How to launch a startup in 48 hours

The first step a startup aims for is product/market fit. It's a bit like the grail of the entrepreneur, the moment when you feel that “it stings a bit” and that people are interested in your product. However, we are easily desperate because of the sharp blows of the sword and the radio silence on the part of these consumers that we so fantasize about.

How can this uncertainty be addressed? Simply by testing, and by testing quickly. You have to test as many ideas and value proposals as possible to pretend to know a market. Your source of inspiration should not be the latest McKinsey report but your Google Analytics dashboard! Fortunately, there are a plethora of tools to test your ideas very quickly.

Launching Your Startup: The Art of the MVP

Let's start with a short vocabulary point: MVP stands for minimum viable product.

There are two ways to get started: lock yourself in a cellar for 3 years and make the product as you imagine it, or test the reaction of the market to your idea, talk to those who have shown interest, develop a simple product, develop a simple product, develop a simple product, develop a simple product, re-test and iterate until you become Facebook. Suffice to say that the second option is preferable.

Eric Ries is responsible for the popularity of schema of thought as well as that of the term MVP. Because in this process, rather than starting with a finished product that offers all the functionalities imaginable and possible from the start, we start with a function, a hypothesis that is easy to test.

The MVP is not a sloppy or flawed product but a function. It is THE essential function, coded in an incredible way. The MVP of a car would not be a chassis with a paper body but the best skateboard in the world.

Yes, but what if the product is complicated? You can cheat a bit to measure the response of a market. The best example is Dropbox: Dropbox is expensive to develop, even in an ultra-simplified version. Solution: make a fake video with an email field below and measure the conversion rate of the landing page. Dropbox collected 70,000 emails in one night, you have a referent of what is a”product/market fit”; and-- (

https://www.youtube.com/embed/7QmCUDHpNzE

The Tools

Making an MVP, even without coding, is totally doable. And if you code, these services can still be useful to you.

Launchrock

Launchrock Allows you to do one thing and only one thing: launch a product. In 3 minutes, you can assemble a page that collects emails with a small text and a beautiful image.

Strikingly (+ Optimizely)

To Go Further, Discover Strikingly, a service that allows you to create a slightly more complete page, composed of various sections that give pride of place to images and large fonts. You can even connect it to Optimizely, a service that allows you to test a multitude of value proposals easily.

Unbounce

Unbounce Is a slightly more complicated service than the previous two but it allows you to test several completely different landings. It takes a bit longer to master but can be very powerful for testing both text and visuals.

Olark

Olark Can work with all the services mentioned above and allows you to interact with site visitors in live-chat. If someone has a question, they can't only ask it but you can trigger the chat yourself. This is very useful for talking to your customers!

And above all, visuals

Beyond pure technique, what makes an effective landing is also the visuals you put into it. Be careful to choose a set of illustrations that fits your brand!

If you were a movie, who would you be? Search Google for images or even video clips that you could put together to create a striking set. And also look at networks such as Flickr, 500px gold iStock.

To go further, Niels and Benjamin gave a great course on these topics: http://udemy.com/4hourstartup/

Normally, with all of this, you should stop twiddling your thumbs right away and start building a page. Start by getting it going around you, harassing your friends to broadcast. Measure responses, talk to users, and iterate.

Then broadcast it everywhere. The example of Dropbox is interesting: it only took a few hours on Hacker News to build a very large list of prospects. Find your Hacker News and jump in.

To go further, do not hesitate to read our article: Startup: less reporting, more experiences! Keep in mind: a startup is a living organization... that evolves!