A New Methodology
First week of PMF Camp in the books and my mind is blown with a new methodology to navigate the 0 to 1 phase of startup building.
I’ve started anywhere between 6 and 15 companies, depending on how we define how far a company needs to get before it’s counted as a real company.
I have tried a lot of approaches to starting companies, mostly centered around the Lean Startup methodology of validating pain points with customers, running experiments, and avoiding expensive engineering until there’s a higher confidence around what people want.
This week I enrolled in Rob Snyder’s PMF Camp and my mind was blown.
Rob, through his work building his own startups and helping many others, has made some important refinements to the basic ideas of Lean Startup. I found learning about these refinements to easily be worth the $5,000 I paid to join his community.
Refinement #1 - Demand exists independent of Supply
From one of Rob’s posts:
There is no such thing as "demand for X product." Demand happens out there in the world - it's what people need to accomplish, whether or not I exist.
Supply, then, is my response to demand. A "great" product takes an interesting angle on demand, and/or creates an innovative shape of supply.
When I believe this... I no longer think my job is to create demand and evangelize. Instead:
* My job is to figure out what project I can fit my product into; not to convince people they should be doing a particular project. The better I understand their project, the clearer my product becomes
* When I feel like I'm pushing, convincing, or persuading, I take that as a signal that I either don't understand demand or haven't nailed supply
* Still ain't easy, but much easier than trying to convince the world they should care about something they'll never care about
This has significantly shifted the way I’m thinking about startup building and the way I talk about startup building. It’s not “what is my idea” anymore. It’s more of “where do I want to search for demand?”
Demand exists independent of supply. Supply are the ideas for how to solve demand. I need to start with truly understanding demand first.
Refinement #2 - Don’t ask about pain points
One thing I’ve done at least 100,000x is ask people what pains they are having in an effort to try and solve those pains for them.
Demand and pain points are similar ideas with one big difference: we all live with pain points.
The mental model I’ve learned in PMF camp is to think of everyone having a Trello board of things they are trying to accomplish. Pain points may exist on the Trello board but they are almost always going to sit in a column titled “things I live with and will likely never solve.”
It’s safe to say that every startup I have done (even the ones with a small amount of success) have been playing in the column “things I live with and will likely never solve.”
I know this now because of how hard it’s been to sell. If you are playing in the “things I live with...” column you are going to have to persuade people to buy. You’ll be under price pressure as you compete most with doing nothing. Doing nothing is the toughest competitor.
Demand is like a pain point in that its something that the customer wants to fix, however, I wouldn’t call demand a “big pain point” or a “pressing pain point” (or the all too common mosquito vs shark bite pain point analogy).
Demand is not a pain point. It’s something that absolutely needs to be done. It’s a project the customer is working on that they must accomplish as part of their job. Using the Trello analogy this is the column titled “OKRs” or “Important Projects.”
I want to work on a product that is playing in the “Important Project” column. If I don’t, it’s going to be an uphill battle of convincing people why they want to solve the thing on their list.
Refinement #3 - Look for Demand Intensity
How do you figure out demand? The process of PMF Camp is fairly straightforward (although not easy): go out and ask a targeted customer type what their pressing projects are, explore how they are trying to solve them, and see if your product idea can fit into those projects.
Rob teaches a concept called the case study sales method where you present a simple template of a sales deck to a customer (he’s open sourced it in the link above). The case study sales method is a way to present to a customer what you think their pressing project is and then listen and learn on what you are getting right / wrong.
You are looking for high intensity “yes” (or as Rob calls it a “hell yes”) response to the case study presentation. You want them to say “this is me and I want this solved right now.”
PMF Camp teaches if you aren’t hearing this, debug and iterate. Continue this cycle until you get to a repeatable “hell yes.”
I did 13 sales calls this week presenting the case study sales method and I found it to be a great way to have a conversation to uncover demand. I had two experiences that got closer to “hell yes.”
The first one the person I was speaking to said “wow this is the exact thing I’m working on right now” then showed me his screen of how he was putting things together in Google Sheets and Slack to accomplish the automation.
The second person saw what we were presenting and said “oh I wish you were doing...” then proceeded to describe in detail their pressing project, why it was so pressing right now, and how, if we shifted what we were building a bit we would be a perfect fit for them.
...
I’m six week into my startup journey. This week, thanks to PMF Camp, I made more progress then I had the previous five weeks.
There is something powerful about a methodology or a playbook you can run. I’m not certain that I’ll find PMF or Demand using Rob’s approach, but I do think it’s the best I’ve found out there for how to run the 0-1 startup playbook.
Appreciate you following along.
#HappyLearning