One thing entrepreneurs must always learn from Paul Buchheit is this: it is better to make a few people truly happy than many people only half happy. I once told a journalist that if I could tell entrepreneurs only 10 things, that would be one of them. So what are the other 9?
And then, when I listed them, there were as many as 13:
1. Choose a Good Co-founder
A co-founder is likened to a startup’s real estate location. You can change any anything in the house except position of it. In a startup model, we can change the idea easily, but changing your co-founder is extremely difficult. A startup model's success is the responsibility and function of its creators.
2. Get started quickly
Starting quickly does not mean producing a lot, but getting your product to market quickly, because you can only truly improve it once it is released. Launching teaches you what to build as you realize how you are wasting time. Its greatest value is showing you how to attract customers.
3. Let your idea grow
This is like the second half of launching quickly. Launch quickly and iterate. It would be a major mistake to break a startup model by focusing only on flashy ideas initially. Usually, ideas wonderful are always discovered during practical implementation.
4. Understand customers
You can imagine the value a startup creates as a rectangle, with one side representing the number of users and the other representing how much you actually improve their lives. The second dimension is difficult to control most. Indeed, growth in the first side depends on how well you handle the second. As in science, hardware cannot answer the question but shows what users lack. The better you understand users how much, the higher the success rate that much. That is why successful startups often make what their founders need.
5. Have a few people like you rather than many with conflicting feelings
Wanting a large number of users to love you is an ideal, but you cannot achieve it immediately. At first, you must choose between meeting all the needs of the few potential customers with a response the few the needs of all potential customers. Choose the first approach. It expands the customer base rather than increasing satisfaction. If you think you have reached 85% perfection, how do you know it is not 70% or even just 10%? Meanwhile, it is easy to know how many customers you have.
6. Provide surprisingly good customer service
Customers in the past were often “mistreatment‘. Monopoly companies will have a customer service extremely bad. Such experiences can extinguish your wonderful ideas. Make your customer service not merely good, but so good that surprised. Make people happy in your own way. In the earliest startup stages, we must pay ourselves to deliver service beyond the business's scale, but that is how we understand and acquire customers.
Chương trình liên quan tại YUP Education: X-Startup – khóa học khởi nghiệp «Khởi Chánh Nghiệp» · The Journey – lộ trình phát triển doanh nhân
