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Why early stage virality can indicate product readiness

June 26, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

In the early days, when I was just polishing off the manuscript of Launch Tomorrow, I gave it to a friend who also lived and breathed startups. I specifically requested that he keep it quiet and just asked for feedback. Professionally, he was a marketer but in this case I was hoping to get some honest “tough love” from him. To make sure the book would be good.

After speaking with him in person, I dropped a pdf into gmail, and forwarded it on to him. Coincidentally, I also happened to have an early trial version of Streak installed on my gmail account, which is an app which measures email opens, now primarily used by salespeople.

Over the next week or so, it turned out 37 people had opened that email 56 times in different locations around London and Europe. This simple indicator was enough to convince me that the manuscript is definitely at least a minimum viable product. If not a bit more. There were a lot of tweaks I wanted to make, but clearly my idea audience was enjoying and using it. Even though this viral spread was accidental, ultimately I was pleased that my friend had effectively proven to me that my product was ready.

This was a special case of someone who knew me well, the fact that he forwarded it without my consent and that it was re-forwarded so many times implied that my soon-to-be released product will be able to generate word of mouth referrals when I do launch. This was particularly poignant, given that this was a B2C product. Like most impulse buys, books (on their own) tend to be low $ value products. There is little margin for error with a high customer acquisition cost, yet you need to be great at generating awareness and discoverability. So you can only use channels that have a fixed cost up front but little additional variable cost of reaching another person.

Going Viral

While virality seems “free” from a financial point of view, it’s expensive in terms of your time. The idea is to create enough product (content in my case) which people naturally want to share. Once you have their attention, you include some kind of call to action which then turns into a conversion , like a sale. Or at least a micro conversion, like getting an email subscriber.

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

Filed Under: assumptions, metrics, modelling Tagged With: faster time to market, growth, launch

Disproved: Politcians claim entrepreneurship is the economy’s job growth engine

January 22, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

When I was close to finishing a degree in economics, I was still a bit unclear about what actually causes economic growth after 4 years of study. Economists have a complicated and sophisticated set of models to understand how economies work, on both a theoretical and empirical level.

When it came to the topic of growth, if I remember correctly, the key factor underlying economic growth was productivity. And the primary driver of productivity were external technology shocks. Which can’t be modelled. They’re just assumed to happen. So basically, the economics department at PENN pulled an intellectual bait-and-switch on me. And I ended up going into software anyway.

Ultimately improvements in technology drove productivity and economic growth of countries. This was true of both developed and emerging economies, with the latter often benefiting from imported technologies, rather than creating their own.

Is entrepreneurship a job growth engine?

This blog doesn’t cover politics. That said, I thought it might be worth drawing your attention to a half-truth that often comes up among politicians (and that’s often repeated as conventional wisdom):

Entrepreneurship is an engine of growth.

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

Unfortunately, it’s not really true if you look at the data. It is true the primary engine of growth are…high growth startups. These tend to be high technology startups or highly innovative ones. These are most likely to be hitting growth rankings like the INC 5000. In the US, these consistently make up a whopping 3% of all new businesses, according to Scott Shane in The Illusions of Entrepreneurship:

“In fact, only about 7 percent of new companies in the United States are started in industries that the government defines as high technology, and only about 3% of business founders consider their new businesses to be technologically sophisticated.”

Industry breakdowns of high growth companies also reflect this insight. For example, on the INC 5000 for 2019, there are:

Filed Under: innovation Tagged With: economic impact, growth, systemic

How to grow your new venture 10% week after week after week

December 25, 2019 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

One of the really “hard things” about the startup game is getting on a growth trajectory that grows exponentially. VCs debate how fast you should be growing on a weekly basis. But one thing about growth is clear. Instead of having the occasional bump in sales or growth, high growth startups are systematic in how they pursue their results. In particular, the heavy focus in this deep dive is on channel testing.

Filed Under: innovation, metrics Tagged With: case study, faster time to market, growth

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  • About Luke

    Luke Szyrmer is an innovation and remote work expert. He’s the bestselling author of #1 bestseller Launch Tomorrow. He mentors early stage tech founders and innovators in established companies. Read More…

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