The First $300: A Startup Launch Tale

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7 pointsbyoung22 comments

Thanks for this! People hardly ever share hard numbers, so it's great to have a specific data point for a lean startup. I hope you continue to share with the same transparency as you grow, but even if you can't, it would be interesting to see a blog post on why that changes.

Side question - I've found that market validation can be an equally significant cost, whether running surveys, or Adwords, or generating content to test SEO. Did you do any sort of market/customer exploration before kicking off development?

Thanks for taking the time to read the post. We plan to write more posts to share more about the process as we go through it. I was surprised that I couldn't find any specific numbers for lean startups. I wanted to know if we were over/under what others are spending to validate an idea. I guess someone has to be first!

Market validation could be a post (or book) of its own. Before writing any code, we did surveys to see what people thought about the idea in general and to gauge the need for a product like ours[1][2]. We got quite a few responses to the survey, and we were actually surprised at some of the responses. For example, 53% of people said they wanted our product to support their existing email address. Then a later question asked them to check off pain points. Then we asked again, if we could eliminate half of the pain points they checked, would they ditch their existing email address, and 78% said yes. The biggest pain points identified were too much email, can't organize email, can't search email, and email not being secure. If we could solve 2 of those (we actually solve all 4), we could get 78%. That was encouraging.

1. http://www.reddit.com/r/SampleSize/comments/29hpfk/marketing...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8051078

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