Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 48Don’t Wait Until You Are Proud of Your Product

Ajay Kulkarni and and Andy Cheung

Ajay and Andy are cofounders of Sensobi, a company that makes better mobile address books, and completed Techstars in 2009. Sensobi was acquired by GroupMe in 2011 and later in 2011, GroupMe was acquired by Skype.

Startups are like music bands—without fans (or users or customers), you don’t have much. At first, we thought building a business was a linear process: build the product, charge for it, and people will pay you. If you’re launching a business in a known industry with a known product, like a coffee shop, you can follow that model. But tech entrepreneurs don’t live in that world. Instead, we live to innovate and to build a new product that transforms an existing industry or creates a whole new industry.

If you are innovating, you actually don’t know what your product needs to be. Neither do your customers. No one does. But what you do know is that there is a problem that the right product will solve. It’s through rapid iteration—trial and error—that you can begin to figure this out. You’re basically running experiments. For these particular experiments you need test subjects. You need users, especially the kind of users who want to experiment alongside you because they believe in your vision and the potential of your product.

When we started at Techstars, we had a working demo of our product, but no users. We thought we had a good idea of who our target user was. Our goal with ...