Hello everyone, I’m Nikolay the Russian Guy, and let me be brutally honest with you today.
Last time i grumbled about people with startup ideas who never say “go” to these ideas, preferring to avoid a painful probability that the idea is awfully bad and nobody needs it.
So you might ask — what a proper bold person should do with the idea instead? The answer is simple. Get it off your fucking head and into the fucking market. As fast as humanly possible.
Gather feedback. Take a step back. Heal the emotional wounds you will inevitably get in the process. Maybe cry a little.
Then gather your balls back up, adjust the idea, and get it to the fucking market again, to gather feedback. Rinse and repeat.
And if at some point you understand that the idea cannot be adjusted anymore, that it is indeed a total crap — well, just dump it and move on. You will free the space for a new idea, so don’t worry about it. Ideas don’t worth shit anyway.
I guess it’s pretty much straightforward up until now, right? Nothing you wouldn’t hear from any half-assed consultant out there. Heck, you can even hear it from these worthless scumbags who call themselves spiritual trainers, mentors and whatnot.
The tricky part is — how the hell do you get to the fucking market?
Most often than not I see people crank up some money, find some agency and pay them to develop the product. Yeah, not enough money for the whole product, obviously, but you can get an MVP. Or a POC. In the end, you can always find an offer just for the sum of money you have. So many Rajesh Kutrapalis out there. Cool stuff, right?
No, it’s fucking wrong. If you get your idea straight to development — well, you are doomed, my friend. Yes, you might survive a little bit with the money lent to you by Fools, Friends and Family. You might sustain a little bit further by receiving a government grant. Yet, most probably, in the end you will find yourself with a crappy product no one buys and no fucking money to sustain it further. A couple of years more you might spend trying to figure out whether to carry it on, or maybe change something — but all of that will be futile attempts to avoid the obvious: you fucked up, and you fucked up big.
But how did that happen? You played it right, you might argue. You got to the market as fast as you could, you implemented your great idea, now you have to adjust, rinse and repeat, right?
Well, if your name is Richy Rich and you have more money to burn — please be my guest. What’s even more important — if you have your lifetime to burn.
In an ideal world, it takes 1 to 2 months to find “the right agency”. Plus 2 to 3 months to create a POC. Plus 2 to 3 months to advertise and get users’ feedback.
In real world, with all the pauses, hesitations, delays and deadline fuck-ups it sums up to a full year or maybe even a couple. If you choose to go with the government grants — add up a year on top of that, to spend on endless bureaucratic paperwork, reports and tricky schemes to make it all look nice and clean on paper.
And then add up the period of “fuck, i spent so much time and money already, i am not willing to dump it”. Classic casino syndrome, which is really hard to avoid, and extremely fucking hard to get out of.
Well, this shitty part mostly depends on the size of your balls, really. Some guys take years to overcome it. Then other guys are never out of this valley of death. You probably met them — these sorry asses sitting in the bars and bragging about their “experience of a lifetime” and how senior they are now in everything startup-related. “Been there, seen that” kind of guys who are not brave enough to admit they fucked up big.
So, the straight-on development is kind of a fucked up idea. There should be another way to get to the fucking market as fast as humanly possible. Faster than that MVP / POC crap. Right?
Well, yes, there is.
You should sum up your idea — could use the canvas that is already there, like Lean Startup, or Lean UX, or Impact Mapping, or any other tool out there you see fit. Doesn’t really matter at this point. Your first version will be more or less shitty, anyway, and will require a lot of improvement cycles.
Then you get to your target audience and ask them whether they need this pile of crap you have just invented. Gather feedback, adjust, rinse and repeat. And only get to the MVP stage if you have a proven positive feedback. Preferably with a proven monetary interest.
If you happen to find a consultant who advises you to do the above — congratulations, you hit a very rare jackpot, and you still stand a chance.
Just be extra careful for the next valley of death.
Who do you ask about your product, and how?
The obvious answer is “people i know”. And it’s wrong. The single worst answer would be “my friends”. Do not ever ask people who know you and do care for you. Ask people who are supposed to actually use the product, and who don’t give shit about being brutally honest with you. Do it in a manner that they are not really afraid of hurting your feelings. Don’t show emotional attachment to your product. Don’t tell them it’s your own idea that you nourished for months and are willing to pursue. Their kind hearts, along with political correctness, will not let them tell you that the product is crap, the idea behind it is stupid, the intended implementation is awful, and the author of it all is clearly a brain-disabled moron.
‘Cause if they don’t — you will happily proceed to MVP stage with a shitty idea, and effectively doom yourself.
What you need here — fuck, what you need at every stage of your thought process — is brutal honesty. Don’t feed yourself with happy lies, and don’t let the people around you feed yourself with the same crap.
Get your head out of your butt and think. After all, that’s what human heads were designed for.