A friend called me out of the blue a few days ago, and said he had a great business idea. Before I could get a word in edgeways asking him what it was, he blurted “And I’m quitting this Friday.” As I controlled my surprise and readied to respond, I flashed back to the time when I quit my job, two years to the day.
I first got an idea for a new venture about 6 months before I quit. My co-founder and I spent a couple of months testing the idea with friends working in the target sector. Once we got feelers that we may be on to something, we spent another 2 months finding a good guy to helm product development. And then we started building the product. By the time I quit, we had a prototype ready, and our website also went up the same day – I could proudly mention it in my farewell email.
Less than 6 months later, we shut the business down (surprised you with the shock ending, didn’t I?). As we pitched the offering to prospective clients and started a couple of customer pilots, we saw severe structural limitations to the idea, and decided to shelve it. As the military saying goes, “The best laid plans seldom survive first contact.” Or to quote this generation’s premier philosopher, Mike Tyson – “Everybody has a plan, till they get punched in the face.”
All of this is to say – there’s a lot of uncertainty when you’re starting up. And while the uncertainty will never go away, there’s a lot you can do while still at a 9-5 (or 9-8 in case of this friend) job to answer the most primary question regarding your startup – is there a paying customer who’ll find value in your service?
1. Build out the product concept
Outline clearly what the product will do. This will be very useful later when pitching customers, but it is also important at the initial stages to make sure you’ve thought of all sides of the idea. If you have a co-founder, then it helps make sure you are on the same page.
You also need to think about the concept at different levels – now that you’re going to execute on an idea and it’s not just a castle in the air, you need to descend from your 20,000ft view. I found it useful to do these three things:
- First develop a 30 sec elevator pitch
- Then dive a little deeper, and think about a 2-3 min description of the product and its benefits
- Develop a 5-10 min presentation on the product – at this stage, you’ll start detailing how you plan to successfully and scalably deliver your value proposition.
- This can be in any format, but I find making a PowerPoint presentation an incredibly useful cure for a muddled mind.
- You can use the template below to sketch out your product concept and business model – it ensures that you think through all the elements of your business model.
Based on framework from strategyzer.com
2. Test the product concept with prospective customers
Unless you’re building a visionary product that people don’t yet know they want (are you the next Steve Jobs?) or there are strong reasons to be in stealth (e.g. Siri), you must absolutely talk to a lot of customers or industry experts. You’re not selling anything yet – this is more about validating the idea itself and ensuring that this is something people would pay for.
I would hesitate to put a number to these interviews – it really depends on the space you’re in and where in the value chain you’ll play. But, roughly speaking, let’s say at least 50 customers in case of a B2C product, and 5 in case of a B2B one.
The aim should be to rapidly iterate on the idea and improve it. For instance, when we were validating our idea, there were times when we would meet one person, return home and change the pitch, and then go to the next meeting. Such early conversations are invaluable in refining your idea significantly, before you spend a single penny on development.
You should also use these conversations to test your financial assumptions. How much would people pay for this product? How much would it cost to acquire the customer – distribution costs, marketing costs, etc.?
Let’s stop for a bit – at this point, all you’ve done is understand your idea, and test it with a bunch of people. No need to quit yet. But let’s move on.
3. Design a strawman / prototype
Once your customer interactions show that your idea has legs, and you refine your idea with customer inputs, it’s now time to design the product. You’re not actually building it right now – you’re just giving your product concept some form and shape. You can use Just in Mind for this – this tool allows you to draw out your product’s different features, and create the usage flow (I used this tool to create the first design for my current app). For example, if you’re building a mobile app, you can create a series of screens with the rough functionality you envisage. You can also map buttons to specific other screens – so that when you’re showing the prototype to someone, you can also demonstrate how the app transitions will take place.
Doing this can be challenging – it’s the first time you’ll be doing something concrete about your idea (and even more so if you’re a first-time entrepreneur, like I was). But if you don’t start enjoying it soon, then that’s a valuable learning too – maybe you’re not yet ready for the uncertainty and vagueness of starting up.
4. Test the prototype with customers
Once you’ve built the prototype, you hit the road again. Test it with the same or different customers – would they actually use this product? How much would they pay for it? You’ll learn a lot – just like creating a concrete design helped you clarify your own thinking on the product, users will give more actionable feedback when they can actually see the product in some form. All of which will improve the first version you launch significantly – without quitting your job yet.
5. Build out your initial financial model
I’m biased towards drowning in large excel models, and therefore I hesitated to put this down – is it really necessary so early on? But on second thoughts, it absolutely is. Not only does it help you acknowledge your assumptions, estimate the cash burn rate and plan your runway, it also gives you one more concrete element to test in the market – running this by customers can again help you verify that your business is attractive. And as long as your assumptions reconcile with user opinion, you can continue to the next stage – developing the product itself.
6. Start developing an MVP
Assuming the previous steps went well (i.e., people liked the product and you liked the experience), you then start building the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP – the most basic product that fulfils your core value proposition.
If you’re the technical lead, then this may be the time to quit your job – but only if you can’t manage this in addition to your regular job. And if you’re not the technical lead, then there’s still not enough for you to do at the venture to justify quitting. Spending your weekends working with your team and meeting customers is more than enough. In my case, our tech lead worked closely with a couple of freelancers to build an MVP – while it wasn’t ready yet by the time I quit, we were more than halfway there. (There may be divergent opinions regarding using freelancers / outsourcing initial tech, but let’s leave that for another day).
An advantage of hacking together an MVP quickly is that you can validate and refine your product much faster, which brings us to the next point…
7. Test the MVP with initial pilot / alpha customers
The next step is to share this MVP with some of the customers you spoke to in the previous steps, and see how they use the app. You’ll find that if you did the previous steps correctly and the customers are indeed captured by the product vision, they’ll forgive a lot of UI issues, buttons that don’t work, etc. – as long as the core value proposition is delivered satisfactorily.
[Tweet “As long as your MVP delivers your core value proposition, early users will forgive everything else”]Only once this MVP works do you really need to quit – before this, there’s more than enough time on the weekend.
Thus, there’s a lot you can do to get your product off the ground before you even quit your job. In retrospect, I think even I quit too early. I could very easily have continued working till the time we found that the idea didn’t work!
Now, delaying your resignation is certainly easier said than done. I had a very supportive employer, and I could keep my boss in the loop from the very beginning. As long as I fulfilled my responsibilities at work, no one had a problem with my moonlighting. But other companies may be different, and I can easily imagine cases where this may be frowned upon.
Another factor that could make juggling everything difficult is the intensity of your day job. If that itself requires you to burn the candle at both ends, then you may not have any energy left to fuel your own venture. In such a situation, you may need to take a leap of faith, and take a short sabbatical (if you have a great equation with your bosses) or quit with the confidence that you’ll find another job if your venture doesn’t succeed.
And of course, there is the mental angle – most of us, to begin with at least, can’t compartmentalize our different roles. In such situations, one may feel that cutting a bond, however tenuous, with the previous employer is critical to fully seizing the new opportunity. So it’s definitely not as simple as I make it sound.
But to tilt the scale yet again, there are a few more underrated benefits of quitting later.
- If your entire career thus far has been a salaried job, a clock will start ticking in your head the day you quit – especially if you’re paying a salary to your team. It makes a difference whether you’re paying this salary out of your (paltry) net worth, or from your own monthly salary. This happens to the best and best-paid of us – there’s no escaping it. Delaying your exit till a time when your product value proposition and customer validation are more solid can do a lot to assuage those frayed nerves.
- This cash in hand aspect is particularly important early on, when you’re still experimenting. Having a fixed cash inflow gives you the staying power you need to try different value propositions, business models and consumer interfaces. Otherwise, every next experiment will pinch you – not the best frame of mind to unleash your creativity. In my case, I had already quit when my first idea failed! So I went back to working as a freelance contractor for 1-2 days a week, to fund my next product and keep me in the game.
- You’ll have to work very hard initially, juggling your job and startup. Those few 100 hour weeks, working yourself to the bone, will tell you whether you’re really passionate about your venture, or just interested in the hype!
What do you guys think? Do you feel it’s hard to work on your business idea while also doing a day job? Would love your perspective – mine’s based on only a few sample points. Comment here, email me at [email protected], or tweet at jithamithra.
Thanks to Abhishek Agarwal for providing inputs on an earlier draft of this post. And for sharing this excellent article, on the same theme. Just as I was ready to publish this post 😛