Rocketshipping: Book Excerpts
An Accelerated Guide to Thinking Just Like a Successful Startup
Wrote a book. Covers over a year of research into starting a startup and seeking out success stories by entrepreneurs who have hit it big, integrated with personal experience. Here are the first 5 sections for free. The book is available for $6.99 in paperback at Amazon/Rocketshipping-accelerated-thinking-Successful-Startup/dp/B08QBGZWBH
Part 1:Motivation
0. Understanding Passive and Active income.
Forms of Active Income - a job. “Time Renting”
Forms of Passive Income - Royalties. Books, Music, Films. Companies and Products that, once created, forever give a trickle.
Many trickles → one river.
On the long walk of Life, one can trade many segments over and over again, or one can trade one or several large segments once, in order to achieve the freedom of time and fancy that most people crave.
1. As Lightening is Pulled out from the air
Many products are made for needs that don't exist. Many products are made for nonexistent customers. One cannot create demand that does not exist in a latent state already. Supply can be created, but demand can only be awakened. If there is no demand to awaken, there is no lifeblood for a product to be born and thrive. Choose slowly and be fullwise when selecting a need and demand to address. Eventually you want the market of people pulling it out of your hands faster than you can provide it. Ideally you want a ravenous group of customers that is passionate about getting their hands on your product, because it solves their problem, creates a bridge where there is a chasm, or provides value where there was metaphorical hunger and starvation. While a product that has no need or that addresses no intrinsic demand cannot ever be made to exponentially succeed, a product that addresses a latent demand even partially can result in a chain reaction where, provided one has a capable-enough team, the ideal product will be "pulled out from the development team" similarly to how CO2 and the atmosphere pull a sprout out from a seed. I know what you're thinking, "sprouts force themselves out of a shell." In startup-land, on planet-startup, sprouts are actually pulled out of the seed shell by the CO2 and atmosphere. Ideal products start as remarkable clunky, embarrassing, imperfect products that have a manifest potential to address a real, unaddressed need that sits latent in the air like rarefied charged particles waiting for the lightening strike to come.
2. Finding Market-Lacks with joy
What sucks in your world ? If you encounter an issue, problem, gap, or lack on a daily basis you've scratched the surface of Startupdom.
Something you yourself needed and created from scratch would be good. Or find an online or offline community and assess the current solutions to a problem or issue.
Think creatively. Then, start building.
In the old model, companies would create a product and then find consumers to buy. In the novel model, customers drive the creation of a product from the initial step. Without consumers, there is no product, there is no life-blood, there is no latent energy and charged particles to bring the lightening to life, so your initial focus in starting a novel venture ought always be to look for where the lightening can happen — to find the customer.
Products solve a problem for the consumer. The consumer runs into problems all the time, and needs something to bridge some gaps. However, we, as product developers, do not know what those gaps are or how best to solve them without deeply inquiring into the needs and expectations of the consumer. In order to find market-lacks and what is missing with current solutions, we must go where the customers are. If they congregate online, get into the online communities. If they experience a lot of problems you think a product could eliminate at the mall, or at a store, go there and ask people to interview them for 3-5 minutes. In short, go where you can ask people directly about an approach, issue, problem, or current solution, go to the place where the consumer is.
"Fish where the fish are”
"Dance where the music is playing”
"Harvest where the fruit is growing”
What you're trying to harvest: a list of inadequate solutions to real-world problems that people encounter on a regular basis. Or an actual market gap. A market gap for a want, or a highly desirable is great. A market gap for a need, or highly necessary service, or product is even better.
3. Amassing a huge list of "Pain Points" from would-be customers and clientele.
Simply create a list of “pain points” that the consumer experiences with current solutions and approaches. Say you want to know how people hail a cab, or how they go about learning French grammar, or how they analyze their website visitor hit count. In all these situations, you find the customer who has this issue and you ask an open-ended question that lets them explain how they go about solving this problem. When they have explained their approach, you ask what about the approach is nice, what is not, what is their level of satisfaction with it, and what the ideal situation would be like. Would the ideal cab simply know where you are and come when you need? Would a French grammar textbook keep track of what you had missed? Would the website hit count tracker offer you recommendations about what to post about next? What does the ideal solution look like in their mind? They might not know, but they can tell you all the things insufficient about the current solution, and that is the starting block for retiring to the Batcave.
Do not "sell your product" just ask questions, get a narrative, schedule to meet people at coffee shops, get them to explain to you the pain points they have with current, unsatisfactory solutions. Listen deeply, ask questions. Listen twice as much as you speak, at least.
4. Retire to the batcave and start thinking of creative solutions that weave and braid a new, useful, incredible quilt that addresses most or all of the pain points people have.
A Startup-worthy solution improves the current situation by at least a factor of ten. 10x better solutions are prime candidates for a startup and worth investing time into: concept, design, and innovation. The ten-times-better rule can be considered a quantum leap in goodness.
Once you’ve identified a market-lack and interviewed plenty of customers in their natural habitats, it’s time to return to your Batcave and start creatively brainstorming solutions to the slew of issues, pain-points, discomfitures and clumsy clunkiness that current solutions simply fall short in addressing adequately. Create a constellation in the night sky of your mind and tie together the variety of stumbling blocks with creative bridges. What’s the best zero-think product you could put in front of a user? What’s the real rough spot they encounter? Are they actually aware of the product they want or do they simply have unaddressed needs that they cannot vocalize? Oftentimes, customers don’t actually know what they want, but they would gladly jump on the bandwagon were it to come along. The “I’ll know it when I see it” mentality is walking along the landscape, and if you can creatively make the thing that upon experiencing it they will see and know that it’s the solution, you have created a product, or at least the initial minimum remarkable product, that solves their problems and addresses their needs. This part takes some creativity, some guesswork, some intuition, and a deep understanding of what your customer really needs and what will solve their problem. The best way to figure this out is to keep talking to customers, keep asking them (without selling your solution) what is the problem they face and how they solve it currently, and what they wish the solution had. Sometimes, you will know that the product solves their problem perfectly, and then your mission is to bring your customer to the glorious “Aha!” moment, where they also realize the solution you’ve developed addresses their most pressing exigency.
Thanks for checking it out. If you like what you read of the first 5 sections you can get the whole 19 sections here.
