If this is your first time reading, I recommend you start with my 6-month challenge and week #1 choosing an idea, validating a market need and bridging focus.
tl;dr I talked with a startup accelerator and others and plan to build a startup advisory board. Always talk to others about your idea; don’t worry about them stealing it. I received additional feedback from users and am diving deeper into their different personas, tried learning how to use API’s with a developer friend and created a learn-how-to-code schedule (later scrapped all of that), found a way to build an MVP by being resourceful, chose to focus on value versus growth and monetization and struggled with the thought of finding potential technical cofounders and overall uncertainty.
Week 2 is finished and I’m impressed I was able to hack together an MVP! All by myself. More on that later and how I went about it. However, I am more concerned with finding the exact pain point and then figuring out a revenue stream to go along with it, not to mention growth strategies (i.e., is this startup idea scalable?). AKA product-market fit. This process of finding pain points – to the pain point where people are willing to pay for your product to solve their problem – is extremely tough and a lot harder than I expected. Remember, actions speak louder than words.
I. Meeting with others to talk about your idea
II. Additional feedback from users and different personas
III. Building an MVP
IV. Value versus growth and monetization
V. Finding a technical cofounder
VI. Dealing with uncertainty and roller coaster emotions
VII. Next week and key lessons
When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they’re making—not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist. Which means you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.
– Paul Graham, How to Get Startup Ideas