Week 1 Intro: What is a Startup?
0 likes176 views
The document outlines various startup experiences and lessons learned, highlighting both successes and failures across different businesses. Key takeaways include the importance of having a scalable business model, testing hypotheses, and understanding market and execution risks. It emphasizes building a product that people love and maintaining strong relationships with investors.
Week 1 Intro: What is a Startup?
- 1. “What is a startup?” Week 1
- 2. Definition of startup Law firm Human resources Cafe Retail Food
- 3. Definition of startup Law firm -> Atrium, Docusign Human Resources -> LinkedIn, Gusto Cafe -> Cafe X, Luckin Coffee Retail -> Amazon, Shopify Food -> Zume, Uber Eats
- 5. What is a venture backed business?
- 6. Lessons Learned: How I failed my businesses and startups
- 8. Highlights Good: - 200 people matchmaking event - Four times a year - Per event, revenue was 10k - Yearly income was over 40k USD for three years - Very very good retention rate (repeat customers) Bad: - Didn’t scale - Didn’t have a scalable business model - Didn’t have any way to leverage customer’s love and feedback
- 9. Dropoff
- 10. Highlights Good: - Faced the problem and knew the problem - Developed a service to sell before building something (corporation, website, product) - Designed a user experience - Knew where to get customers - Revenue since day one Bad: - Didn’t have an engineer - Had “Co-Founder” - Thought about “competitor” too much
- 11. Askompass
- 12. Highlights Good: - Had a team - Pitched to investor - Shipped the product - Spoke to many Japanese tour guides, understood market Bad: - There is no use-case - There are no data - Not sure there is a need or not
- 13. Tastexpresso
- 14. Highlights Good: - Joined Yelp Hackathon - Launched the product - Tested the ideas with users - Got user interviews for the product - Got 50 users - Made the database by ourselves Bad: - Weekly retention was 0% - Relied only on API for increasing database - Didn’t think about the user’s motivation for coming back to the product
- 15. Foxsy
- 16. Highlights Good: - Got a million users - Became an influencer for a new platform - Had a clear business model - Tested the business model, 1.7% click rate for branded ads - Raised money from investors - Kept talking to users pre-launch and post-launch Bad: - The platform didn’t grow - Did not build the sticky product before scaling - Took for granted the thing the investor said - Could not close acquisition
- 17. Why I failed ● My benchmarks were wrong (find the co-founder, have a technical person, raise money from VCs, and have a scalable product since Day 1) ● Hired the wrong co-founder ● Didn’t test idea as a hypothesis before building product ● Focused on wrong metrics (vanity metrics) ● Didn’t research competitors properly and deeply ● Didn’t know platform risk (API regulation) ● Didn’t focus on specific users who loved the product a lot ● Investor relationship and how to raise money
- 18. Lessons learned ● Don’t believe startup myths ● Test your hypothesis ● Do something that doesn’t scale ● Have a lean mindset ● Hack your ideas and processes ● Build something people really love ● Have right metric and growth equation ● Find out the risk: market risk or execution risk ● Ask the right questions to the right people ● Create a network: investors and experienced entrepreneurs who went through the same process
- 19. Test your hypothesis ● Who has a problem (describe user or customer persona) ● What is the problem (simple sentence) ● And why is there a problem now? (Don’t think about the solution yet)
- 21. Any questions?