KaiKul#3 Pocket Book: “To Validate Ideas, Find Beta Users and Seek Out Experienced Wisidom.”
With my respect, this is my written startup journey aiming to document, reflect and share how we are building a startup, KaiKul, since day one. Hope this might helpful to you and can be your shortcut to your journey. Welcome to the KaiKul third month.
This journey will be written into 3 sections:
- Journey
- Hindsight (challenges & happy moments)
- Next actionable items
JOURNEY
Find Beta Users
Now we have onboarded beta users over 50 people with over 1,000 landing page views. (conversion rate = 5%). Here are 6 different methods we applied.
- Linkedin Inbox (work best!): sent 500 profiles per week.
- Indie Hackers (work best!): created post weekly to ask for pointers.
- Facebook Group: shared contents and our product.
- Reddit: interacted with others and tied in our product 😂.
- Quora: same as Reddit.
- Product Hunt: listed our product.
Validate Idea
We apply this process from a book, “The Lean Startup”. In summary, we need to find the user that use our product, reuse our product and suggest our product. That’s the best case for us because this will grow your product quickly and imply that we’re on the right path!. More importantly, always find feedbacks and make the improvement along the way.
Find Experienced Knowledge
As we’re super new on this area, we decided to reach to almost 10 experienced startup co-founders, and here’s what we find in common on their sharing.
Product
- Really understand users’ problems deeply.
- Don’t build your software first, but use available tools to validate.
- Find word of mouth features and marketing.
- Find your revenue model first
Users
- Find targeted niche customers first then scale from those.
- Think about how to make users proud to use our product.
Co-founders
- Don’t look for co-founders from skills but mindsets and vision & mission.
- Don’t give equity easily. Need to have reverse vesting, vesting and cliff.
- If you can’t handle emotional roller coaster, you can do traditional business.
We have done this by just reaching out those by just messaging them on Facebook and attending start-up events & the mentor program.
HINDSIGHT (Challenge & Happy Moments)
Challenge
- Find and create automatic process so we can handle lots of beta users.
- Handle my up and down emotion while meeting uncertain situations.
Happy Moments
- Lots of people that we reached out were super eager to give us feedbacks and to share experiences. So grateful.
- Going exercising just twice a week uplift my mood a lot. You’ll also feel happy when you look at the mirror and see your body transformed.
NEXT ACTIONABLE ITEMS
- Automate process more
- Find more beta users to validate our idea that can make users refer to their friends and people around.
- Enjoy along the way more instead of focusing on the ended result.
That’s our third-month startup journey. Hope you find something helpful and if you have any feedback or suggestion, feel free to reach us via my Linkedin or email, setthawut@kaikul.com☺.️
Interested to read the last month or next month journey?. Here are they
[2nd month] “Build Trust, Manage Tasks, and Generate Startup Ideas”: https://setthawut-kul.medium.com/kaikul-journey-2nd-month-dcc625eb76dc
[4th month] “To Pivot, To Gather Feedbacks and To Handle Overwhelmed Feeling.”: https://setthawut-kul.medium.com/kaikul-4-pocket-book-to-pivot-to-gather-feedbacks-and-to-handle-overwhelmed-feeling-8477fafcf442
