The Poker subreddit only has 100k subscribers, and it’s a much bigger commitment for people to buy poker software than read a subreddit. So it seems plausible that the total market is only 1k users, but you never know.
Founders shouldn’t worry too much about market size, just focus on getting early users and growing the user base at some rate like 10%/month. For example, Uber has grown beyond the total market size of taxis. Peloton has grown beyond what many people might have guessed was the market size of people who want a home exercise bike. Microsoft’s original market was BASIC programmers.
To be able to direct your effort toward where it will make a difference, you need to get a feedback loop going where you give people value and observe the consequences. You made a quality piece of software that could give people value in theory, but in practice value usually can’t be transmitted without an intense manual effort at sales/delivery/onboarding. The way to give people value is to grab specific people and manually stuff your value into them.
Most startups have to manually hunt down their initial traction one customer at a time. It almost always takes a long time to get momentum going where you don’t have to spend manual effort and resources to acquire the next incremental customer.
The Poker subreddit only has 100k subscribers, and it’s a much bigger commitment for people to buy poker software than read a subreddit. So it seems plausible that the total market is only 1k users, but you never know.
Well, my thinking was that only a fraction of the somewhat serious players are on the subreddit, so if only 10k of the 100k on the subreddit are somewhat serious, maybe we can multiply by 5-10 (or hopefully more) to account for the fact that not all of the somewhat serious players are on the subreddit.
Now my thinking is to assume that only like 100 of the 100k are somewhat serious, not 10k.
Founders shouldn’t worry too much about market size, just focus on getting early users and growing the user base at some rate like 10%/month. For example, Uber has grown beyond the total market size of taxis.
That makes sense, but only if you have a plausible path to growing the size of the market.
The way to give people value is to grab specific people and manually stuff your value into them.
This belief has been growing stronger and stronger in my mind over time. And it seems like a really important thing for founders to understand.
It makes me feel really uneasy though, because I don’t want to be spammy. What are your thoughts on that?
BTW, one of my unfleshed ideas is to have a platform that connects self-proclaimed early adopters with early stage founders. Maybe the early adopters would get access to products discounts or something for being on the platform, and early stage founders would have to pay to be on the platform. I plan on fleshing this out and writing about it some time in the future. It easily could turn out to be a bad idea; just thought I’d mention it.
That makes sense, but only if you have a plausible path to growing the size of the market.
I can imagine that someone could make poker software that makes poker more fun and addictive, pulling more people into learning to play well who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered. Peloton got regular people interested in indoor cycling. Codecademy got regular people learning to code. It’s possible to demonstrate signs of this potential just by having passionate early users and a sturdy growth rate starting from a small baseline.
And [grabbing specific people and manually stuffing value into them] seems like a really important thing for founders to understand.
Ya my whole blog bloatedmvp.com is about founders not understanding this.
It makes me feel really uneasy though, because I don’t want to be spammy. What are your thoughts on that?
Your own ego will already bias you toward not putting yourself out there enough.
People and companies have robust spam defenses/habits already built up from more powerful spammers than you’ll ever be. For example, they habitually ignore plenty of messages and emails they get.
Also, when you narrow down what your MVP is to the point where it’s almost by definition an incremental improvement in one specific person’s life, you should feel more confident to attempt to do a Collison Installation on that person. If it doesn’t work out, they should be able to understand why you were convinced this would be worth their time, even if you were wrong.
BTW, one of my unfleshed ideas is to have a platform that connects self-proclaimed early adopters with early stage founders. Maybe the early adopters would get access to products discounts or something for being on the platform, and early stage founders would have to pay to be on the platform. I plan on fleshing this out and writing about it some time in the future. It easily could turn out to be a bad idea; just thought I’d mention it.
I can imagine that someone could make poker software that makes poker more fun and addictive, pulling more people into learning to play well who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered.
Yeah, that’s a good point, but I’m not sure that it applies to every product. So then, it still seems to me that you should try to think about whether it is plausible to “grow the pie”.
What do you think? I lean slightly towards thinking that you disagree, because you initially said that founders shouldn’t worry too much about market size. If so, what is the thought process behind that? Because you think there’s a route to “grow the pie” for any product? Because at an early stage your goal is to be nimble and figure out what direction to run in?
Ya my whole blog bloatedmvp.com is about founders not understanding this.
Awesome, I’ll check it out!
Your own ego will already bias you toward not putting yourself out there enough.
Huh. I thought it would be the opposite. That people have egos that are too big and they think they’re more important than they actually are. Or are you saying that I personally don’t have a big ego, because I’m having this conversation?
Also, when you narrow down what your MVP is to the point where it’s almost by definition an incremental improvement in one specific person’s life, you should feel more confident to attempt to do a Collison Installation on that person. If it doesn’t work out, they should be able to understand why you were convinced this would be worth their time, even if you were wrong.
That registered really well with me, thank you! I agree! I do find myself thinking this a lot, that I’m doing them a favor by reaching out.
If I’m an early stage founder and I launch on Product Hunt, I may not get any attention. Whereas with my idea, the founder would be able to browse the email list of early adopters and reach out to the ones who meet the target demographic.
With Product Hunt, you have to actually launch something to be seen. What if you want to chat with users before you launch? What if you launched already and want to do user research? What if you releases a new feature, or changed pricing, and want to send a sales email?
With Kickstarter, you can put yourself out there before you launch, but you can’t actually reach out to users, from what I understand. I think there’s value in having a list of user email addresses that you can browse through. Basically, warm leads, because they signed up, and because you can see demographic info and other user profile stuff.
Note: I think it’d be pretty necessary to limit the amount of emails that founders can send out. Otherwise early adopters would get totally blasted and not want to sign up. So maybe the email addresses wouldn’t actually be visible, and you’d have to message them through the platform, and the platform would limit how many messages you can send.
What do you think? I lean slightly towards thinking that you disagree, because you initially said that founders shouldn’t worry too much about market size. If so, what is the thought process behind that? Because you think there’s a route to “grow the pie” for any product? Because at an early stage your goal is to be nimble and figure out what direction to run in?
It’s good to think about the market and where you can grow it. Paul Graham asks “What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?” If you can tap into early passionate users and an exponential growth rate of revenue (or at least usage), and the business is inherently scalable (i.e. not a local diner), then it’s hard to be confident that the growth rate will slam into a wall in the near future, but it’s also then quick to test whether you can keep the exponential curve going or not. So the question of whether the idea is good approximately reduces to the question of whether you can get a traction and growth curve going, and that’s usually the highest priority thing to focus on proving. Sometimes you might convince yourself that the market has very little potential even if you do get early passionate users with a good early growth rate, but it’s a rare outcome and often worth giving it a shot and following where it goes.
Huh. I thought it would be the opposite. That people have egos that are too big and they think they’re more important than they actually are. Or are you saying that I personally don’t have a big ego, because I’m having this conversation?
Salespeople typically deal with flakiness and rejection all day. A big part of their job is to relentlessly hound their prospects. I did some sales outreach the other day trying to get affiliate partnerships and it doesn’t feel good to be reaching out to a bunch of people and getting ignored and turned down. But on the other side of the table, when salespeople pester me, I may be slightly annoyed at the spam but I understand they’re playing a game and I don’t hate them for it.
Re the “early adopters email list” idea:
Try making the Value Prop Story more specific by identifying an actual specific person on one or both sides of the 2-sided business, and explain why specifically they need a new email list beyond what exists now.
Are you specifically an example of the “early adopter” you have in mind? Am I an early adopter? I don’t know because that’s a vague term. I’m curious to skim descriptions of e.g. a cool new database, but not happy to adopt it. I’m unlikely to early-adopt a new beauty product.
I’m guessing that you launching your poker software is an example of a target user on the looking-for-early-adopter-feedback side of the equation. Is “email list for early adopters” really that big of a win for what you needed? It seems like the Poker subreddit and other poker communities should already have had enough leads you could email about testing your product.
Your original Value Prop Story should probably already about the kind of person you have access to in your life, depending on what field you’re working on, so I’m skeptical that what founders really need is an email list of early adopters. And if they do just need that, there’s already Product Hunt, Hacker News, startups reddit, startupschool.org, nugget.one, tons of incubators/accelerators who offer advising, usertesting.com, etc.
My thinking is that by signing up as an early adopter, it wouldn’t be industry specific, you’d just be saying that you’re interested in being contacted about new products and stuff.
Yeah, I myself am an example of someone who would sign up as a founder on this platform. With my poker app, and with future projects. With the poker app, I found that the poker subreddit, other poker forums, in person networking, and cold emails didn’t amount to enough leads.
I know that sounds implausible. Maybe it’s an uncommon experience. I think the success of this platform idea we’re talking about depends a good amount on the answer to that question, because if founders are currently doing fine with customer outreach, then it wouldn’t really be solving a problem for them. But my impression is that a) many founders struggle to get in touch with these sorts of early adopters, and b) even if they are successfully getting in touch with some, they’d still want more. Of course, this is a hypothesis that could be validated without actually building anything, eg. by talking to founders.
Your original Value Prop Story should probably already about the kind of person you have access to in your life, depending on what field you’re working on, so I’m skeptical that what founders really need is an email list of early adopters.
That’s understandable. I don’t feel particularly confident in the idea.
With the poker app, I found that the poker subreddit, other poker forums, in person networking, and cold emails didn’t amount to enough leads.
[...] I think the success of this platform idea we’re talking about depends a good amount on the answer to that question, because if founders are currently doing fine with customer outreach, then it wouldn’t really be solving a problem for them.
No question that acquiring leads/customers is a huge problem for a huge number of businesses. Google and Facebook are worth a combined $trillion because they sell a solution to that problem.
I just don’t think an “email list of early adopters” would have helped you acquire leads more than you can already help yourself by using existing forums that aggregate poker-lovers plus existing forums that aggregate people who are open to testing startups.
You probably think whoever currently follows Product Hunt is a good candidate to be on your email list, if only Product Hunt had a section for pre-launch companies. Well, it’s not hard to look up 100 PH users’ emails and blast them an email to take a look at your poker bot :) you can target PH people who have liked poker-related products. This would constitute an MVP of testing your idea, even though on the surface you might not imagine it as such.
But my impression is that a) many founders struggle to get in touch with these sorts of early adopters, and b) even if they are successfully getting in touch with some, they’d still want more. Of course, this is a hypothesis that could be validated without actually building anything, eg. by talking to founders.
Before talking to other founders, a good first step is to convince yourself you would be a passionate user of this, which I’m skeptical about. E.g. would you pay $50/month for access? (This $50 threshold is a generally-applicable stronger version of the Value Prop Story test.)
I definitely agree about talking to founders and prospective early adopters as an MVP. I think it’s a great example of what you talk about on your blog, about how and MVP doesn’t actually have to be a product.
I myself would definitely have paid for it. Somewhere in the ballpark of a couple hundred dollars. Possibly more if I actually was making money and growing. I spent a lot of time struggling to get in touch with users, at various points, for various reasons, and if the email list solved that problem for me, that’d be hugely valuable.
Again, in theory I should be able to easily get in touch with people by messing around in different poker communities, but that just doesn’t seem to actually work for me in practice. I have a great example. I posted about my app on Reddit at various points. Lots of people commented saying nice things. Some even commented to say that they would pay for it when it’s on the market, and to let them know. Yesterday I took some time and DMed everyone. I sent out 24 messages, but only got one reply. And that is for people who have already said they love my app.
Well it’s not surprising that someone on a forum who said they love your app weeks or months ago is probably not super likely to respond to a DM now. There’s just a general level of flakiness that suits all of us to partake in to some degree.
How about DMing 10 users who have commented in the poker reddit in the last 48 hours and asking if they’d do you a favor and answer questions about their poker interest on a video call? I bet you’d get a couple takers. Until I understand why your specific situation is best helped by an email list of early adopters, I’m skeptical that your value prop generalizes the way you think it does.
That makes sense about them not being too responsive to this particular DM. I predict that I won’t get many more responses over the next few weeks though.
I have actually spent a good amount of time DMing people asking for that sort of stuff, and also just posting saying that I’m looking for people to video chat with. It just hasn’t really worked for me. That’s why I feel like the email list idea is interesting, because I myself have had the problem of not being able to get in touch with users. I do place more weight in your intuition though, because I’m just one data point and you seem to have more experience with startups, so if you feel skeptical then I shift that way a lot and don’t expect it to be successful. Although I’m not so skeptical that it doesn’t seem worth talking to some founders though.
Can you link to specific posts you’ve made in relevant communities for poker and/or startups asking for feedback or discussion about your ideas? If they get 1k+ views then I’d expect at least one or two leads to come out of such a post.
I was thinking about it some more last night. It feels like I DMed a lot of people, but the number isn’t quite in the hundreds, I don’t think. Maybe it’s just a numbers game and you really actually have to reach out to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. But at least on forums, that could be tough, because you could get flagged/banned for spamming.
I think many of the people who were commenting in your threads would have been up to let you interview them in a video chat if you’d DM’d them at the time. I don’t think it should take more than 10 DMs to get a video interview with this kind of approach.
Perhaps. At the time what held me back was not wanting to be spammy, but as we talked about, I think I was being too shy. Next time I’m going to jump at those sorts of opportunities, so thanks for helping me realize that, amongst other things.
The Poker subreddit only has 100k subscribers, and it’s a much bigger commitment for people to buy poker software than read a subreddit. So it seems plausible that the total market is only 1k users, but you never know.
Founders shouldn’t worry too much about market size, just focus on getting early users and growing the user base at some rate like 10%/month. For example, Uber has grown beyond the total market size of taxis. Peloton has grown beyond what many people might have guessed was the market size of people who want a home exercise bike. Microsoft’s original market was BASIC programmers.
To be able to direct your effort toward where it will make a difference, you need to get a feedback loop going where you give people value and observe the consequences. You made a quality piece of software that could give people value in theory, but in practice value usually can’t be transmitted without an intense manual effort at sales/delivery/onboarding. The way to give people value is to grab specific people and manually stuff your value into them.
Most startups have to manually hunt down their initial traction one customer at a time. It almost always takes a long time to get momentum going where you don’t have to spend manual effort and resources to acquire the next incremental customer.
Well, my thinking was that only a fraction of the somewhat serious players are on the subreddit, so if only 10k of the 100k on the subreddit are somewhat serious, maybe we can multiply by 5-10 (or hopefully more) to account for the fact that not all of the somewhat serious players are on the subreddit.
Now my thinking is to assume that only like 100 of the 100k are somewhat serious, not 10k.
That makes sense, but only if you have a plausible path to growing the size of the market.
This belief has been growing stronger and stronger in my mind over time. And it seems like a really important thing for founders to understand.
It makes me feel really uneasy though, because I don’t want to be spammy. What are your thoughts on that?
BTW, one of my unfleshed ideas is to have a platform that connects self-proclaimed early adopters with early stage founders. Maybe the early adopters would get access to products discounts or something for being on the platform, and early stage founders would have to pay to be on the platform. I plan on fleshing this out and writing about it some time in the future. It easily could turn out to be a bad idea; just thought I’d mention it.
I can imagine that someone could make poker software that makes poker more fun and addictive, pulling more people into learning to play well who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered. Peloton got regular people interested in indoor cycling. Codecademy got regular people learning to code. It’s possible to demonstrate signs of this potential just by having passionate early users and a sturdy growth rate starting from a small baseline.
Ya my whole blog bloatedmvp.com is about founders not understanding this.
Your own ego will already bias you toward not putting yourself out there enough.
People and companies have robust spam defenses/habits already built up from more powerful spammers than you’ll ever be. For example, they habitually ignore plenty of messages and emails they get.
Also, when you narrow down what your MVP is to the point where it’s almost by definition an incremental improvement in one specific person’s life, you should feel more confident to attempt to do a Collison Installation on that person. If it doesn’t work out, they should be able to understand why you were convinced this would be worth their time, even if you were wrong.
I dunno, try giving a specific value prop story (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iMQmfgieRKY62MC3z/the-power-to-judge-startup-ideas) illustrating why it’s much better than Product Hunt.
Yeah, that’s a good point, but I’m not sure that it applies to every product. So then, it still seems to me that you should try to think about whether it is plausible to “grow the pie”.
What do you think? I lean slightly towards thinking that you disagree, because you initially said that founders shouldn’t worry too much about market size. If so, what is the thought process behind that? Because you think there’s a route to “grow the pie” for any product? Because at an early stage your goal is to be nimble and figure out what direction to run in?
Awesome, I’ll check it out!
Huh. I thought it would be the opposite. That people have egos that are too big and they think they’re more important than they actually are. Or are you saying that I personally don’t have a big ego, because I’m having this conversation?
That registered really well with me, thank you! I agree! I do find myself thinking this a lot, that I’m doing them a favor by reaching out.
If I’m an early stage founder and I launch on Product Hunt, I may not get any attention. Whereas with my idea, the founder would be able to browse the email list of early adopters and reach out to the ones who meet the target demographic.
With Product Hunt, you have to actually launch something to be seen. What if you want to chat with users before you launch? What if you launched already and want to do user research? What if you releases a new feature, or changed pricing, and want to send a sales email?
With Kickstarter, you can put yourself out there before you launch, but you can’t actually reach out to users, from what I understand. I think there’s value in having a list of user email addresses that you can browse through. Basically, warm leads, because they signed up, and because you can see demographic info and other user profile stuff.
Note: I think it’d be pretty necessary to limit the amount of emails that founders can send out. Otherwise early adopters would get totally blasted and not want to sign up. So maybe the email addresses wouldn’t actually be visible, and you’d have to message them through the platform, and the platform would limit how many messages you can send.
It’s good to think about the market and where you can grow it. Paul Graham asks “What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?” If you can tap into early passionate users and an exponential growth rate of revenue (or at least usage), and the business is inherently scalable (i.e. not a local diner), then it’s hard to be confident that the growth rate will slam into a wall in the near future, but it’s also then quick to test whether you can keep the exponential curve going or not. So the question of whether the idea is good approximately reduces to the question of whether you can get a traction and growth curve going, and that’s usually the highest priority thing to focus on proving. Sometimes you might convince yourself that the market has very little potential even if you do get early passionate users with a good early growth rate, but it’s a rare outcome and often worth giving it a shot and following where it goes.
Salespeople typically deal with flakiness and rejection all day. A big part of their job is to relentlessly hound their prospects. I did some sales outreach the other day trying to get affiliate partnerships and it doesn’t feel good to be reaching out to a bunch of people and getting ignored and turned down. But on the other side of the table, when salespeople pester me, I may be slightly annoyed at the spam but I understand they’re playing a game and I don’t hate them for it.
Re the “early adopters email list” idea:
Try making the Value Prop Story more specific by identifying an actual specific person on one or both sides of the 2-sided business, and explain why specifically they need a new email list beyond what exists now.
Are you specifically an example of the “early adopter” you have in mind? Am I an early adopter? I don’t know because that’s a vague term. I’m curious to skim descriptions of e.g. a cool new database, but not happy to adopt it. I’m unlikely to early-adopt a new beauty product.
I’m guessing that you launching your poker software is an example of a target user on the looking-for-early-adopter-feedback side of the equation. Is “email list for early adopters” really that big of a win for what you needed? It seems like the Poker subreddit and other poker communities should already have had enough leads you could email about testing your product.
Your original Value Prop Story should probably already about the kind of person you have access to in your life, depending on what field you’re working on, so I’m skeptical that what founders really need is an email list of early adopters. And if they do just need that, there’s already Product Hunt, Hacker News, startups reddit, startupschool.org, nugget.one, tons of incubators/accelerators who offer advising, usertesting.com, etc.
My thinking is that by signing up as an early adopter, it wouldn’t be industry specific, you’d just be saying that you’re interested in being contacted about new products and stuff.
Yeah, I myself am an example of someone who would sign up as a founder on this platform. With my poker app, and with future projects. With the poker app, I found that the poker subreddit, other poker forums, in person networking, and cold emails didn’t amount to enough leads.
I know that sounds implausible. Maybe it’s an uncommon experience. I think the success of this platform idea we’re talking about depends a good amount on the answer to that question, because if founders are currently doing fine with customer outreach, then it wouldn’t really be solving a problem for them. But my impression is that a) many founders struggle to get in touch with these sorts of early adopters, and b) even if they are successfully getting in touch with some, they’d still want more. Of course, this is a hypothesis that could be validated without actually building anything, eg. by talking to founders.
That’s understandable. I don’t feel particularly confident in the idea.
No question that acquiring leads/customers is a huge problem for a huge number of businesses. Google and Facebook are worth a combined $trillion because they sell a solution to that problem.
I just don’t think an “email list of early adopters” would have helped you acquire leads more than you can already help yourself by using existing forums that aggregate poker-lovers plus existing forums that aggregate people who are open to testing startups.
You probably think whoever currently follows Product Hunt is a good candidate to be on your email list, if only Product Hunt had a section for pre-launch companies. Well, it’s not hard to look up 100 PH users’ emails and blast them an email to take a look at your poker bot :) you can target PH people who have liked poker-related products. This would constitute an MVP of testing your idea, even though on the surface you might not imagine it as such.
Before talking to other founders, a good first step is to convince yourself you would be a passionate user of this, which I’m skeptical about. E.g. would you pay $50/month for access? (This $50 threshold is a generally-applicable stronger version of the Value Prop Story test.)
I definitely agree about talking to founders and prospective early adopters as an MVP. I think it’s a great example of what you talk about on your blog, about how and MVP doesn’t actually have to be a product.
I myself would definitely have paid for it. Somewhere in the ballpark of a couple hundred dollars. Possibly more if I actually was making money and growing. I spent a lot of time struggling to get in touch with users, at various points, for various reasons, and if the email list solved that problem for me, that’d be hugely valuable.
Again, in theory I should be able to easily get in touch with people by messing around in different poker communities, but that just doesn’t seem to actually work for me in practice. I have a great example. I posted about my app on Reddit at various points. Lots of people commented saying nice things. Some even commented to say that they would pay for it when it’s on the market, and to let them know. Yesterday I took some time and DMed everyone. I sent out 24 messages, but only got one reply. And that is for people who have already said they love my app.
Well it’s not surprising that someone on a forum who said they love your app weeks or months ago is probably not super likely to respond to a DM now. There’s just a general level of flakiness that suits all of us to partake in to some degree.
How about DMing 10 users who have commented in the poker reddit in the last 48 hours and asking if they’d do you a favor and answer questions about their poker interest on a video call? I bet you’d get a couple takers. Until I understand why your specific situation is best helped by an email list of early adopters, I’m skeptical that your value prop generalizes the way you think it does.
That makes sense about them not being too responsive to this particular DM. I predict that I won’t get many more responses over the next few weeks though.
I have actually spent a good amount of time DMing people asking for that sort of stuff, and also just posting saying that I’m looking for people to video chat with. It just hasn’t really worked for me. That’s why I feel like the email list idea is interesting, because I myself have had the problem of not being able to get in touch with users. I do place more weight in your intuition though, because I’m just one data point and you seem to have more experience with startups, so if you feel skeptical then I shift that way a lot and don’t expect it to be successful. Although I’m not so skeptical that it doesn’t seem worth talking to some founders though.
Can you link to specific posts you’ve made in relevant communities for poker and/or startups asking for feedback or discussion about your ideas? If they get 1k+ views then I’d expect at least one or two leads to come out of such a post.
Here are the four that actually got some attention:
https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/72hcgl/free_equity_calculator_under_construction/
https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/88bvwx/looking_for_feedback_on_a_free_version_of/
https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/a1n819/free_app_similar_to_flopzilla_and_equilab/
https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/axfekk/updates_to_premium_poker_tools/
I was thinking about it some more last night. It feels like I DMed a lot of people, but the number isn’t quite in the hundreds, I don’t think. Maybe it’s just a numbers game and you really actually have to reach out to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. But at least on forums, that could be tough, because you could get flagged/banned for spamming.
I think many of the people who were commenting in your threads would have been up to let you interview them in a video chat if you’d DM’d them at the time. I don’t think it should take more than 10 DMs to get a video interview with this kind of approach.
Perhaps. At the time what held me back was not wanting to be spammy, but as we talked about, I think I was being too shy. Next time I’m going to jump at those sorts of opportunities, so thanks for helping me realize that, amongst other things.