Dante had a funnel too, you know.

Or — “How To Escape MVP Hell”

Hey kids, you miss me?

I’m sorry — I’ve been doing actual, real work — you know, the kind that you should be doing right about now?

After getting to The Top of Hacker News, you’d probably think I was sitting on a beach in Costa Rica balling it billionaire style with a Mai Tai in hand, but the truth of the matter is that snagging that Startup Holy Grail didn’t really do much to move the needle.

Instead, it created a deluge of emails, support requests, and other “high-touch” activities that have sucked up most of my time and energy and haven’t really added much at all to my bottom line.

Surprised?

Welcome to Startup Land.

If you haven’t learned yet, you need to stop being surprised.

Acclaim does not equal profits.

So let’s get back to the topic at hand — namely, your MVP.

[By the way — If you’re a super fan of The Epic Guide, there’s a special surprise at the end just for you! I promise that it’s way more awesome than those stupid toys they put in the bottom of Cracker Jack boxes! And if this is your first go around, this is Part 4 of The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch — By Yourself. Check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Chances are it’s a better use of your time than binge-watching whatever crappy show you’re currently “chilling to” on Netflix.]

You tried so hard? And got so far? Sorry emo kid, but in the end it doesn’t really matter.

Stop being so fucking emo.

If you’ve been playing along at home, I told you to get your shit together and to ship your basic MVP — amounting to one (and only one) main feature/benefit combo — in 30 calendar days.

You did do the homework — didn’t you?

If you did, you need to put Sunny Day Real Estate on pause and get that emo hair out of your eyes for a little bit here.

It’s time for a startup counseling session.

Let me guess if this is what it’s been like for you:

You’ve got your 20 HECK YESES. You’ve got your 100 email launch list. You’ve built out your MVP, targetting the strongest benefit your market gives a shit about, and you’ve done it in such a way that you’re looking to snag $1,000 MRR. After much hand-wringing and nervousness, you put your MVP out there. You’re feeling pretty good. And then…

And then the tears came.

It didn’t go quite as well as you had expected it would — did it?

Maybe no one signed up?

Maybe no one actually used the product?

Maybe you’re getting inundated with support requests for things that aren’t working quite right or for features that people “must have” in order to be able to even use your product?

Or maybe there’s a number of frustrated users lambasting you for having put out such a shitty product and are hurling every conceivable insult they can your way, insisting that your mother is a hamster and that your father smells of elderberries?

Maybe no one’s actually converting and giving you money?

Or maybe you got a few paying customers but you’re making way less than the $1,000 MRR you were hoping to snag?

Yep.

No one wants to just give my startup money. I knew I never should have tried.

Welcome to MVP Hell, startup emo kid.

You’re gonna be here for a while. A good three to six months probably.

Don’t expect to be making much of anything for a while.

In order to get to that fabled land of product-market fit, you’ve first got to pass through the Inferno. (Oh, and don’t forget the Purgatorio that follows.)

Well hey — at least you got that nasty itch to write some code out of your system (you’re welcome).

But now starts the real fun — making it all work and escaping from MVP Hell.

I’m not gonna lie — it’s gonna suck and it’s going to try your sanity.

I know right about now you’re probably thinking something along the lines of this: “You tricked me! Why did you make me do that if you knew this was what was going to happen! Now I have to go through three to six months of MVP Hell?! What the fuck dude?! I thought I was going to make $1,000 MRR after a month of coding by following your advice and doing this whole stupid ass MVP thing!”

Oh you did, did you?

You see, I’m gonna smack that shitty-ass emo-entitled teenager attitude you’ve developed from having been a privileged, overly-paid, “everything works out for me in the end” developer all of these years.

“But I spent all this time working on this! But I’m supposed to be able to quit my job! But I’m supposed to break a million dollars this year! But it’s not fair! No one understands my feelings!”

Get used to it.

It’s time to grow up, startup emo kid.

Things don’t work out until you make them work out.

Things don’t work out until they do.

I don’t care what the fuck you’ve “accomplished” in your storied career — and neither does the market.

No one here gives a rat’s ass that you keep your business logic out of your controllers, that you fully design for a complete separation of concerns, or that you “embrace” dependency injection or fucking inversion of control.

It’s time to step up and do something that really matters to the people you want to collect some money from.

So put the fucking emo playlist away and let’s learn how to actually solve our problems instead of just cry about them into a pillow.

Because crying about things fixes them, right?

You see, you can’t complain that your MVP “isn’t working” just because you’re not making a ton (or even any) money off of it yet. The truth of the matter is that you haven’t earned your market’s money yet. You haven’t demonstrated enough of the specific value they’re looking for in order for them to want to give you money.

“But isn’t that why we had to go through all of these ridiculous exercises — so that we WOULD BE demonstrating value from the start?!”

Yes, and you are — otherwise people wouldn’t be showing up.

Duh.

But don’t delude yourself — there is no way in hell that you “nailed” your product on your first go-round after having developed it in a fucking vaccuum in only 30 days.

That’s why we put this shit out there.

So we can see what the fuck real people actually fucking do with it.

It never goes how you want it to at first.

This is normal, so don’t freak out.

Now let’s stop and be honest with ourselves for a second here.

You’d still feel this way even if I gave you six months of time to build your first release.

You’re never going to be happy with what you have or have every rad feature you’ve envisioned.

Why?

Because the more you work on the damned thing, the more feature ideas you get.

And who exactly is asking for those features?

You got that right — no one.

You’re making them up.

So whatever idea you have in your head that you want your product to be — just stop. You are not your market.

You see — at best — anything you’re putting out there is going to reach a tiny, small, fractional, pathetically ridiculously infintismally minuscule portion of whatever market you’re trying to go after.

In other words, chances are you’re not going to reach the entire Total Addressable Market for your product in one fell shot.

That’s why I said “Release the MVP!” to you in Part 3 — because you’ve been holding back and thinking it’s an all-or-nothing shot when it’s really a “ready, aim, fire, reload” kinda thing for as long as you’ve got available ammunition.

You’re going to be taking a lot of pot shots in the coming months and years — so stop thinking you’re going to nail this one time and be done — it’s a fucking war, not a damn battle. Every incursion adds up. Stop trying to win the damn thing in one fell swoop.

(That, and you’ve been avoiding doing anything because you’ve been afraid of getting rejected like a scared emo kid on prom night. And we had to put an end to that. Because you’re going to get rejected. So at least we got that over with.)

Anyways — war analogies aside — the point is that you’ve gotten in front of a very small segment of your target market with your MVP.

That’s the whole point.

Your experiences from this one real world engagement will help you to formulate a battle plan for your next scuffle in the marketplace — based on actual data points and experiences — not just some technicolor unicorn dream you’ve been couching.

Keep in mind that you’ve just made more progress in the past 30 days than you have in the past 3 years.

You’re fucking welcome.

Now, just to reiterate: The point of the MVP is to take the strongest possible feature-benefit combination you can think of that people would pay you money for, build it as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and put it out there to see what the fuck happens.

It’s a super-concentrated dose of value you’re firing into the marketplace.

If you’ve struck a nerve (and done your marketing and sales), you’ll get a response.

You’ll get people that come to your website and check it out.

You’ll get people that sign up for your trial and maybe play around.

These signals reinforce that you have people’s interest. That is a huge thing — do not marginalize it.

Now that you have people interested in what you have to offer and they’re (hopefully) trying it out, you need to work to find out the gap between “I’m interested in what you’ve built” and “What you’ve built is so damn awesome for me that I want to give you money”.

Because let’s be honest — lots of things on the internet are pretty damn interesting. But how many of them do you actually want to pay money for?

When you start feeling sad, start being awesome instead.

It’s time to stop being an emo potato.

No one likes emo potatoes.

So it’s time to shake ourselves off, get a haircut, and start being AWESOME instead.

The first step to being AWESOME?

Realize that an MVP is for learning.

Stop trying to make a shit ton of money when you’re still learning about your market, when you’re still learning what exactly they want from your product, when you’re still learning what’s keeping them from shelling over their hard-earned cash to you.

An MVP is for learning.

And like we discussed in Part 3, we’re aiming to learn how to get our first $1,000 MRR.

And we’re doing that.

So stop being emo.

The second step to being AWESOME is that you need to recognize that a very small amount of what you do actually matters — and then STOP DOING all of the other shit that DOESN’T REALLY MATTER IN THE END. (Yes, Linkin Park got that one right at least.)

You need to learn what to avoid and what to double down on.

If you’re not familiar with The Pareto Principle, it’s time to read up because that’s how you get ahead in this game.

Simply put, The Pareto Principle says that 80% of all outcomes arise from 20% of all possible causes.

Put more pragmatically, 20% of your inputs result in 80% of your outcomes.

For example, if you’re a business, you might get close to 80% of your revenue from about 20% of your customers.

Now, the important thing to keep in mind is that it’s not exactly 80/20. It can be 90/10, 95/5, 70/30, or any other kind of similar ratio.

The important thing to keep in mind is that most outcomes arise from a very small number of actions. In other words — most of what you do doesn’t really make much of a difference.

Smart bootstrappers exploit Pareto’s Principle ruthlessly.

In fact, an MVP is a multi-faceted exploitation of Pareto’s Principle.

The first exploitation is based on market. We know that we’re going get get 80% of our signups from 20% of the possible market. (Again, using 80/20 but it can be 70/30, 90/10, etc.)

What does that mean exactly?

It means that if the possible market for your startup is “anyone who has a website” (which is a horrible targeting strategy), that you’re probably going to get a cluster of people showing up who exhibit some common characteristics or who come from some common channel.

Maybe they’re people using WordPress to host their blogs. Maybe they’re people running e-commerce sites. Maybe they run a service-based business and they’ve got a fairly simple marketing website.

Bottom line: Even though your startup might be “for anyone”, there will be a small subset (or a number of small subsets) in that market that will repesent the majority of your signups.

This makes perfect sense if you stop and think about it. You put out some marketing. First of all, you’re probably not going to reach the entire market with your messaging. And even from that part of the market that you do reach, your messaging with resonate better with some parts of that market than others. And from those that you resonate with, those are the ones that are more likely to sign up for your service.

Let’s visualize that:

The second exploitation is based on feature set. We know that 80% of actual purchases will be because of 20% of the possible features we could build.

What does that mean?

That means that if our product could have 10 major features that the potential market would want, there is most likely 2 or so major features that the market really cares about and that will be the determining factor when it comes to making a purchasing decision. The other 8 or so features are really “nice to haves” when it comes to purchasing decisions. (Again, using 80/20 but knowing it can be some other ratio in practice.)

This is why we choose and lead with the smallest and strongest set of features that satisfy the strongest benefit. We know that 80% of the features that we could build don’t have as much of an impact. So we intentionally save ourselves the hassle of building shit that doesn’t move the needle.

Let’s visualize that guy next:

The third exploitation is based on aligning these two aspects. This is where we make sure that the 20% of the market we’re capturing is getting what they want from the 20% of possible features we’ve chosen to build, since these two aspects will directly influence our revenue.

Let’s follow the logic.

The people who sign up (20% of the potential market) will represent the majority of our users (80%).

The features that make them want to pay (the 20% of possible features) will represent the majority of our revenue (80%).

By making sure that the 20% of the market that turns into 80% of our user base get the features that they want, we’re encouraging the largest number of our potential users to make a purchase:

Let’s use a more concrete example.

Let’s say you’re building a bug tracking web app (which I would not recommend you do).

Rather than throwing the kitchen sink out there and hoping something sticks, you decide that you’re going to lead with a slick Kanban-board (feature 1) that lets teams of developers report and track issues (feature 2).

You put out some marketing and try to attract some users. (As an aside, you’ll get only a handful of signups or a lot of churn at this stage, since your MVP is not fully dialed in yet and doesn’t “resonate”.)

You follow my advice and notice that you start to get a lot of Node developers coming through your marketing channel.

So what should you do?

You should dial in your feature set to make your product the bug tracking application for Node developers.

You do this by tuning existing features or adding new features that scream “I was made just for you!”

And now your feature set is being tailored to the user base you are attracting. (And your marketing can get even more specific now, too!)

This is how you become “X” for “Y”.

You see — you want to make sure that you understand who those 20% are that are showing up. What are they hoping to get when they show up after they’ve heard your marketing and sales messages? You need to understand why they’re different from the rest of the market.

You also want to be able to identify out of all of your signups who is in that 20% and who is in that other 80% of the market: You need to nail down your niche.

Keep in mind: Not every potential customer is the right kind of customer.

We’re interested in finding the ones who belong to that 20% of the market we know are going to wind up representing the majority of our paying customer base.

Then, you want to make sure that you’ve dialed in the possible features you could build down to the smallest set of features that they actually give a shit about.

At this stage, the chances are that you’ve got some of the features they’re looking for nailed down but that you either need to refine those features some more or you need to uncover what other features they actually need.

They should feel that the features you have implemented were crafted just for them.

When you do this, your purchase rates will go up.

When you don’t do this, you will have high signups but high abandonment rates.

They need to sync up.

And consequentially, this is why you need to put your shit in front of the market —you need them to tell you if you’ve gotten it right.

And you don’t know who they are until they start showing up.

Sure, you can try and target certain people with your marketing (and you should). But if you target too early, you might exclude a segment of the market you didn’t even know existed and who are really interested in what you have to offer. Not only that, but just because you target someone doesn’t mean they’re going to actually show up.

It’s better to cast a wider net first and see what kind of fish wind up on your deck — then you know which fish-specific nets you should be trying to use down the road.

Everything we do from this point forward for the foreseeable future will be anchored in these principles, so it’s crucial that you figure out who and what your core 20% are.

You’re going to have to tune everything from your marketing to your core product to zoom in to this 20% and make it all click.

This is the core strategy behind escaping MVP Hell: Nailing the foothold niche.

Now, keep in mind that there’s an inverse here at work as well.

80% of the possible market will result in 20% of your signups.

80% of the possible features you could build will only result in 20% of your total purchases.

So when people tell you something, you need to filter it through this 80/20 mindset. Is this person in the 20% or the 80%? Is this thing they want in the 20% or the 80%?

Focus on the core 20% and fuck the other 80%.

Find your 20%.

Exploit it ruthlessly.

Sidebar: When you start getting results, FUCKING DOUBLE DOWN.

Most developers that start to see some traction from a (small) part of the market or from a set of features get greedy and wind up fucking themselves.

This usually happens because they think “Well hey, if I’ve got this kind of a result from this set of features, if I add more features, I should be able to get more customers!”.

Yeah, no.

Don’t do that unless you want to go back into that spinning death spiral of writing code that nobody uses.

There is a time for growth — but this is most likely not that time. Lose your focus here and you’re just setting yourself up for failure.

You need to focus on refining and stabilizing your MVP. This is not the time for growth.

Imagine this.

After having been getting your ass handed to you at the poker table, the blackjack table, the roulette wheel, etc. you sit down at a slot machine.

You put a coin in.

You pull the lever.

Out comes money.

You put another coin in.

You pull the lever again.

Out comes even more money.

I’m pretty sure even a test animal in a psychology department could find the pattern here.

Surprisingly, most people will get bored with the “small” returns and walk away in search of a bigger payday — even though they have a pretty good idea that they’re going to keep making money if they keep putting in a coin and pulling on the damned lever!

Don’t fucking do that.

This is your slot machine.

Keep pulling that fucking lever.

Never stop pulling it.

At least not until it stops paying out.

If you want to go after some bigger returns, pay someone else to pull that lever for you while you go off in search of new riches. But never abandon it. Mark my words — you will regret it.

Alright, so now that we know what we should be looking out for with respect to our market and how it supports our MVP efforts, let’s dive into how to properly double down and start to work our way out of this fucking MVP Hell.

What’s the matter? Can’t keep up with your startup funnel?

Ewww — Your Startup Funnel Is Leaking All Over Me!

Alright, so here we go.

Want to know the real reason nothing’s working out just yet?

Your MVP probably sucks.

“Dude, what the fuck?! I’m following your advice and you’re saying I’m still doing this shit wrong?! What the hell is wrong with you?!”

If it’s any consolation, don’t feel too bad.

Because tomorrow it’s your marketing that’s going to suck.

And then the day after that it’s going to be your onboarding process.

And after that it’s going to go back to your product sucking again.

And so on.

Welcome the never-ending teeter-totter of stabilizing your leaky startup funnel.

Fix one end, then the other is out of whack. Fix that one, and now the other end is leaking again.

You’ll take your eyes off your marketing efforts to fix some product-oriented leaks and then your traffic will start to dry up.

It’s a constant grind to reach equillibrium. It never ends.

Right now, chances are it’s your MVP that’s throwing your funnel off — hence why it sucks.

How do I know that’s probably the case?

Because we already focused on getting people into the top of your funnel through our marketing and launch list exercises.

The only thing that comes after that is your MVP.

(I include signup, onboarding, etc. as part of your MVP — they’re as much a part of your app as the actual “core application” itself.)

If this concept of a funnel is new to you, no worries. I’m going to get down and dirty so that you can see what I mean and how this all works.

So before we jump in, let’s talk about what the fuck a funnel is (I know, crazy, right?)

Let’s picture the path that someone takes all the way from becoming aware of your offering, to visiting your website, to choosing to signup, to getting onboarded, to using the free trial, to converting to a paid user, to continuing to stay a paid user.

Each of those steps constitutes a step in the funnel.

Ideally, every person who becomes aware of your product will go through all of these steps.

But that’s not reality.

In reality, people fall off at different steps.

You should know this because you do it yourself. You check something out that looks interesting but never sign up. You sign up for something but stop using it or decide not to pay for it. Or you cancel your paid subscription to something for whatever reason.

A funnel visualizes these different steps in sequence and helps you see where people are falling off.

To help illustrate this, let’s look at a sample MVP funnel (the numbers are made up for illustrative purposes but I’ve tried incorporate some fairly conventional conversion ratios):

Kinda looks a little like Dante’s Inferno, no?

Yeah, you read that right. There’s 1 customer there at the bottom of the funnel after all of that. It’s a magical little snowflake — just like you, emo kid.

Now I know this may seem really theoretical, so I’m going to frame it with respect to Tamboo’s funnel.

What’s Tamboo?

Tamboo is one of my bootstrapped startups, and its main feature is that it lets you watch what people do on your website. You install a little JavaScript snippet and you’re off and running — it lets you watch videos of people using your website and shows you heatmaps of the things people click on. Pretty simple, right?

People become aware of Tamboo through a number of different ways. Any time one of Tamboo’s marketing messages is rendered on someone’s screen, even if they don’t necessarily see it, we would consider that a “Marketing Impression”.

Why would it be on their screen but they wouldn’t see it?

Think search results. Think ads. Think social media.

There’s plenty of stuff that gets served up on your screen that you don’t necessarily “see”. Pretty basic stuff.

Let’s say that we’re pretty good at marketing reach and we’re able to get our messaging in front of some 110,000 people. (That seems like a lot, but it’s really not.) This number will drive everything “down funnel” as you’ll see.

The lesson here? No marketing — no customers.

Now, some of the people that come into contact with Tamboo’s Marketing Impressions actually decide to check out Tamboo’s website. This is the section labeled “Website Visits”.

Most people you get in front of with a “Marketing Impression” will do nothing with it at that point in time. (Hence remarketing but we’ll touch on that in a later installment).

I’ve kept the conversion rate at a conservative 2% here which is not unreasonable to expect, which means that out of 110,000 impressions, 2,200 people actually come to visit that website. This may seem pretty dismal but it really isn’t.

Remember the old rule of thumb about indifference on the internet? Most people just don’t give a shit. That, and most people don’t even really “see” our marketing message, remember? At least these 2,200 people did. Embrace that.

Most of the shit you put out there will be ignored and vanish into the ether. Remember — stop being so fucking emo. Welcome to reality.

Now let’s say that some people check out Tamboo’s website and they see what they like. They decide to sign up for a free trial. Awesome!

Now, this is where you will start to see “friction”. The more things you ask for people to do in order to sign up, the less people you will get to sign up. In order to maximize signups and to reduce friction, you want to require as little as possible from anyone signing up.

Tamboo’s registration page only asks for an email address and a password. Not first name, not “re-enter your password”. None of that. Email and password. Nothing else.

On average, about 1% of your website visitors will actually sign up for your free trial.

WTF?!

Yep, you read that right.

About 1%.

See why we have to get people into the top of that funnel there and why each of these steps is dependent on the other?

If you get 1,000 people to your website, you’ll maybe get 10 signups.

This is reality. Don’t get discouraged. Don’t get depressed. Accept it. Internalize it. Move on.

Now we’re into what we would call the “onboarding” phase. Onboarding is basically anything that occurs after the signup stage and is required in order to get people to actually use your product.

You should track each onboarding step you have separately — and you should actively seek to minimize how many onboarding steps you have, as each of them cause friction.

In order for Tamboo to do its magic, users have to install a small JavaScript snippet onto their website. This is an onboarding step. People that sign up for the trial drop off at this phase, so it’s important that it gets tracked — otherwise you’re flying blind.

There are no real “standard” onboarding ratios out there that will apply to everyone — it’s all dependent on what you require during onboarding and how your market responds to those requirements. But make no mistake — people will fall off during onboarding.

After getting through the “onboarding gauntlet”, people are now “in trial”. They’ll stay in this stage of the funnel until their trial expires. A good amount of people can tend to fall off during a trial. A lot of times, people will log in once and then be gone forever. Tracking when a user logs in is a useful metric for measuring engagement until a trial expires.

The moral of the story here is that just because someone has signed up for a trial, don’t expect them to stick around for the entire trial period.

There are a number of factors that influence how many people stick around to the end of a trial. You obviously want to get as many people as possible to stick around until the end of a trial, but you should be expecting to lose some amount.

I’ve pegged the ratio here at 50% just because it’s probably reflective of where you’re at at this stage. You’ll want to drive that much higher over time.

Notice how from 2,200 website visits we’re down to 8 people sticking around to the end of a trial? I’m bringing this up so that you don’t get overly discouraged if you see numbers like this.

So now that we’ve got someone who’s come to our website, signed up for a trial, has successfully gone through onboarding, and has stuck around to the end of the trial, we should expect them to convert to a paid user, right?

Wrong.

Despite what you’d like to see happen, most people will not convert at the end of a trial.

I’ve put the the conversion to paid ratio at 25% here since that’s in the ballpark of what you might experience. There are ways to boost this and we’ll be covering them later on. Again, I’m putting this out there so that you don’t go too emo on yourself. This shit is normal.

If you thought we were done once we got someone to convert to paid, I’m sorry but it doesn’t end there.

There’s more pain and suffering to come.

The first 60–90 days after someone converts to paid are filled with a significant amount of churn. Since you’re still starting out, you might see something like 50% churn in the first 60–90 days of people signing up. The post 60–90 day period should have much less churn than this, but we’re nowhere close in our timeline to be worrying about that just yet.

Hopefully this gives you a good overview of what a funnel is, what it looks like, and how disheartening it’s going to be for the next 3–6 months while you try to shape things up.

So what the fuck are you going to do about it?

First thing’s first — you don’t just go to your bedroom and cry about it.

Sure, maybe get it out of your system — it’s healthy to let go sometimes.

Plus, who doesn’t like an occasional after school afternoon fueled by tear-stained mascara set to the soundtrack of Hawthorne Heights or My Chemical Romance?

Once you’ve gotten that out of your system, it’s time to get to work.

First thing’s first —map out your funnel.

Get a whiteboard, get a notebook, get a sheet of printer paper — whatever the fuck — and map it out, top to bottom.

What steps are in your funnel?

What numbers do you have to work with?

What numbers do you need to start tracking?

Go down the steps top to bottom.

Find the first part of your funnel where people are falling off in a disproportionate number.

This is the step you’re going to focus on — and only this step.

Anything below the step you are working on does not matter. Why’s that? Because every step is dependent on the step before it.

Let’s say you aren’t getting people to sign up for your app. People are showing up to the website but not signing up.

What do you do here?

You fix your marketing page copy and/or your signup process, depending on what you think might be causing the friction.

You DO NOT add more fucking features to your app.

You DO NOT build out your credit card processing system.

You DO NOT build out administration screens (unless it’s to track what’s going on with your marketing page or your signup process).

It makes absolutely no sense to spend any time building something that no one is even getting to.

The funnel shows you this and it shows you what you have to fix.

Get people to get through the step you need them to get through. Focus on nothing else. Once that’s done, go to the next leaky step. Then the next. Then the next.

And through all of this — make sure you’re focusing on your 20%.

You can’t make everyone happy — nor should you.

Find your 20%.

Make it work for them.

Now here’s something you need to understand.

MEMORIZE THIS.

You will never “know” why people are falling off.

Yep, you read that right.

That’s because people tend to fall of for psychological reasons.

Maybe there’s something about your signup form that they don’t like. Maybe it doesn’t give them the warm-fuzzies.

Maybe your marketing page copy isn’t resonating. Maybe your offer doesn’t seem enticing enough.

It’s going to be up to you to walk through your funnel like you’re someone in your target market and ask yourself:

Is there any fucking reason that I would not take this next step?

You’re going to have to try and put yourself in their shoes. You’re going to need to try and understand what they want to see.

Then you’re going to make some tweaks, put it out there, and see if that changes things for you.

You’ll want to make fairly small, fairly rapid changes. Because you don’t know what needs “fixed”, you need to limit how much time and effort you put into any one “fix”.

I recommend that any one fix should be able to be conceived, implemented, and deployed in the timeframe of one week.

And you will be doing this every week until you start to see some changes.

Just remember that the reason people are bailing is psychological.

Troubleshooting each of these funnel stages is more of an art than a science and each of them have their own nuances and psychological drivers. Because of that, I’m going to elaborate on how to troubleshoot and shape up each of these funnel stages in follow up parts to The Epic Guide.

It’s that important and it’s that time-intensive.

You don’t get to escape from MVP Hell without going through this.

And you most certainly don’t get to product-market fit without going through this.

Oh, and one other thing — the reason we’re doing this now — after having launched our MVP — is because you can’t know what you need to do if you don’t have a market banging at it.

Every market is different and has different psychologies and motivating factors.

Put the same product in front of two different markets and you will see that you wind up with two very different looking funnels.

You can’t figure this out without a market. That’s why we did that first.

And this makes sense if you look at the funnel.

Market in, customer out.

So everything in between “market in” and “customer out” has to be tailored to getting that market.

This is why we launched.

This is why we put it out there.

So we can get people interested, get them using it, and start to see what needs to be changed in order to motivate them to move forward.

One last thing before we wrap up here.

If you haven’t already, start emailing anyone and everyone that has dropped off or crossed the finish line.

Ask them “Hey, I see you didn’t stick around to the end of your trial — can I ask why?”

Ask them “Hey, I see you finished your trial but didn’t sign up for the long term — can I ask why?”

And especially — “Hey, thanks for signing up! What can I help you with? What are you looking to accomplish? What made you want to sign up with us?”

ASK EVERY SINGLE PERSON “WHY”.

Because you can’t “know”.

Because you’re not them.

Because someone might give you the right clue you need in order to understand what you might need to do.

And here’s a pro tip:

Extend the trial of anybody who is giving you feedback until they stop using your app and stop giving you feedback.

You’ll get some people who will say “I like what you’re doing here, but it’s not enough for me to want to pay $X/month yet.”

GREAT! Your response should be “Can I ask what will it take to be worth $X/month to you? And just because you’re so awesome — let me extend your trial until we get to that point.”

Their feedback is worth more to you than whatever pocket change you might hope to get from them right now.

Oh, and one more pro tip?

Don’t cry, startup emo kid.

This is hard, this is tough, and it sucks.

Just like life.

Get ready to go Frank the Tank on that funnel!

This ends Part 4 of The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch — By Yourself.

In Part 5, we’re gonna get down and dirty with learning how to keep our funnel full as we continue to tweak and optimize our website and MVP on our path to startup greatness.

Update: Part 5 of The Epic Guide — Real-World Startup Sales and Marketing for the Lost and the Clueless is now LIVE! (Go get it, startup kid!)

Oh wait — I almost forgot to ask: Do you like AWESOME SAUCE?!

Because if so, you might be interested to know that I’m turning The Epic Guide into a full-length book that you can now purchase in advance!

If you buy a copy today, not only would you put a smile on my face (you would!), but you’ll also get a nice discount and early access to the chapters as I finish them!

If you’re a fan of The Epic Guide series and want to get even more down and dirty with your startup game, this is the book you’ve been looking for!

And as always, be sure to follow me on Medium and on Twitter at @cliffordoravec and be sure to watch for the next installment to drop!