If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don’t hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.
Sometimes just learning a new word can completely change the way you operate your business. Just one little word can have that much power. In this article that word is “Market Launch.”
The next time my investors ask me when we’re going to launch I will have two answers for them. One will be our “product launch” and the next will be our “market launch.”
This clarity is going to make my life so much easier.
First off, did you know Aaron Patzer is from Evansville, Indiana? I had no idea, and considering how often I link to and post his stuff, I should have known that.
Anyway, some of my big takeaways:
“About 8 or 9 months before we launched Mint, we started a personal finance blog. We didn’t really have much money at this time, so we couldn’t hire any writers. We did the blog mostly ourselves. We went around to all the other personal finance blogs, and we said, “Would you like to write a guest post for us?” Half of them said yes, as long as we linked back to them.”
“Then we emailed those guys and said if you put a little badge on your site that says, “I want Mint,” on your blog, or wherever, we will give you priory access. We got 600 people to put a free banner ad for our site on theirs.”
“Then we launched at TechCrunch 40, and about 6 weeks before, I hired a PR firm, which I think is very important.”
“We also hired designers with a very specific skill set. We hired people who had a computer science background, where they could come up with the idea in their head, and render it in Photoshop, program it in HTML and CSS, and do a bit of a usability/user experience product management roll, sort of three roles combined into one.”
Steve Jobs quoting Picasso’s “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” and saying that Apple has “always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” It’s important to understand that copying is just creating an exact replica, whereas stealing is taking an idea and making it your own.
For obvious reasons (i.e. Pocket Tales is a social reading game) this link is extremely valuable to me.
The biggest choice you’ll make in looking at this list is what gambits not to implement. Focus is key, especially if your application isn’t a game, so decide what behaviors or outcomes are the biggest priority, and design your “game” elements around those.
We don’t pay you to work here—we pay you so you can work here.
This presentation explains how to use Survey.io to measure product/market fit. You will get more out of it if you visit the source of this presentation at Venture Hacks and take a look at the sample survey. You should also consider reading the transcript or listening to the audio that goes along with this presentation.
Mint continues to serve up great real-world examples of how to successful start and operate a new company. Here are a couple gems to demonstrate why you should read this article:
“The Product. Maybe we didn’t have a high viral coefficient but we had a great net promoter score…The delight after a quick setup, and having all those graphs and balances was palpable and emotional.”
“Blog / Original Content. Noah talks about the pre-launch days here but quite simply we focused on building out a unique personal finance blog…Eventually the blog became #1 in personal finance, and drove traffic to the app.”
