16 Steps to Get from Zero to 1 Million (Startup Lessons Learned)

A few months back, I had the pleasure of attending a meetup hosted by the Lean Startup Circle of San Francisco. It was an amazing experience and I'll tell you why. It was more than the fact that I'd learned immensely from the keynote speaker Drew Houston of Dropbox and that I'd met a room full of people that I can now call my network, but it was one time that I can truly say I was in a room that displayed the drive and tenacity to build and succeed that we are missing everyday given the current economic climate. Everyone in the room had their eyes set on a prize, a goal that they were attempting to reach, and that's why they were all here to listen to a guy that started a simple business a couple years back and made a million dollar business from simply identifying a market pain.

Let me start off by giving Dropbox the utmost praise it deserves. It's an amazing SaaS (software as a service) product that I've been using years back when it was nothing other than http://www.getdropbox.com and a cool little video. Since then it's developed into a service that millions of people around the world use (and rely on) daily. I must confess, when I first learned about Dropbox, I was nothing like I am today. I knew little about the startup industry, other than that I was growingly interested in the developments of social networks and very niche verticals like "web-based file hosting services in the cloud." Yes, I learned about Dropbox by doing a "similar" search on Google of an app that I downloaded through the Blackberry App World called SugarSync. 

For me, it was love at first site with Dropbox, and this meant that Drew and the whole Dropbox Team had done their job. If they are able to snag the early adopters (like me) that are key influencers within smaller circles, then they surely had a solid marketing strategy and scalable business plan for customer acquisition. Here are the lessons learned from the horse's mouth (Drew) and boiled down by yours truly:

1. Make something that people want
2. There is always early risk
3. Launch at a time that's ready for your business
4. Learn about potential early success early
5. Learn early, learn often (not launch early, launch often)
6. Go where your early adopters hang out
7. Cut to the point (draw initial attention fast and remove friction)
8. Capture and retain early interest
9. Niche first, world later
10. Create a repeatable and scalable mechanism
11. Be scrappy
12. Make sure what you are doing is valuable (validate, validate, validate)
13. Get mainstream interest
14. Move beyond TechCrunch as a goal
15. Real organic growth comes from W.O.M. (word of mouth)
16. (For beta) Let people in when you need to learn something useful

For those of you that care to stick around, let me break it down for you:

• Make something that people want. It's very important. Before you start any new venture, validate that market and do your due diligence. Building a scalable business starts with a product and the strength of the product will amplify itself. Drew pointed out specifically that the segway was an amazingly designed (and marketed) product that failed because it was a poor market fit.
• There is always early risk. With any startup, there is always early risk. With that being said, if something is bound to fail, make sure it fails as fast as possible. There is no use pumping resources into a product that no one will use even if it has all the world's marketing force behind it.
• Launch at a time that's ready for your business. This applies to certain companies better than others. From the experts, there are starkly conflicting views. We have Paul Graham from Y Combinator who says launch as soon as physically possible. Joel Spolsky says launch "when it doesn't suck," aka take the Marimba Phenomenon into account (this is when more money is spent on marketing and PR than development). In the case of Dropbox, it made sense to launch only when the entire product was 100% because they didn't want to risk the one outlier experience that could spoil the milk
• Learn about potential early success, early. What does this mean? Well it means validate the need in the market to prevent yourself from spending money on an already dead product. Save money spent on resources if you know it's not going to work. In the case of Dropbox, Drew pointed out that the online storage space was very fragmented and no product would fit a single purpose - that's where Dropbox would fit perfectly.
• Learn early, learn often. I cannot stress enough about how important it is to learn who you audience is. It doesn't matter how great a product is and how much time and sweat you put into it, the only thing that matters at the end of the day is who will use it - and will they use it.
• Go where your early adopters hang out. This is a topic that I emphasize with EVERYONE I meet. It's important to influence your audience early on - even before your product is fully built. You want to build interest, you want to validate your product, you want to do as much as you can early on to ensure that your product will succeed within your specially built niche. If you come from the audience you are trying to appeal to, your conversation will be much more organic.
• Cut to the point. This can mean a variety of things, but what I'm referring to is your marketing. When you want to entice people, you don't want to show them how to log in, you want to show them the usefulness of your product. How do you do that? Draw initial attention fast and remove friction. For example, on your landing page, instead of putting detailed instructions on how to work the program, lead them to a video that can convey the utility of your product. And instead of trying to capture all your user data upfront, make it easier (less friction) for users to register and use your product. Don't give everything up front, put enough out there to tease your audience into using your product. If your product speaks for itself, there won't be any problem keeping them once you've got them.
• Capture and retain early interest. Simple enough, right? Some of you might contest that this point contradicts the philosophy of "launch at a time that's ready for your business," but it really doesn't. All this means is throw up a simple email form so that you can capture early adopter interest instead of pushing them away since your product isn't complete. This doesn't mean you have to show them everything prematurely. It just means you might have to put them in a bit of suspense.
• Niche first, world later. Had it not been for Drew, I wouldn't have ever thought of this. What does it mean? it means focus on your community first and then bring your product to the world. You can get more market saturation if you limite the audience. Yes, you heard right, and it's not the first time you've heard the story. Remember that website called Facebook? Yeah, they started in Harvard, the Ivy League, and eventually expanded to college students, high school, and then the world (missing a few steps in there, but you get the point). If you can learn from anyone in this case, it's the success of Facebook in implementing this idea. Target your community first, the world can come later.
• Create a repeatable and scalable mechanism. This is almost the most important (and viral) aspect of getting traction. This mechanism for Dropbox refers directly to their "share Dropbox with a friend and you BOTH get a reward" plan. Getting traction starts with one user and if you build a repeatable and scalable mechanism to facilitate the process of spreading the word there are endless possibilities for growth.
• Be scrappy. Yes, you've heard it thousands of times and it may seem cliche, but it's true in the case of almost ALL new startups. What does it mean? Well it means "fake it 'til you make it." If you have a service that requires user generated content and usership to entice new users, make the damn content yourself. Yes, faking it works sometimes. In the case of Aardvark, the social Q&A website recently acquire by Google for $50M, the founders didn't have the resources or the focus to build an algorithm to solve answers posed by the community and they didn't have a big enough community yet to self sustain the incoming questions. What'd they do? The founders hand researched the answers to questions and sent them directly to the askers. Yes, that's being scrappy and it seems they did quite well for themselves.
• Make sure what you are doing is valuable. I can't stress this enough. I've mentioned it before and I'll mention it again. Validate, validate, validate. Learn about your audience, learn about how they change and how they use your product, and make sure you don't alienate anyone. You have to constantly learn about your demographic and how it reacts to your product. Without the audience, there is no product.
• Next, get mainstream interest. How do you do that? It's tough to give a definitive answer for all companies. For some, it might mean buying AdWords from Google. For others, it might mean hiring a VP of marketing to focus directly on SEM, SEO, PPC, etc. You really need to use your own discretion to drive this user acquisition in the context of your own business. What will work for some will not necessarily work for others. A/B test, test, and test some more. It doesn't hurt to try everything in your arsenal before you hit eureka.
• Move beyond TechCrunch as a goal. Don't rely on scoring a publication in a major publisher like TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, VentureBeat, yes, I can keep going. Things like a repeatable and scalable mechanism and organic W.O.M. are much more sustainable goals to reach in order to grow your company.
• Real organic growth comes from word of mouth. Werd.
• Let people in when you need to learn something useful. Well this really only applies to beta launches. When you are initially testing out certain features or A/B testing graphics, it's important to get in new faces. Funnel in new faces (from your stored list of early adopters) to get a new look on your product.

At the end of the day, there are three things that you MUST take away if anything:

1. You can't build a billion dollar company without a billion dollar audience. The goal is always to build an audience, but there are infinite ways to get there.
2. Create something that makes people happy and solves a problem (pain). Or there really is no need.
3. Focus. Keep your main thing your main thing. You'll hear this over and over again. You can think of all the great ideas in the world, but execution is key. Focus on your product and how relevant it is for your audience and put the rest on the drawing board. If it's a good enough idea, it will wait for you while you build your billion dollar company.

And with that, happy building.

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