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be your own super user
CLASS SPEAKER VINICIUS VACANTI Co-Founder & CEO of Yipit Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit, a service that finds and recommends the best daily deals in your city by learning your tastes. He left finance, with his co-founder Jim Moran, in the summer of 2007 with the ridiculous notion that he could build web products. It took him six months to realize he had no idea what he was doing. After a few days of soul searching, he decided to push forward spending the next 12 months learning to become an entrepreneur. Before working in finance, he graduated from Harvard College in 2003 with a degree in Applied Mathematics. Twitter: @vacanti Website: vacanti.me
OVERVIEW

Most startups spend way too much time perfecting a product. Vin Vacanti, CEO of Yipit, says: get your idea to product as soon as possible, test it for honest feedback (not chicken soup for the founder's ego) and become your own super user. 


BRINGING YOUR IDEA TO PRODUCT, ASAP

"You can sit here and spend nine months pontificating about what your customers might like and not like; but the truth is, the first day you have someone sit down and play with your product, you'll learn more than the last nine months you spent thinking about it." Vinicius Vacanti, Co-Founder & CEO of Yipit.

Rent the Runway knew girls wanted high fashion looks for glamorous nights out, but didn't want to deal with the anxiety of investing in piece after piece. What they didn't know was whether those girls would go so far as to rent luxury dresses and feel comfortable enough to talk about it.
The co-founders of Rent the Runway bought 10 dresses, called their friends and told them they could rent any dress for $X plus free dry-cleaning. If their friends rented, they would building a product around it. If their friends didn't rent, they would know they had NOT proven out their #1 risk.

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DIM (Do-It-Manually): Being in a tech startup doesn't mean you only use tech to test your tech.       
DON’T FORGET THE SINGLE PLAYER EXPERIENCE If you weren’t too busy playing ‘Snood’ during that Economics 101 class on Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, you would know that people are incredibly lazy and selfish, and that unless you benefit them, they won’t use your product. So make sure your product benefits your users immediately and wholeheartedly. Founders often don’t factor in the self-interest part; they only think about creating collective good because it’s counterintuitive to think that the secret to scaling is to focus on creating a single player experience. Take Delicious.com. In the beginning, they focused on helping users to satisfy their self-interest of bookmarking their favorite topics online. But today, Delicious has become a tool that aggregates all the best information online. And yet, no one added their bookmarks because they thought they were helping out society as a whole. Are you rewarding your users’ self-interests?
Unless people love your product, it probably won’t take off. And you won’t know what people love until you get honest feedback. So hurry up and build the simplest version of your product. That first version is just a wedge into your overall vision. Temporarily ignore the larger vision to focus on building initial traction. People aren’t going to sign up for your product because you spent nine months perfecting a slew of features; they are looking for one killer feature that immediately benefits them. (see Single Player Experience)

The first version of your product is also a wedge into your vision of reach. Focusing on a specific geographical or niche market, will ensure a greater chance of gaining critical mass because it brings together people who matter to each other. Do NOT launch it to everyone.

Mark Zuckerberg probably didn't envision Facebook as just a college platform when he first launched. But his wedge strategy was to get every Harvard student to sign up - and they did, because everyone that mattered to them did. At the same time, many other social networks just like FB launched their betas to the world. And none of them succeeded. That's the power of the wedge.

GETTING HONEST FEEDBACK

After you release version one of your product, if your friends say “yeah, I’ll use it,” it will be a disaster. Because most people will give you positive feedback and end up never using your product. 

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(YIPIT): Tell your friend “Uh. I don’t know what we are going to do. No one likes our site. We can’t figure it out. Do you have any ideas why this is happening?" Now you've just set yourself up for authentic feedback. No one is going to tell you your product is awesome when you’ve just told them it sucks.  
                 Brutal honesty is better than an agnostic thumbs up. 
                  
                 HACK TOOL: Net Promoter
Your startup's goal for the first six months should be to bring your idea to product to feedback to traction (adding users at an increasing rate). When you're trying to ramp from 0 to 1000 users, expect the cold start problem (not being able to create a large user base because you don’t know how to get the first few users). So how do you deal? Become your own user of course.

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(YIPIT): Be your first user. Be a SUPER USER.
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(YIPIT): EX-CUSTOMERS CAN BE YOUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET 

WHY YOU WON’T LAUNCH A PRODUCT IMMEDIATELY AFTER READING THIS

YOU ARE AFRAID OF FAILING: You have to get over this. Your expectation should be that the first version of your product will fail. It’s impossible to predict everything your customer wants. You’re not going to learn by yourself; you need customer feedback. Assume failure. If it happens, your goal should be to figure out why it’s failing. 

"BUT MY VISION IS SO MUCH BIGGER! I CAN'T PUT SOMETHING OUT IN JUST A WEEK." Remember: your first version is just a wedge into your overall vision. Don’t get caught up thinking that it’s going to be all that you’re going to do. Read how Yipit did it. 


BUT WHAT IF I DON’T HAVE A PRODUCT YET?

1. Create a six word sentence to describe your company.

2. Build a landing page that describes or shows screenshots of your future product. See if people will sign up for 
    your invite list. (LaunchRock is a good example of a landing page tool. However, they are currently in closed beta 
    as their inbox is stuffed full of beta-invite requests.)

3. Hurry up and build a simple (manual) prototype to get in front of potential users.

TOOLS: 
Net Promoters
Delicious
LaunchRock 


SUGGESTED READING:
How to Make it As a First-Time Entrepreneur (BLOG)
Written by Vinicius Vacanti 
Practical advice and useful examples

The Four Steps to the Epiphany (BOOK)
Written by Steven Gary Blank
Eric Ries Review 
Buy for $39.99 at Amazon
Eric Ries (@ericries @leanstartup) and Steve Blank (@sgblank) are lead proponents of the Lean Startup Movement 
 


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