A group of sharp guys got together and decided to do a Silicon Valley start-up — but they weren’t quite sure what to do.
They started sketching out some ideas for email organization. Then Gmail released its priority inbox.
Then they started looking into automating the legal discovery process. Talking to potential customers was frustrating:
We built a pretty good prototype for a kind of problem we suspected lawyers might have, but we lost our way even as we found a target. We found ourselves going over the same questions with different potential clients and getting different answers, and not quite understanding why. We built features that made sense to us, but our test users just shrugged.
In those initial tests, what your users say doesn’t matter:
It’s how they say it.
Are they asking all kinds on inane questions, grumbling about the colors, and telling you everything you did wrong while you can’t pry them away from your demo? Success.
Are they smiling, nodding enthusiastically, telling you what a great idea it is, and then wandering off and not answering your email? It’s not working.
Apparently it wasn’t working. So, they pivoted to making
siege toys:
I didn’t realize that this was happening to us until we gave up on the legal software startup. Mike pulled out some plans he had for a snap-together trebuchet, and we started building it in TechShop on a lark. As we put it together, we started having back-and-forth idea sessions faster than we’d ever gotten anything done with the first company.
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That happens because when you believe in your product, and you own the idea behind it, you’re reacting to your own mistakes on gut feel and getting it right faster than you can talk it through with your cofounder. You’re watching your test users use your product wrong and figuring out how to fix it even as they’re complaining about something else.That’s not just a nice place to be, it’s a necessity. There are so many other things grabbing your attention when you’re trying to do a startup that you can’t painstakingly work out the right answer by careful analysis. You need to be able to think up and be confident in a new idea or improvement in the middle of doing six other things.
It’s more important than any other business indicator—addressable market, competitive advantage, disruptive technology—none of that matters compared to believing what you’re doing.
And that’s why we’re lucky that we moved from a $6,000,000,000 market to a $60,000 one, from serious software for real business to a simple toy for kids. Because we were flailing and we didn’t know it, and now we’re doing something, we’re doing it right, and we can feel it. Without that feeling, we wouldn’t have had the confidence to start a Kickstarter project, wander into important people’s offices holding laser-cut siege engines grinning like idiots, and bother random people on the Internet until they started passing our site around.
I’m not saying that just believing in your idea will magically make you successful. But I am saying that if you don’t have that simple, unshakable certainty, you’re looking at a nearly impossible uphill battle. And I would—and did—trade a “billion dollar” “opportunity” for a maybe-side-business that I know I can make work.