Launching a Product - How do you automate your communication with customers?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and today I want to talk about how you can start planning for a new startup idea. So having an idea is great, but if you're wanting to start a a new business and actually build it up rather than trying to just, you know, get the IP and find someone eventually to buy your intellectual property and the idea from you, which is possible, but usually takes quite a bit longer unless you already have a really good relationship with someone who buys that kind of IP that you're generating. If you're wanting to actually start up a company, then you want to start planning how to do so. And this— that's what I want to outline here. There's— I want to go over 5 things, you know, defining your goal for the startup, defining your team. We've already talked about this a little bit, but for a startup, you want to really be aware of who you need to have involved. Third, do market research. Fourth, your budgeting, planning all your financials. And then fifth, and this is most important, it's really key, is that will allow you to be able to turn and pivot and is the hardest one for everyone to follow. But we'll get to that one at the end. First, define your goal for the startup. So what is the goal of your Your startup? Is it to become a large company? Is it to solve problems in a really specific area, develop only specific products? You know, that goal can be many different things, but you want to really define what's the goal for the startup, not just the product. The product will have its own kind of set of goals and what you want to accomplish with it. But you want to make sure that you are creating goals for your startup. Second, define your team. So we talked about this in other videos. Defining your team is very important, understanding who needs to be involved. And with a startup, you really want to be aware of what are all the business people that need to be involved. You know, do you need a lawyer? Do you need an accountant? Those are usually things that are highly recommended to have. But being aware of, you know, is this an idea that you share with someone? Should— are they going to need to be involved? What does that look like for you and your startup? Third, start doing market research. Now, I tell everyone, when you start developing a product, you need to do market research. You need to do a study of the impact. What— how is your product going to impact things? on every level, you know, social, economic, environmental. What is— what are those impacts? And you also want to be doing this market research early. But when you're doing a startup, you want to step back a little bit and do a little bit broader market research, not in terms of like actually broadening your market necessarily, but it might mean that, but deciding what is your company overall going to be looking at? So yeah, your first product might be super specific to a single niche. And while you are doing that, you might, in your goals, have said for your startup that you want to touch on 3 or 4 different areas. And so you want to start doing the market research for all of those areas that you want the company to be involved, you want the startup to be involved, because that will lend itself as you begin creating a product roadmap for a product line, for multiple products. And it's also going to be something that if you go through a branding process, they're going to ask you, or a good branding agency or designer will ask you, where are you wanting to market this brand for? What is this whole company marketing for? And when you have— it's totally fine to have multiple areas, But you just need to be aware if you don't want to hyper-niche your company down and you do want to have a little bit broader reach as a company, as your startup, and that's in the cards, is what you want to have happen over the next few years, being aware of that early on is really important because it can help with all the other things that will happen in product development, road mapping and figuring out your product line. And also identifying, you know, who is really your competition. And part of that is if you really niche down and you only are going for one, then your competition are only companies involved in just that. So you might have a list of, you know, maybe say 5. But if you're going after 3 different niches, then you're gonna find people that are only in one of those. And now you have a potential, maybe it's 12 companies that you're potentially going to be competing against, or you find that you're, you're not there. You know, there's nobody else that really works in those areas. And it's also going to be positioning for yourself in that, oh, well, we don't just do this one area. We actually can help in these 3 areas and figuring out unique— that can be part of your unique proposition. And what makes your company unique is that you do those 3 areas and you bring them all together and solve problems that are shared by those 3 areas. So that kind of market research is going to be really important and it doesn't always impact the actual product. And so that's why I'm— I bring this up as something very important on the startup level, the business level of business-level market research. So for Is establish your budget. Establishing your budget is really important. You may have very little budget, but it doesn't really matter how much your budget is. The whole process is understanding what is your budget and how, how are you going to use that budget, whether it's going to increase over time if you set yourself goals of Well, when we get to this point, then I'll, you know, pull money out of savings, or I'll go raise capital. So understanding what those phases are, what are those points, so that you can start planning. So you know that, oh, if we get to this point, we know we're going to hit these goals and we're going to need more money, so we'll need to then start raising capital around this time. So establishing that budget is really important. For you as the company, and it gives you, you know, really clear delineation to know whether you're in budget or not, whether your project is going the way it should be, or if you've hit unexpected bumps and you now can see, okay, well, now I have to rearrange my budget. So establishing that is really important, and making sure that you have a portion set aside for your product that you're launching. And having a portion set aside for the rest of your business expenses, legal, all the things, you know, that go into starting up an actual company. You want to make sure that you have that delineation so that you don't use up all your budget on business stuff and only leave a little bit for the product when it needs more. So budgeting that all out is really important. So the 5th thing that I want to talk about is Decide what your line in the sand is for killing your startup. Now, it might seem a little violent, but the reality is most of the time when there's a failure in a startup, it failed a while before they actually stopped it. So before you get in too far into the project, before you even start, know what is the point and really define it. And don't let yourself slip on this. What is the point where you will— you've determined that it is not going to be successful or it's going to cost too much and you can't do it? And, you know, that line is going to be different for everyone. You're going to have, you know, a different threshold for how many hours you work a week, how many— how much money you spend, how big of a team you need to have involved. How much capital you need to raise, determining what are those— I don't want to go past this— and creating that will give you a bit of a safer space. And it also will help protect you from being one of those startups that ends up burning more and more and more money trying to solve a bunch of things that they didn't really want to. It's outside of what they initially were willing to do. But, you know, when you get to that point and you feel you're so invested, you just keep investing more and more and more and more, even on a bad idea, and not being willing to shift it. That is something you want to avoid. And the only way to do that is creating that line in the sand and saying, okay, well, if we get to this point and we don't have a product, Or we've worked on this for a year and we don't have enough customers to be making X dollar amount. You know, those— you can create that line in the sand. And yeah, you can always change it if you're like, well, yeah, this was the line, but we're 95% of the way there. I think with a little bit more, like with 2 more months, we can get there. Or, you know, with a little bit more money, we can get there. And then set that line again. And the trick, of course, is to not just keep pushing the line back and back until you drain all your money, spend all your time, and are exhausted and burned out to the point where you don't want to start something new. Because what you want to do is stop the project at a stopping place before you get too deep, because that will allow you to take whatever successes you've had from your startup and go start another startup if you want to, using what you can. without having all of the burnout attached to it, whether it's personal burnout, financial burnout. You know, there's lots of ways to burn out. And I've seen or been a part of companies that have burned out in most ways possible. So you want to make sure that you create this line in the sand for absolutely stopping the startup. And yeah, maybe you pivot, maybe you kill a product, Keep the company, start on a new product. Those are all fine, but determine what that is and what that looks like before you start. It will save you a lot of time and a lot of headache and make it so that you can move on to the next idea quicker if you need to. So those are the steps that I, I always mention to people when they're trying to start up a new idea and they want to create an actual startup. Create a business around it, create a brand in order to launch a product. These are all things to keep in mind and make sure that you are aware of and create in order to have as smooth a startup as possible and avoid burning yourself out way past when you should have stopped. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed and like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well. So check us out there. All right. Thank you.