podcast, it would be nice when you discuss with them to buy them a coffee.
 
🐿
Buy them a coffee, definitely. Like you said, you could even go ahead and buy us a coffee. If you go to our website, you can see the Buy Me a Coffee link and you could also buy me a coffee for doing all of these great episodes for you, free of cost.
 
🐼
Yeah, but remember, it’s important to talk with your future customers and in these interactions to be sincere with them in order to try to solve their problem and not sell them something that won’t help them.
 
🐿
Yeah. And actually, in one of my presentations, I didn’t even touch upon this aspect, but now that you’ve started mentioning the importance of being honest and really getting to meet the people, meet them for coffee or tea. As I always say, never alcohol, never anything to do with alcohol, or otherwise you will ruin all of the results that you get from this test. But if you do get them to a nice cafe or tea place or tea house, sit down with the people, be honest, ask your questions. Don’t try to get them to buy into your idea. This is not the place for that. This is not the face for it. And most definitely, since you have a one on one interaction, try to see their body language, try to pick up their interest by thinking about it, and try to see the look in their eyes when you ask them different questions. Try to see how passionate they are about giving you their answers. Try to see if they’re like, I don’t know. I’m in medical advice, man. You ask me if I try to talk to anybody about it, I mean, why would I?
 
🐿
It’s not that interesting. You know what I mean? If you already get this, you should write this down. You should keep a note that even though the person did reply to this question, they weren’t very interested in replying to this question. They were bored. Or maybe if I ask a certain question like, Does it keep you up at night and you see a huge glow in the eyes? Oh, my God. It really keeps me up at night. I can’t stop thinking about anything else. This is what I need.
 
🐼
So unspoken feedback.
 
🐿
Yeah, unspoken feedback. You need to look at different queues like body language. Even from their posture, you can see if they’re interested in the discussion that you’re having, or if they’re just laid back and don’t care, then maybe they don’t care about you solving the problem either, or maybe they’re just tired. So sometimes you can also have that. But if they’re really passionate about the problem and this need and they really want a solution, you will learn that from their body language, from eye contact, from other things. And because you need eye contact and you need the body language, you should also try to inspire as much honesty as you can and not be like one of those shady salesman who try to get you to buy something that you don’t need. So you really need to make them feel very confident in talking about this to you, I mean with you. But to do this, the best way to do it is through honesty.
 
🐼
What I also saw in the interaction that I had with my customers in the previous startup was that it’s important to follow up and to thank them. Just saying them, your feedback was very valuable and that feedback actually got to this part of the product. Thank you for that. Because in this way you will be loyalty with them and you will get them as customers for a longer period of time.
 
🐿
Exactly. And even if you don’t have anything built yet, sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. But if you don’t, then you can tell them that you’ve just gained valuable insight from this interaction and you’re super happy and hope that if it’s the case in the future, that you can definitely talk to them about this again. And they will usually say yes, of course. And then you have their permission to contact them later on when you have your wire frames and your product. And these people will keep talking to you about this problem because you’ve shown genuine interest in their problems, in their need, and in their lives. And if you’re not sure about any of this, just read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It’s one of the best books to read and it will definitely change your life, especially if you’re trying to pursue a life business. That’s what you need to know to inspire honesty, to get honest feedback and to be honest with people and really understand how you can win people to your side. And it’s not very hard to do. Just letting people know that you’ve gained valuable insight in their time was very valuable to you.
 
🐿
That will make them super excited, super happy. And next time you will call them, they will answer and they can’t wait to meet up with you again.
 
🐼
And I think with all these valuable feedback that I got with your help, we can in a next episode to move to the next phase since you are talking about product and wire frames. So e are now in a position in which I think we can move to the next phase that we will discuss in the next episode. But until there, if it’s something that you would still like to mention, or if not, we can continue the discussion on our Facebook group, Startup Express. So drop there your ideas about how you think about these questions. If there are other questions which work great for you.
 
🐿
We can actually do maybe many episodes, but at least one episode where I can mention a book or two on asking questions because I’ve actually found an amazing book on how to ask questions to get the answers that we’ve just talked about in this episode. And that’s one of the best books. If I were ever to write a book, I would have written that book. But if I would have written it, it wouldn’t be that good. So the author made a terrific job at writing the best book on how you can ask questions that will be helpful for customer development. I’ve never read anything like it.
 
🐼
That sounds great. We should do an episode.
 
🐿
Yeah.
 
🐼
Totally. Okay. Talk to you next.
 
🐿
Time, guys. Until the.
 

 
🐼 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. You should never give up because you need to understand that something bad happened to you and that’s why you want to give up. You don’t want to give up because of other reasons. You just want to give up because you feel that you’ve lost so much speed, so much velocity that you will never get to reach the top players in that industry or in that race or in whatever you are trying to compete in because you feel that now they have an advantage because you’ve just had a disadvantage and that makes you want to give up.
 
🐼
The idea would be that even if you close the startup or don’t do anything about it, you don’t have the what if. So to be sure that you tried what you wanted to. So there is no regrets, no what if I would have tried that, if I would have done that. You know, like, to don’t miss things that you felt that you could do it, but you didn’t do it because I don’t or some reasons.
 
🐿
That should be a good end when you’re 100 % convinced that you cannot do this, and this is not related to moments where it was hard.
 
🐼
I won’t enter that market because I’m sure that there is already the other competitor who has the entire market, so most probably I won’t be able to get them.
 
🐿
That’s also not true. You need to understand that if you go into a race and you go full speed, so you try to be the fastest racer in that race, or you try to be the best fighter. Think of Luffy and Son Goku from Anyways and other stuff like that who are always super obsessed about giving their all, training harder, doing better things, really struggling to reach those objectives. It’s like you got to be like that. And why is that? Because you should think about the fact that you were unlucky. You’ve had a drawback. Something held you back from achieving something. But if you don’t give up and you continue doing your best, you go full limit, full throttle. You go like a maniac, like an obsessed person, and you keep going and keep pushing towards those goals. The funny part is your competitors are also people. They are also companies. They will have problems. So by the moment that they have a problem and they start falling back, you will go up in full speed and then they will go behind you and you will be in the front and now you’ve overtaken them and you have the first position.
 
🐿
I’ve seen this over and over again in business. I’ve seen it in my business. I’ve seen it in other businesses. Even the food Panda, because that was the idea. The food Panda in the hip menu example. As I’ve said, there was no chance to compete with those guys, but you can go full throttle and then food Panda will close hip menu and all of a sudden you’re the second biggest player in the market and now you have a total chance of overtaking food Panda and conquering all of the market.
 
🐼
Yeah, because if we have to discuss a year ago, there is no way for some other app to conquer the food delivery market in closed. And actually, one year later, it happened this and now.
 
🐿
This.
 
🐼
App that I think didn’t exist at that point. It didn’t even exist.
 
🐿
I know for certain that nobody that I know has ever heard.
 
🐼
Of them. And that’s actually now our favorite app. So I think…
 
🐿
And it’s something that used, I guess, like with young people inclusion, everybody just uses that now. And the food pandemic is slowly becoming irrelevant because of what they’ve done. So the guys from YouTube, they went full throttle. They went like maniacs. They were building something that they never should have built, but they wanted to build it because it was their passion. And now they’ve had a great opportunity because their competitor had a drawback.
 
🐼
And with a little bit of with a little bit of pinch of salt to say like that, well, if there is obvious that it’s not problem, no problem that you’re solving or something like that, you should stop because that’s the obvious thing to do. But in situation in which you felt that you don’t have any chance, but you know that that’s a real problem and you have a passion to solve that.
 
🐿
This is interesting to point out in the episode. So basically what you’re saying, quit if it’s for the right reasons. You can’t get any traction, what you’re building is wrong, you’re not solving a real problem.
 
🐼
You don’t have passion anymore for that. You have other things that you felt more important to dedicate your time.
 
🐿
Yeah, that’s a good reason to quit. But the fact that you have a competitor and the competitor seems to be doing better than you are, that’s a bad reason to quit because they will fail. They will have points of failure as well. And if you really have everything else, you can get traction, you can get people to sign up for your app, you have passion for what you’re building. You see that you can validate stuff, you see that you can help real people with real problems. Even though the competitor exists now, it doesn’t mean that they will exist a couple of years from now on.
 
🐼
Or that they won’t make a stupid move and annoy everyone in the market.
 
🐿
Exactly. T hat happens a lot. I can even give you an example with Formula One. T here was this kid in the last season, 2019, he was at the Toro Rosso team in Formula One. Now he managed to get Red Bull because of some impressive stuff that he’s done. He started with the Toro Rosso is still a team of Red Bull, for those of you who don’t know. Those are the lame cars that they have where they don’t have that much equipment, they don’t have the best things there. And this kid, he gave his all in a race that didn’t make sense because in that race, no matter who won, the championship was already decided. All of the places were decided. You couldn’t get more points than that. But he gave it his all and he ended up in top three of the race because two Ferraris crashed into one another. Another Mercedes got pulled out of the race because of other reasons. And a lot of things happened to his competitors that made him become the superstar of that race and that will earn him a spot to the big team of Red Bull.
 
🐼
So the answer would be always do your best, no matter the environment, let’s say like that. Do your best and sometimes you’ll be the right person at the right moment. Because I think the right person at the right moment are those who are doing their best, no matter the circumstances.
 
🐿
But if you’re doing nothing with your life, you will never be able to become the right person at the right time because you’re nowhere to be found. And then destiny cannot choose you.
 
🐼
Give us example, if you have, of reasons that you feel that would be…
 
🐿
That would be good for the theme of discussion today. And even if you have your own examples of moments when you’ve done this, you went full throttle and that led you to a win because the others started having drawbacks, give us those examples. If we really like them and if we really like them and we really think that they’re exactly what we’ve been discussing in this episode, we are going to mention all of those examples in a future episode on Startup Espresso.
 
🐼
Yeah. So drop a message on the Facebook group and let’s continue the discussion there.
 
🐿
Yeah. And if you don’t know where the Facebook group is, just do a Google search for Startup Espresso and you will either land yourself on the group or if not on the website, then you will see the group on the website.
 
🐼
Talk to you there.
 
🐿
Yeah. Definitely send us those.
 

 
🐼 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 actually tell you how to do that type of validation. Everybody’s like, Well, learn about customer development. And you could learn about customer development. There are great books on customer development and learning what people would need from your business, what type of business they would need, what problem they need solving and other stuff like that.
 
🐿
But it still doesn’t help you how do you validate this sales channel? How do you validate this pricing model? How do you validate this price point? How do you validate X, Y, and Z? And we are going to do a small series on Startup Espresso just for you, just to let you know how you can validate every little thing. So each episode will be a type of validation that you could do and how to do it, because you already know the why from these amazing experts and these amazing authors. And now from Startup Espresso, you will learn how to validate each small thing because you know why you need to do it and now you will see how you can do it.
 
🐼
Since we’re talking of validation, because we’re also in the process of validating what is interesting for you, please let us know on our Facebook group on Startup Express if you think that this content is valuable for you, what ideas would you like to listen for us? Because there is still a validation from our side also about what content we should bring to you so it’s most useful. A ctually, this came up from the experience that I had together with my co founders. We were all technical persons, which was hard for us to validate because it’s easy to write code because it’s only you and computer.
 
🐿
Yeah, and you’re happy because you’re working on something that feels real.
 
🐼
Nobody tells you that it’s not okay what you’re doing because you think that everybody wants that product. Validating, it takes you out of your comfort zone because you will need to discuss with people. You will need to understand that maybe you assume something which is not actually like that. I think it’s this first episode, we should focus on this part with validating if the problem is real. I think you call it interest validation.
 
🐿
Am I right? Yeah, I call it interest validation. Why? You basically want to validate the fact that there is or there is not any interest in the type of thing that you are trying to build. You see, I use the word type of thing. So it’s not like this thing specifically, this type of thing. I’m thinking about doing something in this space that would look something like this, this, or that, and I’m not sure which one of them I want to build as a final product. I have some ideas on how those should look like, but I’m actually trying to see if I could get anybody interested in trying out one of those products. So I shouldn’t build anything if I don’t validate that there’s an interest in using something that I’m planning to build.
 
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Does it actually need to be interest from other people or I can start that it’s interest for me? Because I’m thinking a little bit. Look, for example, when we try to build the medical advice app, the interest from our side was to build something that would help us. Because, for example, in that situation, we are using a lot of text messages with some friend of us, which was doctors, to get medical advice. At least for me, there was interest to build that because it would have been useful for me. Now, can I consider this some interest validation?
 
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You see, this is why I actually like talking to you on all of these podcast and in real life when we’re just randomly talking about random stuff, because we can get to really impressive things and really impressive details. Yeah, well, what you just said, that’s the best reason you should be building your startup when you had the problem and you are trying to solve it. Now, there is one small thing here. You should do that, but you should also make certain by doing interest validation that there are tons of other people in this world who have the same problem that you are already trying to solve. That’s the best point that you could get to with building a startup when you want it because you had a problem, you’re trying to build it, but then make sure that you find at least 1,000 or a million people who also have the same problem and want that thing done for them?
 
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Okay. So in order to find them, I actually need to know who they are, right? And where to look after them. Because it’s not enough to come to and tell you, Florin, I know there are like a thousand of people interested in this.
 
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Yeah, I would instantly go and say, How do you know that? Can you show me any details, any research that you are 100 % sure that those thousand people exist in the world? Because if you can show me a list, it means that you already have some idea on how you would target them and sell them your product. But if you don’t know and you just think that there are a thousand or a million people in the world, then I’m really not interested in discussing this further because it’s very clear that you haven’t done any interest validation.
 
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Okay, so let’s go a step further then. And I will tell you that, hey, Florine, I have a thousand mothers which are on this Facebook group where I drop this landing page that promise a medical advice for kids and 300 of them sign up. Is that some interest validation?
 
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Well, yes, because you give me a very concrete number. There’s like a thousand people and you got 30 % sign ups. It’s really good.
 
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With the promise of having an app that will allow them to get medical advice for their kids.
 
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That’s a great example of how you could be doing this.
 
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I somehow validated a little bit the interest. Now I should move further with the validation, right? I shouldn’t just start building the product because it’s not enough validated.
 
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No, you shouldn’t build the product yet. You should move to other ideas. First, you’re not very sure if they would actually do something more with the app. You should see this is a very good example that you would get signups, but you shouldn’t start building it because you don’t know if this is going to go further along. Further along, maybe you need to validate some other things. You have validated the interest from a standpoint of signups, but would they use it every day, for example? How often do they have this problem and there are other steps that you need to validate.
 
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You said that how often would they have this problem. So actually, I think I rushed up the things a little bit. So even if I have those signed up, I should still validate more that they actually have the problem and they need to talk with somebody about their kids for medical purposes. Exactly. So I should stay more in that Facebook group, maybe, from which I got the sign ups and look what they are complaining about, what they are discussing about there.
 
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I have a couple of ideas on how you can do validation and customer development. And the next point would be to start taking the people who signed up, who had the interest of using, to get them on to a couple of interviews, to a series of interviews. And if you want, we can make another.
 
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Episode in.
 
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Which to discuss about. In which to discuss about, you’ve already got this, what are the next steps that you need to validate? And then we can move on to the next steps because there are still a couple of things to discuss at this step right here because you had a very clear example of how you could find people for the app that you’re trying to build, and it’s a really good example. But there are other examples of how you could do interest validation. So if you want to do this, you’ve instantly thought about Facebook groups. But then you can also think about forums because maybe there are some markets or areas of a certain market where people still use forums. You can even see, like you said, Facebook groups. Then you can see comments on blog posts and get a lot of details from the comments on different blog posts. If they are about parenting, maybe you can see on a lot of different sites, a lot of people have different comments. Maybe from those comments you can extract the idea that they would need medical advice from somebody who would help them as parents with their kids.
 
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I think that what you just told me here is that if I’m a good developer and I want to build a product, I should not build a product that I think is doing something. But first, I should look, I don’t know, on Google, on Twitter, on forums, or all these channels that.
 
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You.
 
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Told me about for actual problems that people are complaining about and start making notes about it. I see on Quora that somebody’s complaining about, I don’t know, how hard is to find good viewers for your games, for example.
 
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Definitely.
 
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I continue after that. I’m looking, okay, let’s see on Twitter forums what the people are complaining about regarding game reviews or something like that. I’m looking about the existing players in the market that are trying to solve this, what other complaints are about it? If it’s a mobile app, I don’t know. I look on the app store on Google Play to see are people complaining always about something?
 
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Yeah. You can even look at search queries. On Google, if you see there’s a lot of search queries, a lot of people searching for, how do I get reviews for my game? How can you get your game reviewed? How can you get professional reviewers for a game? Or other search queries that all of them imply that the solution would be to have a service that offers you people to review your games, then if that’s what the startup you’re trying to build, then that’s a great way to validate interest because let’s say that I would think about, yeah, so I’m going to make this community where you just sign up as a company and then you have a whole bunch of people reviewing your games and I’m going to make this access very easy to you and I’m going to totally disrupt this market. And if that’s the case, then it’s awesome because by what we’ve just discussed, you’ve discussed about that on Quora, and then me with the search queries and with the other places where you can validate interest, we could definitely see that there is interest in the market and there would be a lot of people searching for ways in which they can get reviews for their game.
 
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So if I come along and build a platform for that, I’m going to get tons of signups and that’s what the data shows me. So that’s my very initial research. I usually call this in my five step customer development program, I call this phase zero, because this is the first thing that you need to get. Will there be anybody interested in what I’m trying to build? And this is an easy way and a bulletproof way to see if there’s interest.
 
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And since you call this the phase zero in the five phases program that we discuss about, to move to the next phase, I assume there is the outcome of this interest, which might be that, yes, there is interest. No, there is no interest. Now, if yes, I think it’s obvious to move to the next thing and maybe we’ll discuss in another episode about this. But if not, what should I do?
 
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Yeah, you should, if not, then you should go and try something else.
 
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Because I think here is the complicated part for you to understand that there is not a need for what you’re trying to build.
 
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Yeah, it’s interesting to discuss about this, really, because if you’re doing something in a very classic or interesting market, then you will find search queries for it. But if you’re building something that’s so disruptive and so alien and so wow and so blue ocean, you will not see Google search queries for that because it’s way too new and people didn’t even think that they have that problem yet.
 
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Yeah, here I wanted to get because I’m thinking now if there would have been Google when Henry Ford was leaving, I think that if he would look at Google queries, he wouldn’t have find a lot of interest for cars in that period.
 
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Yeah, I agree. And that’s why you should look at it like, maybe people in that age, in that period, would have been looking on Google for stuff like, how can I get there faster?
 
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Exactly.
 
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And if you can validate this interest, so it’s not like I want a faster horse, but I want to go from A to B faster, then you could build a whole bunch of products. You could build airplanes, cars, trains, anything that could get you from A to B but faster because that’s what you are looking for. And if you understand this small detail, then you can go back to everything that me and Paul discussed about today and think about searching on forums, on Facebook groups after this small tiny details. Do you want something done faster, better with more customer service, with a hands on experience or with white gloves? Hands on experiences when somebody helps you, like hands on to set something up. Or maybe you want a white glove service when you don’t even have a headache with setting things up because you paid the company to make all the set up for you. And there’s a lot of these very interesting details that could end up with you having a very successful company.
 
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And since we were mentioning the Facebook group, let’s continue the discussion there on our startup expression Facebook group. And since we’re speaking about the interest, let us know there if there is interest from you on these topics and let us know also how you validated your idea and the need that you’re trying to solve.
 
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Yeah, that’s great. And if you make something really interesting, so other than the queries, the Facebook groups, the forums, whatever we discuss today, if you have any other super great example, we can totally do an episode about it as well and mention you and mention you as the source of that amazing piece of content.
 
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Yeah, that sounds great. And I think that’s all for.
 
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Today, right? Yeah, that’s all for today’s episode.
 
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Talk to you on our Facebook group.