Announcing our plan for 2019
We’re about to launch a series of moonshots!
Laser focus is key to success.
You’ve heard that phrase many times. However, after designing, building, and launching dozens of apps used by over 10 million users, we concluded that this statement is true only after finding a product with the right fit, and that doesn’t mean only product/market fit (h/t Todd Goldberg).
Our plan for 2019 — Experiment as much as possible.
We believe that the path towards building a successful product is experimenting with as many different products as possible, until finding one that users really love and with high growth potential.
Finding the best performing acquisition channel takes some time. As a result, we may stop development tasks while working on marketing. This will lead us to a state in which we’re running many projects concurrently, which we acknowledge is not sustainable.
In January 2020 we’ll decide what projects we’ll sell or kill, ensuring we can focus on scaling only one of them
Startup studios are on the rise — And early stage angel investors have just realized this.
A few years ago, when I reached out to pre-product investors trying to get funding, I always got an immediate rejection. Our pitch was that we had an audience of millions, and that we knew how to build and market online products.
“We don’t fund teams. We fund products.”
That was always their answer. However, it completely changed when we reached the #1 spot on the App Store. Regardless, we decided to continue being a bootstrapped startup after understanding that raising funds is a complex task. We prefer to focus our efforts on building the winner product, raising funds only to scale it!
Many angel investors are now backing startup studios or “search labs” from the beginning phase. This year, Roger Dickey shared this announcement after raising 2.8M for Untitled Labs. Facts from his announcement: Many of today’s unicorns were the result of a search lab or a big pivot. Twitch, Slack, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and the list goes on. It includes TBH, an app bought by Facebook that I analyzed:
It’s a long read, recommended for those who build online products. However, the key fact here is that even though it was bought 9 weeks after launching, the team behind it had spent 5 years trying out new ideas.
The benefit of a startup studio.
Building an online product is hard. Building one with recurrent usage is even harder.
Many people think building something innovative is really hard. And they are right. However, they think that the building phase is the hardest part. And they’re very wrong.
The building phase of any project requires going through many technical roadblocks. But even if you succeeded at building it, you still need to get people to use it. But then, even if you’ve marketed your product successfully and got millions of users, you still need to get people to come back to use your product recurrently. We became really good at building viral products, but so far failed to build something with recurrent usage.
I created the chart above inspired by this post by Andrew Chen written seven years ago (the pre-producthunt era). The chart is based on our experience building dozens of apps and websites, as well as data from other successful startups that decided to share their financials.
The dashed line represent alternative paths, like having a super viral launch (which happened to us) or just failing to launch and get enough traction. More importantly, they represent the fact that iterations are needed once you understand the target audience. If those iterations were able to improve the product to the point where users don’t churn, then it’s time to launch again.
Startups that raise big rounds to build their product vision iterate until they run out of money, as they’ve been committed to building their product vision. We may also fail and run out of money. But in that case, we will fail at finding a product with market-fit. We will never try to force a product to succeed.
We don’t plan to have many iterations. If we weren’t able to find product/market fit in a few months, we think it’s OK to say we were wrong, so we move on with the next idea.
“So you’re just building anything that pops into your mind? “ — Defining the idea and the acquisition strategy.
Everyone has ideas for projects that could succeed. Those who have the ability to execute them and those who don’t. The challenge lies in saying “NO” to most. There are many factors that come into play when choosing the best idea to work on. We’ll probably write a blog post only on this. But before evaluating how attractive could a project be, we ask ourselves the following three questions:
- Do we have a very clear acquisition strategy?
- Are we the right people to create this?
- Is this something we’re passionate about?
Most founders underestimate the importance of defining your acquisition strategy upfront. Each of our projects has a very different acquisition strategy. However, we already have a very good starting point based on our past projects:
- +7,000,000 people who used our Top Nine app.
- +60,000 monthly active users on our Truth or Dare App.
- +2,000 developers and marketers following our journey, including you!
This existing user base enables us to acquire users for other projects for free, using email or just redirecting users. Besides this, we make sure each of our projects is designed for growth, supporting network effects. Paid advertising also plays a key role in our acquisition strategy, but we’ll dive deep into this on another post.
To answer the second and third question briefly:
We make sure we’re building something in the intersection of what we’re good at and the industries/spaces we want to explore.
Our experience: Consumer apps, Social Media Tools, Ecommerce.
Top Nine, a 3-week development project, generated mid-six-figures in revenue after reaching the #1 spot in the US and many other countries.
Our Truth or Dare app made it to the #2 spot, and currently, it’s breaking the top 100 charts every weekend (when teens download it for their house parties).
But while we were good at creating something millions like, we failed at generating something millions really love enough that it ensures recurrent usage.
Industries/spaces we will invest in
In the following months, we’ll place our bets on each of these spaces:
Podcasts — We believe 2019 is the year in which Podcasts will become mainstream, and we think the industry is demanding more sophisticated tools. Both podcasters and listeners alike!
Creator tools — From YC request for startups: “We believe there are ways to build more creator-friendly platforms, and we’re interested in seeing projects that make it easier for artists to raise funding, track consumption of their work and prevent piracy.”
As creators ourselves, we overcame many of the obstacles in the way, and we think some of our solutions may be useful to others.
Crypto — The future of crypto is still uncertain as decentralization beyond currencies, but we’re certain that cryptocurrencies are here to stay and solve many existing problems.
Join our newsletter!
We’ve decided to launch our newsletter sharing every step on the process, including our failures. We took this decision with three goals in mind:
- Update our friends, followers, and supporters on our journey.
- Teach others how to do things we’re really good at doing.
- Ask for feedback for things that we’ve no idea what we’re doing.
We will share the live process we’ll go through, building and launching many experiments this year. We also plan to include:
Toolkits— Learn what we use, and what others use.
Marketing — Strategies, growth hacks, and key decisions that proved to succeed.
Engineering — Design decisions and key technical learnings.
Alpha access — Get access to early versions of everything we build.
Relevant news analysis—There are many platforms for curated news. Our added value will be to surface and analyze those that impact our work directly.
The newsletter is free for now, and it’ll remain free until reaching 10,000 subscribers. Most importantly, it will always be free for those who sign up while free!
Sign up below! 👇👇👇
