Fundamentals & principles
- Micro businesses are one man businesses
- Make a stand
- When your proud of your work, you’re motivated
- Focus on the core of your business
- A startup value is not just pure profit
- Validated learning
- Build, measure, learn
- The growth hypothesis
- The value hypothesis
- Sustainable business model
Framework or tools
Profitability & Business models
- Startups cannot predict the future
- Finding a business model is of utmost importance for startups
- Be careful to have the illusion of a product
- Validate your business idea
- When a customer pays a high price, they have dispensable income
- A profitable business model is more important than the startups value
- When the business model isn’t working out, pivot
- Pivoting
Prototyping, Feedback & Testing
- You could smoke test features
- Customer feedback
- Being big muffles customer feedback
- Launching a launchpage as a smoke test
- Launch as quickly as possible
- Test the waters before going all-in
- B Testing helps to know if a feature is valuable or not
- A smoke test could validate just as good as an MVP
- The MVP should just be enough to draw feedback
- Customer behaviour can validate your assumptions
Communication
- Bold promises shows confidence
- Summarise your product or service in one sentence
- Be frank and honest when you fuck up
- Every communication is marketing
- Have honest, personal communication
- Being small means less public
- Actively teaching people promotes your product and company
- Picking a fight over your stand
Marketing & Sales
- Lower the barrier to purchase your product or service
- Premium price comes with advantages
- Niche coverage might be better then mass-coverage
- Reaching your customer is important
- Strong relationships with the customer increase the customers value
- Effort vs value of potential customer
- The three growth engines
- Viral growth engine lowers marketing costs
Data & Metric
- Vanity metrics
- Historical data is important for metrics
- Cohort analysis
- Core metrics
- Metrics should be meaningful
Innovation
- Vertical progress
- Horizontal progress
- A vision for the future
- Being critical of the present is important to think outside of the box
- Thinking out of the box is necessary for vertical progression
- True innovation is usually both vertical and horizontal
Mentality
- The new rich
- Don’t strive for perfect
- Don’t be afraid to make use of people’s knowledge
- Make yourself replaceable in order to sell your business
- Automate to decouple your time spend
- Virtual assistants increases your freedom
- Being a small startup offers advantages
- Make decisions, quickly
- If you use your own product you can be more motivated
- If you use your own product, you can estimate the value
- Don’t be reactive, be proactive
- Try not to have venture capitalists
- Going too broad can hurt you
- Specialising in a niche necessary for building a monopoly
- Startups should be flexible
Product design
- Be resilient against feature requests
- Cutting features can improve a product
- A product should be simple and easy to use
- Better technology is a secret