Recomendados
Más contenido relacionado
La actualidad más candente
La actualidad más candente (20)
Destacado
Destacado (17)
Similar a Startup Growth Manchester v2
Similar a Startup Growth Manchester v2 (20)
Último
Último (20)
Startup Growth Manchester v2
- 2. MANCHESTER STARTUP GROWTH 2 THE 5 PREREQUISITES OF GROWTH
- 3. 74% OF HIGH GROWTH STARTUPS FAIL DUE TO PREMATURE SCALING No startup that scaled prematurely passed the 100,000 user mark
- 4. 95% OF STARTUPS THAT SCALED PREMATURELY NEVER BREAK $100K REVENUE PER MONTH
- 8. Putting this into action What important truth do very few people agree with you on? What will the world look like in three to five years if your startup is incredibly successful?
- 11. Niche to win
- 12. Total Addressable Market (TAM) Served available market Target market
- 13. Putting this into action How many people or companies could use the product or service you created? Which specific segment would benefit the most from having my vision imparted on them right now? (cheers Cassius) Is there a good analogy you can use to frame the opportunity? How will I deliver my solution at scale? What efficiencies am I dependant on to achieve this?
- 14. Solves a Real Problem
- 15. “In a sense there’s just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you’ll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don’t do. If you don’t make something users want, you’re dead, whatever else you do or don’t do.”
- 17. “A startup’s solution has to deliver to a customer an improvement that is relative to the way the customer is currently solving the problem to a factor of 3”
- 18. Putting this into action How many customers and potential customers have you talked to about your idea? How satisfied are your current customers? What can you learn from analyzing customers you lost?
- 19. An Excellent First Interaction “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression” - Will Rodgers
- 21. Putting this into action How many customers have you watched interact with your product? Where does your customer encounter friction? What experiments can you run to test improvements? Does it make sense to create a guided tour of your solution?
Notas del editor
- Thanks for coming down everyone This is the second event we’ve put on, The first one went well so we’re really excited to be doing this Today, we’ve got two quick talks from Cassius and myself. First of, all, I’ll be setting out the 5 prerequisites of growth and providing a framework to establish if you meet them Then, Cassius will be taking you over how to create killer user personas. Finally, something I’m super excited about, is a fireside chat with John Kershaw of M14 Industries. If you haven’t heard of John already, you’re in for a really interesting story, that isn’t only entertaining, but you’ll learn a lot too.
- When launching, it’s easy to get tempted to jump into the exciting stuff like catalysing growth and building teams and culture But in 2010, a group of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford gathered and analyzed data on over 3,200 startups They didn’t only take data from the startups themselves, but they crossed referenced it with feedback from their customers to ensure it was consistent
- The study found that one of the major causes of startups failing was premature scaling And not one of these startups scaled passed the 100,000 mark
- 95% of startup that did scale prematurely never broke the $100k revenue per month mark The importance of this talk is to stop you falling into the same trap Because I’m really making it a personal goal for Manchester to not only be a city where startups being, but where they grow into world class businesses This might not be the stuff you want to hear, or are excited to execute on, but ask yourself this Do you want to earn more than £1m a year? Do you want more than 100,000 users? Success in startups is a gamble anyway - don’t reduce your chances even more by not taking this into account
- Prerequisite one Founders start their adventures with little more than insights that serve as the foundation of their vision The successful ones invest years of their lives turnin their vision into a reality When you read articles profiling their success, it seems like it’s linear But it covers up long, difficult tumultuous periods Most of us will be able to intuitively understand the role that a founders vision and passion might play But still, most of us will underestimate just how important it is
- Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn Tells a story on his personal blog about the formative years of LinkedIn ‘It’s said that when architects walk through an office, they see ceiling ornamentation, light sources, building acoustics. When psychologists walk through an office, they see unresolved father issues and avoidant personality disorders, When I walk through an office, I see networks. When you truly see networks, it changes the way you plan and strategize. You move differently’ Martin Eberhard, co-founder and the first CEO of Tesla has similar conviction about electric cars He didn’t just see them as a more fuel efficient way of getting around He decided they were going to be THE way to get around Even when companies like General Motors were cancelling the electrical vehicle programs he perservered
- Elon Musk - Tesla If Hoffman is a brilliant example of vision, there’s no better example of perseverance than Elon Musk Almost every startup will go through a period of disillusionment when it seems like failure is inevitable In Christmas 2008, despite making a wealth of $1.5, investments into Solar City & SpaceX left him with $3m in liquidity And then he found out Tesla wasn’t going to make payroll He described his choice as “Either I went all in, or Tesla died…” He went home that day wondering how he’d pay rent It’s not just Elon Not only did Hoffman have an amazing vision, but his perseverance in making it a reality was evident When they founding group said they weren’t sure if anyone else would find the utility in professional networks Hoffman said he’d fund a minimally operational service if only for his own value Today, millions of people pay for LinkedIn premium
- This is a difficult prerequisite to asses, ultimately there’s only time that knows the answers as to whether you have the vision and perseverance But ask yourself Is there something about your vision that no one else agrees on but you? Your vision needs to be something that looks into the future and solves something that no one else has seen If it’s something everyone agrees on, you need to hone it to something more unique And what will the world look like in three to five years if your startup is successful I don’t want to know your revenue projections To borrow Steve Job’s saying I want to see the dent you create in the universe
- Most founders biggest fear might be going out of business But something that’s even scarier for me Is to invest all of your time and resources, and build a small team around an idea you’re passionate about Only to find out that there aren’t enough customers to justify the time and resources you invested into the business Leaving just enough salary for the founders to scrape by, but by no means enough to cover the cost they’ve already sunk into the business This is becoming more and more prevelant as the barriers to create technology startups get lower Businesses who are unwilling to shut the business down but also unsure how to drive growth to meaningful levels
- The first thing for any startup to consider, if their goal is high growth, is do your costs dramatically decrease as your organization's output increases? Consider two businesses - a Doctor’s office and Tesla As Tesla produces more vehicles, it is able to spread out the cost of research and R&D As the company purchases larger batches of parts, they can become more competitive in sourcing suppliers Therefore, the cost to produce the first Tesla Model 3 (the new one) is dramatically low than the cost to produce the Model roadster, the one the first one they released On the other hand, if you think about you local GP, the major costs are salaries of the practicioners and support staff, these don’t decrease dramatically as you add more pateitns to your business Their might be smaller cost savings made, but time is a constained resource, and that’s ultimately why most startups are built on technology, which can scale, in softwares case without constraints. It’s not to say businesses of this mould aren’t amazing and they won’t make you fantastically rich and succesful - it’s just that that’s not what we’re focussing on, and a startup is about more than your personal wealth
- But something you should always try and do, is focus on a really specific customer segment to start LinkedIn focussed solely on Silicon Valley Tesla focussed solely on luxury sports cars Tumblr focussed specifically on artists Facebook on Stanford It seems counterintuitive to do this, but it’s really important
- While you may, & should, chose a specific niche to start with It’s important that the ultimate potential market is large Your Total Addressable Market is how big your company could become if you took the whole market. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that a disruption can be defined by looking at existing markets If you compare Uber with the taxi market, it’s clear to see their improvements over the traditional redefined how big the market for people who wanted to pay per ride could be
- How many people could use the product or service? It’s tempting to answer everyone. But your ability to precisely answer this questions and do your research to understand how many of these individuals exist is worth the investment of your time and and investor’s money Is there a niche i should focus on? Already gone over this Is there a good analogy? Whilst people like Uber and Airbnb completely redefined their market size, if your target market has the same dynamics a successful startup had in it’s early development it can be an effective technique to estimate a growing and hard to quantify market How will I deliver at scale? How are you going to scale not only the amount of people you serve, but also ensure that you’re delighting them at scale too?
- If you’ve got an idea you think can scale and the market is large enough, the next step is to make sure your startup successfully solves a real problem
- It would be a much fairer world if startups did fail because of technical challenges The probability of success would be a simple function fo the teams intelligence and willingness to work long hours But that’s not often the case I’d strongly recommend you pick up two books: steve blanks four steps to the epiphany and Eric Reiss’ Lean Startup Before scaling, you need to validate your market not only cares deeply, but is willing to spend money on your solution
- And when I talk to startups, it becomes obvious why this obvious problem is still a problem They talk more passionately about what they’re building, what they’re using to build it Theyll focus on technologies and buzzwords - machine learning, bots There’s a saying in venture capital - ‘the best technology rarely wins’ But what they need to focus on is the problem they’re trying to solve, and what the benefits of using all of those things are
- Don Jones, an investor and entrepeneur from Pittsburgh said this What he basically means is, Is your startup 3 times better than the way your customers are currently solving their problems? PayPal for instance. Instead of sending a cheque and waiting 10 days for it to arrive, you could send the payment as soon as the auction had ended
- No matter how smart your and your co-founders are, the market is smarter. Figure out who to talk to and how to shape the conversation so you get the answers you need - not the answers you want. Measure net promoter score or use the Sean Ellis Product market fit survey to find out if your current customers are happy enough with your current solution When a customer leaves, ask them why! Email them, phone them, tweet them, message them on LinkedIn. You need to dig deep because as former customers, they’ve validated themselves as your target market and in need of a solution you provide
- The importance of someones first interaction with your product is hard to overstate Time is precious and attention spans are shrinking You need to ensure that the first drop of attention you receive from a potential customer is rewareded with a great first experience Uber are a great example of how you can hack your network so that the first interaction is positive
- I want you to look at these two screen captures and tell me which one you’d keep and which you’d delete And I know Uber are better funded, but if Pound Cabs can’t deliver an excellent first interaction, then why are they advertising to me? This is a prime example of why traditional businesses don’t understand startups You cant just pour users in at the top and expect everything to be dandy Good, maintanable growth is what marketing always should have been–a completely integrated strategy for company growth that combines the best of marketing, product, design, engineering, and analytics,”
- Things to consider Watching people interact with your product is surprisingly powerful And you don’t need to do elaborate usability testing, in fact Jakob Nielson, an expert in the field, published research that elaborate usability testing is in fact a waste of resources Especially at an early stage - just get 5 people and run through each iteration Map out the processes you observe and highlight the specific areas of friction that emerge When you encounter an area of friction, brainstorm ways to remove it Use cohort analysis to ensure that your iterations are continually getting better. Most of the time people commit to changes because they’ve sunk time into it - don’t let this be what decides the success of your business If you’re a low touch model, i.e. someone doesn’t manually walk each user through the model, can you create a walkthrough or guides that help people through their first experience of the product? Another good thing to do is constrain all of the things a user can do to just one action and not let them past a certain stage until they’ve achieved it. This helps remove the paradox of choice and ensure they follow a logical process towards unlocking the value in your product. For example, an analytics product is useless until an intergration has been installed that collects the data - don’t let people see an empty dashboard!
- Things to consider Watching people interact with your product is surprisingly powerful And you don’t need to do elaborate usability testing, in fact Jakob Nielson, an expert in the field, published research that elaborate usability testing is in fact a waste of resources Especially at an early stage - just get 5 people and run through each iteration Map out the processes you observe and highlight the specific areas of friction that emerge When you encounter an area of friction, brainstorm ways to remove it Use cohort analysis to ensure that your iterations are continually getting better. Most of the time people commit to changes because they’ve sunk time into it - don’t let this be what decides the success of your business If you’re a low touch model, i.e. someone doesn’t manually walk each user through the model, can you create a walkthrough or guides that help people through their first experience of the product? Another good thing to do is constrain all of the things a user can do to just one action and not let them past a certain stage until they’ve achieved it. This helps remove the paradox of choice and ensure they follow a logical process towards unlocking the value in your product. For example, an analytics product is useless until an intergration has been installed that collects the data - don’t let people see an empty dashboard!
- For hire Either augment your existing team with specialist skills Or act as your entire growth team