Q1 2025 Reflections
Six months into my latest startup journey. Summarizing the lessons learned in the last 90 days.
I mainly use this SubStack to document my startup founder journey. Its a public journal to help hold me accountable to the main reason I love entrepreneurship: the lessons and personal growth.
If you’re new here, this is my fourth startup venture and I’ve been at it for six months now. Starting in October, I was on a quest to make learning more effective with AI. Crazy how far things have come since then.
At the start of the year I wrote First 90 Days Reflection where I graded myself on my initial goals, which were all focused in the learning AI space. Starting the new year, I changed the goal set (in The New North Star) to be more focused on revenue with an eye towards finding true market demand before investing heavily in building a solution.
Grading Q1
My Big Hairy Audacious goal for Q1 was to bring in $100,000 in revenue. We didn’t quite pull this off but I’m still going to give ourselves an A minus for the quarter for accomplishing the following:
First, we proved we could 100% get consulting projects to bring in revenue if we needed. We accomplished one project and had multiple projects in the pipeline for our AI consulting angle but ended up turning them down in favor of focusing on our own ideas.
Second, we were able to secure fractional roles to provide steady income as we continue to focus most of our efforts on our own ideas. This has been a big psychological boost to our startup efforts in two ways. First, the fractional work gives us a front row seat to real business problems. Just this last month I completed a project for one of my clients that became a heavy inspiration for where we’re at with Game Film. Second, although we have runway in savings, seeing your savings go down month after month is stressful. The fractional funds are slowing the burn and extending our runway.
The spirit of the goal of last quarter was to prove we could make revenue. We accomplished this and shifted half way through the quarter to trying to make revenue with our own product.
Game Film Progress
I’m happy to report we made our first few thousand dollars for Game Film! We have come up with an approach we think gives early customers a win-win, which we call our design partner program:
We charge $5,000-$10,000 for a customer to put a deposit down on Game Film
The deposit is 100% refundable if we fail to deliver a specific use case for the product, which is intentionally left vague in the customer’s favor.
Our job is to build Game Film in such a way that our design partner wants the product more than they want their money back.
We have one signed with three that have told us they intend to sign. On top of this progress, my pipeline is full with more interested design partners. Our plan at present is to limit to 10 design partner slots to ensure we can crush the product delivery for them.
Our Startup Philosophy
With the caveat that there are lots of ways to build a successful startup, let me tell you my startup methodology, which is heavily influenced by Rob Snyder who runs the PMF Camp I joined in December.
Our number one goal is to find Demand. We find Demand by talking to real people about real projects they are trying to accomplish. Demand is a project with urgency behind it.
We are at the earliest of startup stages, trying to find our first 10 customers. Our plan is to sell the concept of Game Film to 10 people with the design partner program I described above. Do our best to crush it for all 10 of these customers (with the expectation that a handful won’t be happy, a handful will be “meh” and a handful will absolutely love what we deliver). We’ll then take what we learn from these initial 10, filter to the ones that loved what we delivered and double down on our efforts there.
What this process means is that I’m not stressing about answering the following:
Who is my ideal customer profile, buyer persona, end user, etc.?
What marketing channel is most effective to reach them?
What are the value propositions of our offering?
Where can we niche down to focus more?
How much can / should we charge?
These all seem like reasonable questions to ask and I want to answer them one day. My reason for not stressing about trying to answer them now is I’m letting the process of accomplishing real projects for real people guide the answers.
My current customer set (assuming I can get the remaining three to sign) will include:
A B2C business
A B2B SaaS
A trash pickup business
A serviced based advisory business
My pipeline is similarly varied in the type of people that find Game Film interesting! What this tells me is we’re simply too early to make any sort of definite choices on strategy. Its best to wait, learn through real projects for real people, then iterate from there on what’s working vs. trying to be an MBA about the problem and guess.
Our Q2 Goal
In the spirit of last month, what’s the new north star?
10 design partners with signed order forms and (hopefully, fingers crossed we can get the technical work done) crazy happy about what we’re doing for them.
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#HappyLearning