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
  • Read goodreads reviews
• 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