Questions to ask yourself
- What is the problem you are solving?
- How does that problem relate to you?
- Are you interested in it / passionate about it?
Where to start?
- Become an expert on the industry — look at Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook earnings calls / broker research
- Identify customer segments
- Storyboard the ideal user experience
- Build a minimum viable product
- Position your product — explain clearly to users what your product does / what problem it solves
First users?
- You, friends, family, online communities, local communities, niche influencers (authors who tweet)
- Read crossing the chasm
- Make it easy for customers to give feedback / get in touch with you
- Track customer retention over time, good metric of how your product is doing
- Ask them how likely they are to recommend the product to a friend (NPS — net promoter score)
- Honest feedback
- Strangers give better feedback if they have to pay for it
- Strangers do not give good feedback if they did not have to pay for it
v1 feature creep
- Build fast, but optimize for now
- Manual before automation — understand what you can automate