Adii Pienaar: “How To Build Any Startup With Zero Budget” – MicroConf Europe 2013

The MicroConf Europe 2013 Hub Page with all the information can be found here

Speaker: Adii Pienaar (@adii)

WooThemes Today

• 500,000+ Users
• 110,000 Paying Customers
• Starting something new, I became more risk averse

What I was looking for:

• Something that had as little risk as possible
• Something that I could fund myself

Public Beta

• Want to help Entrepreneurs
• Started with only a landing page
• Acquired 2000+ emails in 8 weeks
• Content marketing on adii.me:
  • 10 posts written
  • 8,344 unique visitors
  • 15,977 page views
• First 4 weeks:
  • 2313 Unique visitors (28% conversion from adii.me)
  • 8080 email signups (35% conversion)

Product Validation

• Problems to convert emails to customers with Lunchbox
• Money in the bank is ultimate validation
• Credit Card numbers are 2nd best validation (almost equal to money)
• Plan A: Risk Mitigation (Validating Public Beta has cost $1,000 to date)
• Sell something you can get, but don’t yet have
• Keep it simple stupid (How little could we build?)
• Capture Credit Card details at “sign up”
• Decide on your threshold ahead of time (For Public Beta it was 30 paying customers / +- $1000 monthly recurring revenue)
• Do customer interviews and find out why they paid you

Launching the Product

• all this leads to incredible validation:
  • 47 minutes to process transactions
  • 68 customers
  • $4,000 revenue
  • $2,000 MRR
• Changed the roadmap

Take-Aways

• Being paid is the ultimate validation (in absence of money, credit card details are great!)
• Doing Customer Development with someone that paid you, 10X’s the validity of the feedback (people who don’t pay you tell you a LOT of stuff)
• Deception sucks. Always.
• Your heart should be in the right place
• Startups are about speed and access

-Christoph