- Start up domination.
World domination.
(upbeat music)
Five keys to startup success.
Maybe you're frustrated with the progress you're making.
Or you feel like you should be two or three years ahead
because you have a friend that started the same time as you
and you're like why am
I not making more progress in your business.
Here's the thing, is there's literally five keys
to a great product, a great startup
a great technology platform that's required
so that you even have the right foundation
to grow and scale your business.
Now I've been watching and studying
some of the smartest people in the world.
Even though I feel blessed and lucky
to have started, and scaled, and exited.
My last two companies were venture backed.
My third one was a consulting company.
And literally invested, had the privilege to invest
in 30-plus other companies like Intercom
and Udemy, and Get Around, and Unbounce
and watch them grow their businesses.
There's really
studying the Elon Musk and the Reid Hoffmans
from LinkedIn and the Peter Tiels
you know, of PayPal and Facebook fame.
I just feel like there's literally a pattern
and if you understand these five keys
then it'll at least allow you
to make better decisions in your business.
So the first one is product-founder fit.
A lot of people talk about product-market fit.
I actually think you gotta go to the next level.
When I was starting my company Clarity.fm,
it was an expert network for entrepreneurs
to get advise over the phone,
everybody kept saying to me,
"Dan, I've never seen an idea and a product
"that had better product-founder fit,"
because I was so passionate, like literally,
I mean it's the reason why I do these videos,
I just love teaching.
I love connecting people.
I organize founder dinners.
I host events.
I mean, this is just part of my DNA
and to create a platform to allow people to do that,
I think it's a big part.
And that's where I see a lot of people
get into businesses 'cause of opportunities,
financial opportunities and I just don't think
that's the way to do it.
The biggest key, number one, is product-founder fit.
Number two is the market need.
There's a pain, okay.
If you feel like you're tryin to peddle something
that people kinda want, but they don't really want
like there's no immediate pull from the market,
it's probably cause you built
a nice to have, not a must have.
And I think that understanding the pain,
sometimes it's really just a positioning challenge.
Like the market's there.
They have the problem.
Your solution solves the problem,
but you actually haven't positioned it right
for them to understand that.
I think that's a huge opportunity,
but literally the market, step one,
is that they need to have the pain.
So first is product-founder fit,
two is market need.
Three is a great product hook.
Every company out there, from PayPal to Facebook,
they all had a very direct and simple premise.
You have a problem; they solved it.
And they got the user to take an action
that was logical, that was easy.
They got a feedback loop going, right?
From posting a tweet to sharing a project on Basecamp
to commenting in Slack to you name the product,
sharing a file in Dropbox.
Searching and saving to a list on Airbnb.
People don't understand that every product has hook,
has something that you can get people
to resonate with, to take action on,
and gets them some kind of benefit,
some kind of dopamine hit.
So that's the third area that I want you
to think of in your product.
What is that hook that'll get somebody in?
Get them to experience kind of the value
that I'm suggesting for them to go further
so then you can expand what's called
the surface area of the product.
And number four is they figured out
a scalable distribution process.
I mean, the challenge is that at the end of the day,
you need to be able to grow faster.
Some kind of virality.
Things like, embedding an image
or embedding, well so,
Instagram was really
distribution through social networks,
but you have YouTube that was famous
on using MySpace for their distribution.
So there's a lot of different ways to do it.
With Clarity, it was really about using the expert profile.
We called it EDS: expert driven sign-ups.
Engaging in the expert to promote their profile
to drive more demand,
which then introduced them to our platform,
which then kind of created the snowball effect.
Really understanding what is
your scalable distribution model?
That is the key.
You know, I wanna leave you guys
with a really important concept.
It was almost number five,
but is more of a thought, an idea.
And that is to create a moat.
Right, and that's the tip that there's something about
your business that has to be hard to copy.
If it's just as easy for anybody
to just create a features check list
of your product and copy it.
I mean, I've seen so many people,
they're like, can somebody, on Upwork, right?
I would get notifications because I subscribed
for the notice, but people would literally write
can somebody build me a copy of Clarity.
Can somebody build us a copy of FlowTown?
If it was as easy as any developer
just building those features,
I mean people forget this.
You remember Pownce?
Do you remember literally when Twitter came out
there was so many different products
that looked exactly like Twitter
for different use cases, different verticals,
but there was only one that won
because they built the network.
They built the moat.
They built that virality into it.
And they were first and I think even today
as much as PayPal is a shitty product.
I mean, let's be honest, it's a bad product.
It's still used.
It's still defensible.
There's very few people
that have been to penetrate that moat
and I think that that is something worth thinking about
as a thought experiment within your business on your team
when you're thinking about product direction.
How do you create a moat in your business?
So real quick, product-founder fit is number one.
Number two is market need.
Is there a pain to solve or is it a nice to have?
Three is a product hook.
Is there one thing you can ask your users to do
that gets them engaged in the product,
gets them some value to feel it?
Four is a scalable distribution model.
Understanding how your product
gets penetrated into the market
and distributed amongst the different users.
And then as a thought experiment,
for you to really take things to the next level,
is how do you create a moat
so that's it's hard to copy.
As per usual, I wanna challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business.
And I'll see ya next Monday.
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Have a great day.