After blogging about a variety of topics, I find that they form the core nucleus of the things I care about before investing in a startup. Yes, I also care about the usual stuff like smart entrepreneurs, great idea, etc. But I think there are things that I've been focusing on assuming we get past the basic stuff.
So if I meet with you, you can expect discussions on:
1. What's your world domination plan (and more on why it's important to have one)? How can you avoid just becoming another small business which is not a reason for not existing, but does bring danger to us investors?
2. I'm most likely going to try to talk you out of being an entrepreneur.
3. Most startups I meet are working on me-too products, even if they don't think so. How can you not be about just developing a me-too product?
4. Are you planning on lasting two years? If you aren't and you need time and money to pivot, you won't be able to raise money in this climate because second chances are impossible to come by.
5. How are you going to make money? Please, no more projects that are just going to gain lots of users...
6. If I were to envision the The Ultimate Product (and Part 1.5), would what you're building be that product, or on the path to that product?
7. How are you going to gain customers - distribution is by far the number one problem facing internet startups today (see me-too post and my combining startup investing and distribution post).
My hope is that not only you will have great answers to all these questions, but you will also internalize and truly believe in those answers yourself, and that your answers aren't just lip service. Hope to see you soon at a cafe near you!
Ever since you blogged about the Ultimate product, I couldn't get it out of my head. Haven't fully figured out what my Ultimate product would be. Maybe you could help :)
Are you thinking to join Venture Hacks' angelList?
http://venturehacks.com/angellist
I went to your site followsales.com. Cool stuff there.
Without knowing much about what you're doing, let's say your mission was to help people find sales online. So you ask yourself, what is the Ultimate Product for helping people find sales?
A lot of the thought process for discovering the Ultimate Product (UP) involves knowing your customers and also making sure you don't deceive yourself in knowing the breadth of what your customers are like. Many people can't step beyond the "If I were to do X, then Y would be the UP." They think because they develop for themselves that that is the UP. This is a very bad trap that you don't fall into. So UP development is very much like customer research and then imagining the ultimate solution to their market need, for all affected demographics.
OK now assuming that you can step beyond yourself - you have to analyze the typical questions, which are how, when, why, where, what. This example would be:
How will I want to experience sales?
When do I want to know about sales?
Why do I want to know about sales?
Where will I want to know about sales?
What kind of sales do I want to know about?
Then there is the biggest question: Do I even want sales at all? Masters of marketing and advertising have created "want" out of thin air - think luxury brands and why someone would want a Gucci purse versus a cheap one from Target, or even a Nike branded sneaker versus the generic brands. So a possible UP could even be one that is a brand play on emotion, although this does take a lot of $$, time, and effort to produce.
Asking yourself these questions against all the possible demographics and creating answers shapes the UP for the area you're working in.
Hope this helps!
Good stuff here - thanks for sharing.