Table of Contents
Strategies for Startup Growth and Success
- 💡 The key to building successful startups without funding is to focus on solving real problems that you personally experience in your daily life.
- 🌍 Find new subcultures and fringe subcultures to explore, as they can provide a competitive advantage and potentially lead to unique business or app ideas.
- 💻 Learning how to learn and figuring things out for yourself is the most important skill in coding and entrepreneurship.
- 🚀 Launching a startup is the most important step as it validates if the product is useful and can be monetized.
- 💡 Just because an app already exists in the market doesn’t mean you can’t create a better one and gain more traffic, so being a little bit arrogant and believing in your ability to improve upon existing solutions can be beneficial.
- 💰 Venture capital-based startups often rely on fake growth and paid traffic, which can be unsustainable and lead to a decline once the funding stops, highlighting the importance of building something useful and attracting organic growth.
- 💡 Building with users and incorporating their feedback is crucial for creating a positive user experience and turning them into ambassadors for your product.
- 💰 Monetizing is crucial for startups to survive and validate their product, as running a business requires generating revenue to pay bills and avoid an existential crisis.
- 💰 Recurring revenue is crucial for the growth of a startup, as subscriptions can lead to exponential growth and generate significant income over time.
- 🤖 Automating tasks with robots can make businesses more efficient and scalable, eliminating the need for hiring and managing human employees.
Building a Startup Without Funding
- 💰 Building a startup without funding is possible thanks to the affordability of technology, allowing individuals to use their own skills and resources.
- 🌍 By crowdsourcing data and creating a website, Pieter was able to turn his spreadsheet of cities into the profitable and popular platform, Nomad List.
- 💡 Do it yourself. Don’t work with other people. You don’t need a technical co-founder if you’re a business person. Just learn the codes. Just do it yourself and learn to design or whatever. Do the basics yourself, because it will save you so much time.
Launch quickly, learn to code or use tools, be friendly & honest when engaging, and focus on organic growth, engagement, and monetization to create a successful business ecosystem.
- 💡 I built 12 projects in 12 months and accidentally cracked a marketing thing, which led to the creation of Nomad List, a website that makes $15,000 to $25,000 a month without VCs, proving you don’t need many customers to make one million dollars.
- I sold all my stuff and traveled with a laptop, but when my YouTube income started to decline, I got depressed and had to figure out a way to make money.
- I built 12 projects in 12 months, the first one was an app to send music over E-mail, the second was an animated .gif book, and the third was Go Fucking Do It, which made me $500 a month.
- I accidentally cracked a marketing thing with 12 Startups in 12 Months, which led to the creation of Nomad List, a website with 1,250 cities and 250,000 data points that makes $15,000 to $25,000 a month.
- I focus on solving problems in my daily life to create projects, which I then launch, grow, and monetize without VCs.
- Start small and focus on a niche to gain a competitive advantage and make money.
- You don’t need many customers to make one million dollars, just a small niche.
- 🚀 Launch quickly, learn to code or use tools, be friendly & honest when engaging, and make sure your website is static & load tested.
- Write down ideas and track them, learn the basics yourself, and avoid groupthink when building a startup.
- Sharing your idea is good as it allows you to talk to potential customers and get feedback before building something, and execution is what makes it original and unique.
- You can learn to code yourself, or use tools like Typeform and Carrd to build a website without coding.
- Launch quickly and make sure your product looks good on Product Hunt to get the most out of it.
- Be friendly, honest, and personal when engaging with people on Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Reddit to get your product noticed.
- Make sure your website is static and load test it before launch to ensure it can handle the influx of hundreds of thousands of users.
- 🤝 Launch your app and focus on organic growth, engagement, and monetization for the best results.
- Submit your app to relevant websites like Horse Forum, Bodybuilding, and Motorcycles to get the highest conversion rate.
- Check analytics after launching and focus on organic growth instead of using shady tactics.
- Organic growth is better than paid traffic because it shows that people actually like your product, while paid traffic stops working when the money stops.
- Engage users by building with them, using feedback boxes, feature requests, and re-engaging them with newsletters and special offers.
- Launch your startup and features in public to gain attention and press.
- Focus on monetizing your product within two months of launch to ensure it is validated as a successful business.
- 🤑 Ideate, build, launch, grow, monetize, automate, and exit to create a successful business ecosystem.
- Validate features before building them by putting up a pay button to see if people are willing to pay for it.
- Business models such as Freemium, sponsorships, and Patreon can help you make money from your website or product.
- Subscriptions provide exponential growth and more revenue than single payments, but can be annoying for users.
- Robots can automate businesses, but it’s important to have a human on standby to manage them and check for server crashes.
- It is important to consider the growth rate of a business when selling, as it can affect the selling price and the psychological impact of the sale.
- Ideate, build, launch, grow, monetize, automate, and exit to create a successful business ecosystem.
- 💡 Trust your intuition, be nice, and charge for access to features to prevent spammers from taking over.
- I chose to focus on Nomad List instead of completing the 12 startups, which allowed it to become successful.
- You can have one company as a holding company and do everything in-house, or spin off parts of it legally for fiscal benefits.
- I manage all website features alone, which is a lot of work but also not a lot of work, often resulting in late nights at Dojo.
- After four years of intense work, the idea for 2018 is to keep things running and relax a little more.
- Trust your intuition, be nice, and don’t rely too heavily on the internet for advice.
- Ignore haters and charge for access to features to prevent spammers from taking over.
- 🤔 Start learning a new language by Googling and talking to rural developers, and don’t be discouraged if your creations don’t turn out perfect – just keep creating!
- Google and figure out the language you want to learn, as the main skill is to figure it out for yourself.
- Google any coding questions you have and look for rural developers to learn from their experiences.
- People responded positively to the fake Stripe checkout and paid for the real feature after being informed of the test.
- It’s normal to feel like your creations are crap, but keep making new stuff like artists do.
- 🤖 Learn to code and track press mentions and user engagement to determine when to work on a website.
- Track press mentions and look for daily user engagement to determine when to stop working on a website.
- Dark Mode List is a website that shows which apps have dark modes, and it has been getting press mentions, so it is worth continuing to work on it for a few more weeks, but not months.
- I could have charged more for premium features, but I don’t want to annoy people and I don’t care about the community website.
- Validate your product idea by creating a community to get feedback if there isn’t a Product Hunt for it.
- Go to your customers, think about your problem from first principles, and look for ways to solve it better than existing solutions.
- Robots are taking over and it’s important to learn to code to stay employed.
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- Thank you for attending and please rate Dojo with 5 stars.