Hi there -
Here is this week’s “1 principle, 2 strategies, and 3 actionable tactics” for running lean…
1 Universal Principle
“10X your odds of success with shorter and better feedback loops.”
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I have been an entrepreneur for over a decade and have built dozens of products during that time. While all my ideas started as “awesome,” not all ended that way.
I knew that good ideas are rare and hard to find, so I was prepared for the search process. What I wasn’t prepared for was my idea cycle time.
Idea cycle time is the time window or runway you give each idea before you kill it off and move to another one or pivot the same idea to something better.
I averaged about two years between ideas, which is the typical time window to achieve product/market fit.
According to data from top accelerators and VCs… it takes roughly two years to achieve product/market fit, and 80% of products never get there.
And therein lies the problem.
Finding one successful idea using these numbers could take 20-30 years! It’s no wonder the average age of a successful founder is 45.
Here’s the breakdown:
- To hit an 80% success rate, you would need 14 years.
- To hit a 90% success rate, you would need 21 years.
- To hit a 95% success rate, you would need 27 years.
If you’d like to calculate these odds, check out this article on Bernoulli Trials.
Turning around these dismal stats is what got me started on a new journey, summed up in this mantra:
“Life’s too short to build something nobody wants.”
I found that reducing idea cycle time and increasing idea cycle quality are the keys to significantly raising startup odds of success.
2 Underlying Strategies at Play
I. Reduce idea cycle time.
Shorter idea cycle times let you take more shots at the goal — increasing your odds of finding the right idea.
This begs the question: How short can you make your idea cycle?
Running rapid experiments in days or weeks is possible, but there’s a tradeoff between speed and learning.
You need to gather enough evidence from multiple experiments to make a sound go-or-no-go decision on an idea.
After a lot of testing, I’ve settled on 90 days.
I give every new idea 90 days of runway, after which I make an evidence-based 3P decision - pivot, persevere (persist), or pause (perish).
Keeping the success rate the same as above, shortening your idea cycle time from 2 years (24 months) to 90 days (3 months) raises your overall odds by 8x.
This assumes that every idea is paused (or perished) and replaced with a new one. This is not usually the case.
More than two-thirds of successful founders report pivoting to a variant idea versus completely starting from scratch, which carries across learning from one cycle to the next.
I argue that this stacking of learning and the next point further increases your odds of success to 10X or beyond.
II. Increase idea cycle quality.
Ninety days is not a lot of time. If you break this into 2-week sprints, you get only six sprints.
This means you must make each count, not by filling them with sub-optimal tests but by fanatically prioritizing “what’s riskiest” in every sprint.
This is the essence of “right action, right time.”
When you practice this at the early stages of an idea, you quickly realize that what’s typically riskiest isn’t technical or product-related but customer behavior and market-related.
This unlocks new idea validation tactics that maximize “speed, learning, and focus”:
- Learn before you pitch,
- Sell before you build, and
- Use a 10X launch.
3 Actionable Tactics
I. Learn before you pitch.
The best pitches meet customers where they are and channel existing demand versus trying to create new demand.
Great salespeople already do this. They spend more time on discovery (learning) before demos (pitching). Doing the first makes doing the second a whole lot more effective.
Understanding your customers better than they do is a superpower and a skill every founder should master.
II. Sell before you build.
The first battle with any new idea is earning attention. The next battle is trust. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a working product to do either.
Furthermore, when you prioritize selling before building, you ensure that you end up with a product that you know delivers value rather than hoping it does.
This evidence of demand (or traction) is how you make sound go-or-no-go decisions on an idea.
III. Use a 10X launch.
There’s a reason the hockey stick has a long, flat portion. It’s not because founders are lazy but because most ideas start small. You have to crawl before you can walk and run.
Why not intentionally start small?
I sometimes describe this tactic as playing the hockey stick versus letting the hockey stick play you.
Rather than trying to get everyone to use your product, why not start with just ten carefully selected, ideal early adopters?
- If you over-deliver value to them, they’ll tell others and help you get the next 100 customers.
- If you can’t deliver value to them, what makes you think you’re ready for hundreds of customers?
Rolling out your product in 10X stages automatically prioritizes “what’s riskiest” for you.
I hope these strategies and tactics shed a new perspective on how to view startup ideas. A prerequisite mindset is separating your success as a founder from that of your idea.
Your job isn’t to make an idea work but to find one that can work.
If you’d like to dive deeper into these validation strategies, check out my flagship course, BOOTSTART. It outlines the exact framework I've used to bootstrap, launch, and grow my products to millions of people.
That's all for today. See you next week.
That's all for today. See you next week.
Ash
Author of Running Lean and creator of Lean Canvas
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