MentorLabs Story

All, startups, Virality, growth

The three kinds of viral growth and how to use them in your startup.

People talk about things going viral all the time, usually in connection to some meme or video. Virality is the holy grail of business models. There are three different kinds of virality that might apply to your startup business. The term viral growth comes from epidemiology. If each sick person infects more than one new person, the disease will rapidly grow and spread through a population. While we don’t want that with sickness, it is fantastic in business. Viral user growth describes a situation where existing users bring in new users. The real magic happens if each user brings in more than one new user creating exponential growth.  I think about three different kinds of virality: Incentivized, Advocacy, and Inherent. Incentivized virality is where a business basically bribes its users to recruit their friends. Any time you get a free month of a service for each referral that signs up, you are participating in incentivized virality. The down side of this approach is that it can be off-putting to your customers. It can feel like you are trying to exploit your users at the expense of their friends. The cost of these incentives can also become very large, but it can be very effective in the early growth stages of a business. The key to achieving that critical user density is to focus on small closed populations. Advocacy virality happens when your users want to tell all their friends about your business. They love your solution and want to let everyone in on this great thing they have discovered. You see this with Tesla owners all the time. We can be downright annoying with the amount we go on about these cars. Tesla does not need to give me anything to get me to endorse them at every opportunity. Strong network effects characterize inherent virality. If a service gives you more value when more people you know are using it, you have a strong incentive to get them on the service. The example economists always use is fax machines. If you are the only person you know with one, it is a big paperweight. Facebook is a more recent example. Its value is inextricably tied to having your friends on the platform too. Once you join a system like this, you will start pressuring people you know to join as well. An interesting complication of an inherently viral business model is the low value in the early stages. When your company is just starting, users will not find their friends already there, so they won’t get much out of the service. The key to achieving that critical user density is to focus on small closed populations. Within a small group, you can quickly hit a high enough density to ensure that most new users will find many connections already signed up. Facebook did exactly this by launching exclusively to current college students and focusing rollout on a school-by-school basis. It was only after they had a very large user base in that population that they opened up membership to the general public around the world. The Hard Truth In all cases, the user’s experience of your solution is critical. People will not invite friends to use a service, even with significant incentives, if they think they will be resented for doing so. None of us wants to look bad by recommending a lousy product. So, the good news is that all you have to do for high virality is to make an incredible product. The bad news is that you somehow need to make your product incredible. I hear a lot of companies describe themselves as viral. However, I rarely hear them dig deeper and explain what kind of virality they have and how they will measure and maximize it. If you think virality will be an important component of your startup, see if you can get some initial data and measurements early. Even surveys can provide some indicators of how effective this strategy might be. If you have real evidence that virality will work for your business, as an investor I am very interested in listening to you.

All, ideation, validation

Do your customers want what you have?

Founders have great ideas. Founders have amazing ideas and are looking to solve meaningful issues that contribute to a better society. Their ideas are often born out of a pain they have faced themselves; I call this the light bulb moment or, one where they are dealing with the problem already at their workplace and have found a more efficient way to market. Being flexible and open-minded in the early ideation stage is important, however, do not sell your solution at this early stage. Conducting a thorough validation process is key and can potentially make the difference between success and failure. I’m often asked, what should you validate? I like to refer to this process as the ‘validation triangle’. Founders need to explore and challenge their current assumptions of these three points of the validation triangle to achieve product market fit  - Validation Triangle - Pain 2. Market 3. Product Be curious and thoroughly explore everything there is to know about these three areas with your customer.  That includes the relationship your customer has with the problem and how they deal with it today. Find out what solutions they use now and why, what is working, and what can be improved. If you’re doing this much, you’re on your way to being a great listener and finding the gaps in the market, the spaces you can crawl through, to find your unique positioning. We call this your secret sauce. Do not sell your solution at this early stage The challenge is trying to go against your natural tendency to hear what you want to hear. We often do it both in our personal and professional lives. And it’s no different when launching a start-up. It often is a common mistake made when developing a product.   Founders miss the warning signs and avoid digging more into potential negative responses, discounting them if they don’t fit within their preconceived objectives. It's good to hear bad news at this early stage. It will save you a lot of time and money in the long run. It’s good to hear bad news now. It will save you a lot of time and money in the long run. Instead, founders focus on the answers that validate the product they already have started to build or want to build and ignore the true feedback and criticism. Challenge your assumptions. It’s time to challenge your assumptions and test them on your customers. Make a short list of your top assumptions that you’re making for the business and then formulate a series of questions that will flush out these responses with your customer. If you’re truly honest with this process, it will go far deeper and beyond these initial responses. Understand your customer’s attitude and relationship with the pain point as we’ve said and get the full picture. Are your findings starting to align with your value proposition? Interviewing your customer. I constantly see founders selling their solutions in early interviews and most cases, their customers will just agree with them and give them false hopes to go build something they wouldn’t pay for. Without casting too many aspersions on your customers, they may not be telling you the whole truth when answering your questions. That’s why it’s crucial to dig deeper into your customer’s thoughts, avoid closed questions, and use techniques like the 5 why process, where you don’t take the first response and keep questioning until you unveil the real truths behind their answers. Cast your net out wide at first, using surveys and an audience building tool like Prolific, which will get you an initial market response from hundreds of customers for a reasonable cost. Narrow in on those responses that appear to be aligning with your assumptions and then send them a second series of questions and so forth. Continue this process until you’re satisfied that you have challenged your assumptions thoroughly. You’ll soon start to see common themes. Avoid closed questions, and use techniques like the 5 why process The next crucial part is to interpret the data correctly, making sure you’re not avoiding any negative answers and you seek to dig into them further, through secondary and tertiary surveys. Leave no stone unturned. Seek to then start having face to face interviews with some of those surveyed customers and find some new ones to speak to as well. Product market fit. Sometimes it may seem like there is a degree of luck involved when coming up with a product that will intrigue and excite an already busy marketplace. If you conduct a thorough validation process by asking the right questions, listening, and interpreting those answers carefully, then you may well just be on the way to achieving product market fit. Allow yourself to be challenged. Product market fit is the holy grail for any founder. It represents that perfect alignment where your product or service seamlessly meets the needs and desires of your target audience. Achieving this fit is a testament to your business's viability and potential for success. Product market fit is the holy grail for any founder. It means you've not only identified a genuine problem in the market but have also crafted a solution that resonates with your customers, creating a sustainable path to growth and profitability. For a founder, it's the ultimate validation that their vision is on the right track.

All

MentorLabs Story

Co-founders Richard Cristina & Liam Morris have years of experience in the start-up ecosystem helping founders realise their dream of launching tech companies. As the Principal Director of the Founder Institute's London chapter, the world’s largest pre-seed accelerator program, Richard has helped graduate 100's of companies. Many have since gone on to raise funds. Liam is a UX/UI design specialist who has helped numerous tech companies bring their product to life at the best practice level. This platform is a testimonial to that. Recognising a market gap that some start-up founders were not ready for a long-term commitment to programs like an accelerator or similar programs, which often required founders to commit to 8 to 12 weeks of their time and give up equity. Having previously collaborated, working for mutual clients, Richard & Liam knew there was a synergy in their working together to achieve their objectives. When they discussed the gap they saw in the market, they knew they could take this project on and started working on it 18 months ago from now. Recognising a market gap that some start-up founders were not ready for a long-term commitment to programs like an accelerator or similar programs, which often required founders to commit to 8 to 12 weeks of their time and give up equity. Convinced of a market opportunity, they started outlining their plan to interview founders and mentors alike and challenge their assumptions. Do these founders really exist? Will they pay for on demand help? There was much to research and dig down to. Across this time, we end up interviewing over 300 users, mostly founders and also many mentors. We felt it was important to speak to mentors also, as they play a pivotal role in this marketplace and we needed to understand their motivations for joining our community. Rich & Liam meticulously planned and designed various prototypes, which they used in their research to get feedback and as a result made several iterations. They were not 'founder friendly' and used to building products for corporations or funded start-ups. We were boostrapping therefore price was key. We're probably making this sound easy, but it wasn't. As we finalised which version we will start building, we set out to find a suitable tech partner. We looked around for some time, meeting with several companies. They were not 'founder friendly' and used to building products for corporations or funded start-ups. We were boostrapping therefore price was key. We found Woods & Walker, based in Newcastle, UK and the rest is history. They built what we see today and have been an awesome tech partner. Yet even with all this expertise in the room, unforseen things cropped up to challenge us. A major payment supplier advised us we couldn't do what we planned with their product, two thirds of the way through our build, setting us back weeks. Lesson here for us was to question our vendors more, ensuring the product was going to deliver exactly what we asked for and get proof of it. There were times we doubted ourselves and what we were doing and even felt like giving up. With some perserverence, MentorLabs is the result of a lot of hard work from a team focussed on bringing an on demand service to market for start-up founders. The journey continues as we eagerly build our founder and mentor community.