How to Build the First Magical Version of your Startup This Weekend

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Sponsor: Byldd

Byldd is a startup studio offering MVP development services for startups. They’re focused on helping early-stage founders launch revenue generating businesses. Talk to Ayush ([email protected]) and tell him you came from the pod.

This Newsletter:

We’ll send it out with each episode now - hope it’s helpful. Share it with someone who’d like the pod!

Early subscribers can start getting our weekly post sent to Tacklebox Members as well. Here’s last week’s: How to Message Your Price. Reply “Sunday Email” if interested.

Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡

This episode is half kick in the ass and half product fundamentals. It’s meant to help you distill your big idea into a manageable product you can build in a weekend so that you can start getting feedback.

Your product needs to make your first customer wildly successful, and this is a fast way to start testing for and aligning towards that.

We gloss over the five marketing archetypes in the pod, but I dive in a bit deeper here:

1. The Five Marketing Archetypes
   

   1. So That They Can Messaging (STTC): This is an archetype of messaging that allows you to show you know exactly who your customer is. “I’ll help you do X so that you can Y,” “I’ll take this hard thing off your plate so you can get to the bigger goal that hard things been holding you back from.”
      
      So, for the company Freewrite, a distraction free keyboard for writers I’ve been obsessed with lately (don’t buy one yet, I’m working on a discount code), it might be something like “we help remove the millions of distractions your laptop has so that you can actually write for an hour a day.” The more specific you are on X and Y, the more trust you’ll build.
      

   2. Empathetic Pain Point Messaging (EPP): Describing a customer’s pain in eerie detail let’s them know you understand their blockers. They’ll trust you to solve their problem even before they know how you plan on solving it (your product).
      
      So, for Freewrite again, if we said “you promise yourself you’ll write each day before work for an hour - you know this will help you finish your book in six months. But, your writing time gets usurped by email and texts and instagram and every other shiny object on your laptop. We remove the option to be distracted - you won’t have to rely on willpower.” Or something. Detail the customer’s pain with depth they’ll be surprised by.
      

   3. Cost-Driven Messaging: Describing the exact cost the customer is incurring by not solving the problem is more motivating than any feature could ever be. This assumes the customer already measures this cost and feels it’s impact.
      
      “Every employee that leaves has a real cost to you of $80k. You lost 6 employees last year - that’s $480k. You’ll probably lose 6 more this year if you don’t change anything. We’re confident we can save four of those employees, saving you $340k.”
      

   4. Apparate (Teleporter) Messaging: I think of this as the Weight Watchers tactic - a before and after picture. Before, you did this. Your life looked like this. Your process looked like this. Specifically, the worst part was this.
      
      Now, we remove that part. You skip straight from here to here. We’ll handle the middle.
      
      The “we’ll take this off your plate so you can skip from A → D pitch, when the customer is used to slogging through B and C, is magical.
      

   5.  Urgency Messaging: Similar to cost, but when there’s a specific barrier. “In X days, this will happen whether you’re ready for it or not. Let’s make sure you are” is compelling, especially when the urgent moment is sitting in the back of their mind.
      
      Also, there’s usually something they’re avoiding about the moment.
      
      “Taxes are coming in April. You can ignore them all you want, but you need to pull together a bunch of company information you don’t have or don’t know you need. We’ll remove all the fuzziness.”

For more messaging pods, check out:

• Storytelling 101 for Entrepreneurs

• The Magic of One-Sentence Marketing

• How to Create a Strategy For Your Startup

The References

• Byldd

• Tacklebox

• Idea to Startup Newsletter

• The Personal MBA

Timestamps:

0:55 The Two Questions Entrepreneurs Have About Products
2:35 A Great Product Does Two Things
4:26 Entrepreneur Baggage + Airbnb for Lawn Equipment
6:29 A Mindset for Today
8:13 Step One - Process
8:53 Organ Donors
9:55 Inertia
11:35 Chronic Pain
13:07 Frank’s Process
14:50 Harry Potter and Being Chosen
15:43 Step Two - Metrics
17:12 Chronic Pain Ex-College Athlete SOM
18:35 Outcome not Features - The Product is Irrelevant
19:16 The Five Marketing Archetypes - STTC, Pain, Cost, Apparate, Urgency
20:19 Step Three - Delivery (The Product)
20:32 Warby Parker
22:23 The Twelve Forms of Value
25:49 The Venmo Accountability Group

Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:

Today, we’re going to talk about your very first product. The first thing you send to customers that’ll hopefully solve their problem, give you a ton of feedback, and help you make a bunch of decisions like… is this worth it.

Ideally you want to do this before you’ve spent a bunch of time and money. Early products are important.

The two questions most entrepreneurs have at this stage are - what should I build and how do I build it?

We’ll tackle those today.

Nearly everything out in the non idea to startup world focuses on the second part of that equation - how you should build it.

There are podcasts and youtube videos and even whole companies that teach you how to build a product in 2023 with no coding knowledge or developers needed. There are endless accessible tools - you can get a beautiful website up, collect payments, trigger emails, automate social media posts, generate an AI logo, and on and on. You can build, affordably, just about anything you can dream up.

But, as my dad says, all of that plus a dollar fifty will get you a ride on the subway. Pre-inflation.

I get a kick out of people who say things like “it’s so easy to start a company in 2023 - look at all the tools you have at your disposal to build stuff!”

That’s like saying “it’s so easy to start a restaurant in 2023! There are grocery stores everywhere and stoves are cheap!”

Uhh.. Cool? That’s certainly better than them being expensive. But that wasn’t really ever the problem. The problem is… what the heck are you gonna cook? And for who? And how will you find them? And what will you charge? And will they ever come back? And is the name “not all heroes wear crepes” already taken for my french bistro or can I use it?

Today, we’re going to talk about what you should build with all these tools. The what, in this case, is way harder than the how. The how is a commodity. In general in life it seems like you can always figure out the how if you’re sure about the hard ones- the what and why.

A great product does two things.

• First, it helps the customer do something today that they couldn’t do yesterday. And they really, really wanted to do that thing. And now that they can do it, they’re in a whole new status level. They’ve jumped up and separated themselves from their peers. Always remember, people make decisions based on envy not greed and success is separating yourself tomorrow from the peer group you’re in today.

• And second, it makes them feel good while they do it.

If I had to combine and shorten that into one word, I’d say that a great first product should feel magical. It should feel like those transport booth things in star trek or apparating in Harry Potter or something else with gen z I don’t know about. It should pick your customer up at one place and drop them off somewhere completely different that used to be hard to get to.

When I say magic you probably thought hey Brian you just said the product wasn’t the important part and now you’re telling me it needs to be magical - that seems hard.

Well, counterintuitively, magic is straightforward.

It’s a two step process.

1. Recognize the process your customer goes through to solve an important problem now.

2. Remove the hardest step

Gotta do one to do 2, and most people never fully nail #1.

Today, we’ll teach you how to make your first product magical, and it likely won’t take more than an email account and a squarespace page. Maybe a little airtable and zapier mixed in, but nothing we can’t build in a weekend with a few of those youtube tutorials.

—

So… why is this so hard? Why does nearly every entrepreneur we’ve worked with have such terrible instincts around what they should build first? Why do people struggle so much with their first product?

Because entrepreneurs have baggage.

When we have startup ideas, and I’m using the royal we for all of us beautiful idiots trying to build stuff, those ideas form in the shape of a product. That’s just human humans think. And that initial product idea usually colors everything we do from that point on, almost always negatively.

Here’s an example.

Maybe you just bought a house in Connecticut and the weeds and grass are so high that when Ruby runs in the backyard all you see is her fluffy tail sticking up like some sort of swiffer periscope. And maybe you tried to get landscapers to cut that grass but they’re all booked because no one wants to start landscaping companies and everyone wants to start chatGPT startups that’ll tell me what to watch on Netflix instead.

So, maybe you say hey - what if there was an Airbnb for lawn equipment and I could rent a mower and weed wacker for 25 bucks from a neighbor before my father in law comes to visit this weekend and thinks I’m a slob? Lots of people have equipment sitting around - there’s excess utility and probably tons of demand. Why don’t I build that app - the airbnb for lawn equipment.

Maybe I’m projecting, but it’s also realistic. We’ve been pitched this at Tacklebox a number of times.

Unfortunately, because of the shape of my idea, I’ve anchored myself to a product construct. I’m building airbnb for lawn equipment. That means it needs to be an app and a marketplace and collect payments and have ratings and send notifications and everything else the way airbnb does. So when I say I want to build my first version, and maybe I call it an MVP, I try to build a barebones airbnb app. Which will still be huge and bloated and not be a fit for the specific use case I’m targeting to start.

The shape our ideas come in - usually as an X for Y, uber for this, noom for that, talkspace for the other - sabotage our first product.

One of the worst things you can do in life is compare your beginning to someone else’s middle or end, in anything - your career, cooking, learning french. But in startups, it’s catastrophic.

So today, no matter where you are with your startup, I’ll beg you to approach this like a beginner. Like you’ve got no idea what you have to build.

You’ve only got customers that want something and a desire to help them get it. Those customers have a current process for solving it. We’re going to help them remove the hardest step.

That’s it. That will lead to the right product.

So, let’s talk about how you can do that this weekend and have a product on the other side. We’ve got a three part framework that’ll set you up real nice.

And before we get to the jazz, an editors note - I do know that a good chunk of you were like shit - that airbnb for lawn mowers isn’t a half bad idea! Does that exist? I should do that!

And to that I’ll say… all babies are cute, my friend. All babies are cute. But if you do start it, I need a lawn mower by Friday before my inlaws come. You don’t want to be the slob son in law. Even if you can build magical products.

Which we’ll get to… after…. a little smooth jazz.

Three Steps to your First Product - Step 1 - Process

The three step framework to building a magical first product is hard but straightforward.

1. Step one is Process - Knowing the steps the customer goes through to solve the problem now and calling out the most painful one

2. Step two is Metrics - Knowing how the customer measures success and promising that specific metric in relation to their bigger goal

3. Step three is Delivery - Removing the most painful step, somehow

Let’s start with process.

And to do that, we’ve got to first talk about organ donors.

In the US, roughly 15% of the population are organ donors, meaning if they’re in an accident they’ll donate their organs to save someone else’s life. In Austria, roughly 90% of the population are organ donors.

Why the gap?

Is it that people in the US are morally opposed to being donors? Are people in Austria more compassionate? Is it a religious difference? A cultural one?

Nope. It’s just a detail with the signup form.

In the US, you have to actively check the box on your license to be an organ donor. The default is to not be one. In Austria, you have to uncheck the box. The default is to be one.

If you’ve listened to all 162 episodes of Idea to Startup - and I just got the metrics, there are a lot of you who have, which is cool - and there’s one thing you take away from all of it, make it this - 99.999% of things people do are based on inertia. If they have to change anything - it’s unlikely they will. Even for something as serious as being an organ donor.

So, 15% of the US population are organ donors because you have to opt-in. If, instead, you had to opt-out, I’m confident that number would be closer to the 90% that Austria has. And lots of people would benefit from it. But again, not what we’re here for.

The point is recognizing the power of your customers inertia.

Inertia is like Charlie Munger talking about compound interest. Do not, under any circumstance, break it.

And if you want a cheerier example, a tacklebox member Christoph pointed out the ultimate inertia - there’s a restaurant in london that has a button at every table that says press for champagne. You press it, champagne comes. Inertia. Thrust and drag. And lots more champagne sold than if you didn’t have the button.

And that’s step one for your product. To understand your customer’s inertia. To understand every step they take to solve a problem. To understand what those steps look like, which are painful, and which they’d pay to remove. You need to know which steps are written in stone and which might be flexible - do this by understanding what steps they’ve changed in the past.

We’ve talked about the hassle premium before - people are happy to pay to remove hard stuff if it gets them something they want. But not if it breaks their inertia.

Knowing their process lets you build a product that’ll benefit from the existing inertia. The goal is to make it easier to use your product than to not. And to know their process, you need to pick a specific customer with a specific process.

Here’s an example.

I’m thigh deep in the chronic pain startup work. If you haven’t listened to the last 6 or so episodes, I’ve been exploring chronic pain for the pod and, more, because somewhere around 25% of the population suffers from debilitating chronic pain and I think that’s unnecessary.

So, in my interviews, I ask people how they go about trying to manage and cure this pain. I get all sorts of responses with all sorts of processes, but one has stood out.

This customer has a protocol that works well, but it’s time intensive - it’s usually between 20 to 40 minutes each day. If they do it, they feel good. If they don’t, they don’t. And most of the time they don’t. These are people who are busy at work, have kids, and on and on. Usually my instincts are to leave this customer alone - we need people who are actively trying to solve the problem and who you’d bet your company on to follow through. But, so many have said the same thing, it’s tempting to try to help them - it’s some variation of, quote, “it’s just so hard to stay accountable without an actual PT appointment that I’ve paid for and can’t miss” - and they’re all at the point where their insurance won’t pay for any more sessions. I’m curious.

And this is a good use case for a product test. To see - if I’m able to remove their hardest step, will they reach their goal.

When you’re doing this exercise, always pick one customer and go through their flow. This is one person I’ve interviewed, though lots of other people’s process rhymes with this:

Wake up creaky because they slept poorly the night before, snooze the alarm that was set so that they’d exercise before work, and get an extra 45 minutes of sleep.

Rush through morning kid stuff and fly out the door to work.

Mentally plan on exercising when you get home once the pain starts around noon.

Take advil at 4pm as the pain moves towards seriously distracting.

Get home and have something pop up. Kids, dinner, whatever. Realize it’s 8pm. No one wants to do 40 minutes of back exercises at 8pm. Watch Jack Ryan and go to bed.

Sleep poorly. Rinse, repeat.

My job is to isolate the hardest, most painful step - the one that’s really holding them back from being successful. My guess is it’s sleeping in. If I can create accountability, help them keep to a schedule and get momentum, they can create a habit.

When I test out that messaging with the SOM - I’ll keep you as accountable to your exercises every morning as though you had a daily PT appointment - people get excited.

Now, I’d love for it to be more specific. But the iterations of product and customer interaction will do that. And I’d love for the step to be more obvious, but most of these removable, painful steps are hidden. They have to be - otherwise someone would’ve solved for it already.

We talked about Harry Potter earlier when I mentioned apparating and I’ll talk about Harry Potter again now. Twice in one episode. Might be a record. Probably not.

Anyway, the reason people love Harry Potter so much is the same reason you need to nail this first step to build a great product.

We love Harry Potter because the most irresistible thing in life is being chosen. For someone to reach out and say hey - you - you’re actually special. You, out of everyone else in the world - you’re different. And because of that, look at what I’m going to do for you.

This is your chance to make a customer feel like that. To say I know your problem inside and out. I chose you -I know you do a b c d e now to solve X, and it doesn’t get done because step c is so hard. I’m going to take that out for you.

The more specific you can be, the more it’ll feel like you chose the person, the more excited they’ll be.

Which leads us nicely into step #2.

Step 2: Metrics aka The Leap

Step two of building a great product comes back to another thing you’ve got to know about that customer you chose in step 1.

A broader note, when you’re going through this process I’d highly recommend working on it in a similar way that we worked on the one person landing page. That episode is a great precursor to this one.

You’re building this product for one person you’ve specifically interviewed and spoken with.

Don’t fall victim to the Frankencustomer trap. That’s when you take a bunch of people, some real some make believe, and squish them into an ideal customer persona and build for that fake person. That never works. Only build for real people. Cmon.

Anyway, back to step 2.

Step 2 is about understanding the leap. Step one is identifying the process and the hardest step, step 2 is about clearly messaging what’ll happen if you handle that hard step for your customer. What it’ll allow them to do.

It’s a bit counterintuitive, but we need to start by communicating the value we create before we build a product that creates that value. This ensures that people care.

To do this, we need to know what our customer really wants. This is always about status level jumps. Humans spend an enormous amount of time tracking how successful we are relative to the people or companies we compare ourselves to. So this jump will have something to do with that.

Back to chronic pain.

Another layer to this SOM that I’m toying around that we just talked through for step one is why they want to kick chronic pain. And it’s fascinating.

There’s a consistent customer that is an ex-college athlete. For their entire life, they were the fit one of their friends. The one who did things no one else in the group did or could do. It was their identify.

And now, chronic pain has taken that from them.

When I do interviews with members of this SOM I hear over and over that they used to be the best athlete and now they aren’t. Certainly some of that is getting old, but they talk about how they used to outwork everyone in the gym and now they physically can’t. The chronic pain is holding them back. The status leap is clear. Often, they hate who they’ve become. Regular.

Step two is combining the messaging of the step you’ll remove and the status level leap you’ll create.

We’ll help you stay accountable to your daily, morning recovery program so that you can get past your chronic pain and back to kicking your friends butts in every sport you play.

When I test that verbally with potential customers and through a landing page, they jump. Envy, not greed. It’s not good or bad - it’s just human nature and there’s no reason to ignore it.

There’s a reason we do this part of the messaging before we do the product. It’s critical that you describe your product without describing features. Everything needs to be specific to the customer - we help you do this so that you can be this. The product is irrelevant. Knowing what they want is the key.

And if we nail this part, we can test and iterate the product endlessly until it stacks up to our messaging.

This part can be hard. So, there are five messaging archetypes we use at Tacklebox to help facilitate the thinking here. I’ll go through them here. We’re also going to start posting transcripts and deeper notes on a newsletter you can get access to through a link in the show notes - these will be there, too. Fill them in with your customer.

1. STTC Statements - Before, you had to do X. Now, we’ll help you do Y so that you can Z.

• Pain. Describe, in detail, the pain your customer feels. Then describe what happens when it’s gone.

• Apparate (reference 3). Describe the transformation. Where were they, in detail, and where are they now. Who’s their new peer group? What are they now able to do?

• Cost. What has not solving this problem taken from them.

• Urgency. Don’t go another minute dealing with X. Solve for Y today.

If you’re selling B2B, specific metrics are a huge help here. Numbers. Things people get hired and fired and promoted on.

Message steps one and two in a way that your customer is definitely compelled. Then, build.

That’s now.

Step 3: Delivery - remove the step

Now, let’s build the thing that removes the step.

I hate to start with the most obvious example, but it’s also hard not to because it ties the pod together so nicely.

When the warby parker folks were asking how people bought sunglasses now, they learned about their process. People went into a sunglass hut, tried on a bunch of glasses, picked one, then went home.

When they dug in deeper, they found that something like 95% of people felt wildly awkward trying glasses on in public, which meant they didn’t really know if they looked good or not, which meant they went home and realized they bought $250 sunglasses that made them look like a bug.

The process - the inertia - was consistent:

1. at the beginning of every spring on one of the first sunny weeks go to a sunglass hut, try on glasses, buy some, get home and be disapppointed, find a time in the next few weeks to go back to the store to return them, try on more pairs, repeat until you found something that made you look slightly less like a bug.

The most painful step was trying the glasses on in the store, because it led to the moment of you getting home and realizing you’d bought a pair of sunglasses that made you look like a bug.

When sunglasses work, they really work. So people went through the annoyance.

The core of Warby’s business is that process insight - people really love great fitting sunglasses but really hate trying on glasses in the store.

To remove that step, warby’s first product was shipping you 5 possible sunglasses, you keeping the one you liked and sending the other four back. They had some product innovation in terms of suppliers, too, but this was the customer-facing unlock of the first product. And, before they made their own sunglasses, their product could’ve been shipping other sunglasses people chose online. The hassle premium would be how much they’d pay to happily try on a few different brands in their home.

Ideally, you’ve got a pretty clear step you want to remove. Now it’s time to be creative about how you do it.

There’s a book called The Personal MBA which I absolutely love. I recommend it to everyone starting a business and I’ll pop it in the show notes. They have a section called the Twelve Forms of Value, and these are, basically, the 12 types of products you can build.

During the intro, we talked about how people get anchored into a specific type of product based on existing products. This isn’t good. Warby invented a new type of commerce when they recognized the part of the process they needed to skip. They built for that specific step they wanted to help the customer skip.

Using the 12 forms of value as an anchor, it’s a great exercise to think about how you might use each to solve the problem. I’ll pop these all in that longer doc you can get from signing up in the show notes, but I’ll use a couple here to think through the chronic pain step we need to figure out how to skip.

So, to refresh, we need people to do 30 minutes of exercise each morning. It needs to be as sacred as if they’re paying for a PT appt and not pull them out of their process.

Let’s try some out:

1. Product - a physical product might be a coin that sits at their desk, where they feel the pain. A general rule of thumb for a product is you want it to show up when the customer feels the pain the strongest - either when they’re in a place where they can do the thing you want them to do, or in a place where you remind them they should’ve done it. So, this coin might have pain on one side and relief on the other. Each day, you flip it to relief if you exercised. I hate this, but that’s ok. The exercise is meant to make you think and combine and stretch.

2. Service - the step we want to remove is avoidance, so the service should create accountability. They all mentioned that they didn’t skip physical therapy because they’d paid. Also, a few mentioned that they’d had workout groups that had worked in the past. So here’s a service idea that mimics the conditions of the time they were successful - another good approach.

Each week you venmo our business, which is still called I Stand Corrected because I’m not beating that, $250. Then, you show up each morning to a 6am group class on zoom where everyone has cameras on and does their exercises. If you show up all 5 days, you get your $250 back. If you miss a day, $50 gets distributed to the venmos of everyone who showed up.

Another service idea is simpler - group sessions on Zoom. The night before you commit to the workout group.

Yet another is a digital physical therapist who runs a group of people with the same pain through exercises, lowering the price. Could have 25 people in a group and charge $15 per person. This could scale to 50 or 100 people in each session.

3. Shared Resource - we could create a digital repository of all the best exercises for certain types of pain. People could pay for this monthly so that they’re able to easily mix up their morning routines.

I won’t go through the rest, but pushing on ideas for what it’d look like if this were a resale product, an agency, audience aggregation, etc. etc. is useful for thinking through product ideas.

To actually create these products becomes simpler once you know what you need to build.

I sent out a landing page to 15 people I’d interviewed who seemed to be in that ex-athlete, desperate for accountability SOM with the group invitation for the Venmo product. $250 bucks a week, show up to get your money back, stay accountable over Zoom.

It looks like people are interested.

Is this a bit goofy? Sure. But it’s a simple, fast way for me to get feedback from customers. To see if money is a motivator. To see if the group is a motivator. To see if that step - the accountability piece - is something worth going after. Or if it’s a red herring.

Your product won’t start in a great place. It’ll start in a goofy place. An unrefined place. And reps will get it better.

Starting with a goofy work out or else you pay construct will give us info, and we’ll evolve. Where you start is never where you finish, and, as always, never compare you’re beginning to someone else’s middle. We’re optimizing for speed.

People will ask if this works for physical products and bakeries and restaurants and it does.

1. Choose a customer and know their current step by step process, isolating the hardest step

2. Know how your customer measures success and how it relates to a bigger goal around identity

3. Remove the painful step in a bunch of ways to see what works best

This is a game of ping pong. Back and forth, learning, testing, learning, testing - getting deeper until you know the customer better than anyone and can solve their problems better than anyone.

And, seriously, if anyone has a lawn mower in Connecticut I’ve got to borrow it before Friday. Poor ruby walked right into the swingset the other day. It’s like the lost city of Z out there.

Have a great week.

This was the idea to startup podcast brought to you by tacklebox. If you’ve got a startup idea and a full time job, come figure it out with us. Apply at gettacklebox.com. We’ll get back to you in 72 hours and can start working on your idea immediately after that.