Faster, faster!

You are young, talented, and inspired. You dropped out of college to chase your dreams, because they said the time is now or never. Your high school best buddy Daniel started his business two years ago. Everyone else is doing it.

Gotta get there before the door closes. Your early retirement is waiting. Gotta cash that cheque and contribute to the startup ecosystem and shit, like all your startup heroes do. You convinced your next best buddy Trevor to work with you, together, in his basement, because his basement is slightly better than your basement.

You always had brilliant ideas, but this one is a real gem. It’s like Tinder, for cats, and you did all the market validation already.

I feel validated. Source: Andrea Vidali, Creative Commons

You used Google Keyword tool to do market research. Looks like the keywords are generating massive interest. Who knew? People will do anything with their cats on the Internet. Anyway the market is definitely not saturated, yet. There are some potential competitors, so you need to go faster. Grab that market share.

You created a landing page with some basic info of your idea with email address collection. You posted it on a couple of forums and some cat related subreddits. You get some traffic, and you got shadow banned on that one subreddit, because Reddit recognises shit content, sometimes. You collected some email addresses and some natural traffic. It’s tiny, but it’s a start.

You built your first prototype in two weeks. It’s shit. You called it a minimum viable product. It’s totally not viable. You put it out there anyway, because you are the man. I mean, a man. A man with no shame. I mean, a man with a dream. Gotta do it faster than others.

You learned all of this from your friend Daniel and his business partner Wilson. Gotta have that insider connection. Wilson. What a stupid name. Don’t trust anyone with a last name as their first name. Somebody said, the fastest way is the longest way. Some other body said, no, just go fast; get it out there, get feedback, and iterate.

You’ve setup Google analytics and laid out your growth funnel. It looks something like this:

Get traffic Signup User enters cat info Match cats, do some cat magic stuff and show to the user Make it funny so that the user wants to share. Viral! Monetise with subscription option for unlimited right swipe on other cats, as well as some digital cat goods because meow

You built a very rough internal tracking page where you can monitor the user flow through the funnel, identified drop off points, kept iterating, filled in spots by reaching out to the users with surveys, emails, and some skype calls.

You decided to use the latest free tech tools to coordinate better with Trevor. For now, you use Slack for chat, Trello for task managment, and Google Drive for documentations. Your tech stack is AWS, Ruby on Rails, and some mobile thing. You and Trevor are learning so much so quickly as you go. Every lesson is on Youtube, and every question you had is answered on StackOverflow. What a time to live.

Months passed, and you show that hockey stick curve, and you are getting there, although not as ideal as your initial plot. User growth is steady, and your first $25 came in. Fuck yeah. This is your chance, Daniel said. He introduced you to Lionel, a dude from an investment group.

Lionel’s group is interested in investing in your company to scale it up. You can’t believe it. This is happening so fast, but you must go faster! You did all the right things. You researched the basics of investment structures and valuation. You couldn’t believe Lionel’s love for your vision in cat things. The truth was Lionel’s love was not with cats, but with hockey; hockey sticks to be exact.

You got funded. Now you are a proper company with growing paying users. Your users are scaling, and your team is scaling. You wrote down the process of what you did, your vision, and delegated instead of micromanaging. Meanwhile, you keep iterating the product, engaging with your users, building trust.

You were most eloquent. informative, and convincing that your great idea is actually great, and were transparent so that if it isn’t, you could get some real feedback and refine. You knew bad feedback is the best thing you can get after temporarily being stuck in a loop of silence.

You did everything right, and you are growing fast. All vloggers are now talking about your app, you got featured on Product Hunt, and you are creating technological disruption in the cat world. The society of cats will reward you with money, and paws; and… pause.

Slow down… before it gets out of hand, and don’t scale.