These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the Airsign team, formed by Miguel Páramo
Lets try to motivate a bit with this one. You can think about this being motivational bullshit, maybe it is. I just want to give a reason to explain why I wrote this:
Every day there are tons of projects gaining users (or clients) at a high rate. In many cases those projects don’t have a solid business model or well determined pain behind them. So, what is the key of their success? Answering this question is actually very complex and the reasons may be different in every situation. But there is something they all have in common: Marketing, simple calculus and inertia. Elementary maths.
Lets see then:
Yeah, you have your very well located pain, you have your strong and solid strategies and all of the resources needed to launch your startup and become one of those lucky self-employed badasses. But have you ever though about the scope of your market? What is it then potentially? 100K? 20M?
Nowadays all of us have big opportunities on the global technological market. Never in history was it easier to create something and deploy it worldwide, operating into a market with not just 1M but 100M to 1B of potential clients/users. If your idea seems to be targetting an environment with lower that 100M of those buddy… seriously, you can consider opening your market wider. If you are aiming very high, in a pessimistic case, you are going to catch just a sadly 0.0005% of your market (5 clients of every 10k). That is when elementary maths steps in and gives us about 50k clients. If you look at the Long Tail model, that means that those initial numbers are expected to increase just by inertia, without even appliying marketing strategies. This is validated knowledge. However, don’t expect to keep those clients easily depending on your product. A snowball/waterfall effect can happen on that cycle. With perseverance, marketing (important) and some luck on your side, you can expect 100k users the first year. Not bad at all.
You shouldn´t try to make effort on closed markets but maybe because altruism. Think globally and let the simple math and the inertia to be on your side. Think that nowadays the amount of users you have is, despite what some investors say, one of the objective measures that is directly proportional to the value of your system. Depending on your project, you should try to attract users first while still maintaining the platform. Maybe one day you can apply several different revenue models that your users wouldn´t have paid for before. These are long term strategies, and are against many of the lessons we have been taught. It´s risky and hard, but remember, this is happening every day.
