3 Tips to a Successful Startup Launch (Part 1) | The League Founder, Amanda Bradford

So here's my 3 tips. Sorry, this got formatted a little bit weird on the screen. But basically, make sure you're really validating your idea. I think the more crowded your market is, the more you really need to do that up front. Make sure that you're doing a lot of hustling, is what I call it, before you even launch. That's why it does help if you have 2 people, someone doing the coding and then someone kind of doing the hustling. And then the last is make sure you really kind of embrace If you do pick a niche, really embrace it and make sure you're marketing to it, because that's going to set you apart. And you can always kind of expand those niche— niches? You can always expand them, but it's really hard to kind of go from being everything to everyone to a really targeted use case. So the first part is really, really validate your idea. And here's all the things I did before I even hired my developer. I did a lot of work on making sure that I had basically the entire concept start to finish laid out in my head. Business model, competitive landscape, how I'm going to pitch it to press, how I'm going to pitch it to investors, how I'm going to pitch it to a girl I meet on the street, how I'm going to pitch it to a guy I meet on the street, how I'm going to pitch it to a parent of young successful people. And so really getting that story down. And I spent a lot of time on wireframing. And this is something you don't need to have a technical background to do. And it really shows, I think, your dedication to the product when you can get real— oh, I can read it over here. When you can get really in the weeds with your product prototyping. I'll show you a little bit of what I went through. But I like this because it says number of staff, 1. This was an executive summary I had to fill out for some program that I ended up not getting accepted to. But I think that like what it made me do is sort of lay out all of the things. I mean, this goes on into the problem, the solution, the business model, the margins, the exit opportunities, who's failed, who succeeded. Like you really are doing kind of a full almost research report on your industry and your likelihood of success. And I think it, it really brings to a forefront some of the challenges you're going to face. Like when I was doing this, you know, I found like 7 kind of similar sites to mine that had died, right? And so I tried to research why they had died, what had happened. Was it that they chose the wrong technology, or was it that their market was too small? And so really doing kind of research on the graveyards in your industry, I think, is really helpful. And I talked to a couple entrepreneurs on the phone about why their dating startup failed. There's a ton of failed dating startups. Investors will be the first to tell you. And But I really think it's good for everybody to have this before you're even really even looking for a co-founder, or if you have a co-founder, even before you sit down to start prototyping. Just kind of lay this out. And it doesn't have to be perfect, but it just gives you a roadmap. And the funny thing is I actually, just one more thing, I looked back on it today right before I was putting this presentation together, and it's actually pretty on target. I mean, it was written in February, We didn't launch till November of last year, and it was written in February, and you'd think a ton of things had changed, but really the entire go-to-market strategy, the features, the differentiation, how I think we are gonna make money, what our exit opportunities are, they all haven't changed that drastically, so it is a really good roadmap to use to guide yourself. I also think the better prototypes you can make, the better feedback you're gonna get from your users, and the better your launch is going to be. Ideally, you want to launch with a product that you already know people want. And so this is an example of what I use. I use Balsamiq to really spec out even the messaging, how the user is going to be onboarded, what's going to happen when you click like or dislike, how they're going to proceed through the screens. And I continue to flesh these out into more and more high-resolution prototypes. You can see here. It got a little bit more intricate where you're actually talking about, OK, if they go here, choice A, you go this flow. If you say no, you go this flow. This is an example of where I found— I had put LinkedIn as the first login button. And then I had put Facebook second. And I found through doing user testing that people were really uncomfortable giving you their LinkedIn credentials, no matter how I messaged it. So what we ended up doing was switching Facebook to go first and then LinkedIn to go second. And by the time people already give you their Facebook credentials, they're already kind of locked into the onboarding process. So we actually saw a pretty high conversion to LinkedIn because they had already kind of felt invested. And I think little things like that you might not know without really testing your onboarding as much as you can. And this is, again, you could do this all without a developer. I started to get a little bit more and more I guess, high fidelity. And you can see my first logos before I got a designer involved. But first logo, still figuring out taglines, still figuring out kind of the look and feel. But this is what I ended up using to pass to developers to actually give me a quote. And I eventually found someone who was going to do it as more of a kind of temporary co-founder. But this is the exact kind of spec I gave him and did these little notes. And so as much as you can do that up front, you can get a better— if you don't have a co-founder, you can get a better quote for development. And if you do have a co-founder, there's less ambiguity between what you're expecting each other to do. So I think either way, this is a really good step to take before putting code down. And so again, you can see I got super far in the prototyping. Again, this is all without starting to code. And I think going from here to the design, I passed this off to a designer. They made it look a lot prettier. But kind of the basic— you even see, if you looked at the app now, it's pretty close to this. So we didn't change that much. The designer definitely added polish. But I guess the takeaway is you can do a lot yourself as a non-technical co-founder. The other thing I did was I got it to the App Store very soon. So basically, as soon as possible, we shipped to the App Store, even though a lot of stuff wasn't working and wasn't fully fleshed out, because then I could test onboarding. And onboarding is the most important part of a mobile app. You need to make sure that not only is it bug-free, but it is as fluid and frictionless and fast as possible so that users are not ever thinking, oh wait, maybe I don't want to do this, or get second— especially on dating sites, a lot of people will get cold feet halfway halfway through. So we really spent a lot of time finalizing the onboarding flow, a lot more than other parts in the app, which you'll notice if you're a user. Like, there's definitely a lot more clunky parts once you're inside, and it's clear we just didn't do as much testing on that than we did on the onboarding. And I really worked on the copy and the messaging. That's just as important as the features— how you're positioning, why they need to give you their LinkedIn. We saw a huge change when we started telling people Do you want to see your boss on LinkedIn? Yeah, we didn't think so. Give us your LinkedIn credentials. Then people started doing it. But when we said, hey, give us your LinkedIn credentials so we can auto-populate your profile, everyone was like, fuck you, I don't want to give you my LinkedIn data. So it's a lot about just framing and positioning and like why that is going to be valuable to them. We're going to block them from their boss, from their coworkers. Like that makes much more sense to people, especially people that have cold feet about dating apps in general. You can test the UI/UX design. You can just test overall app experience. So we were probably in the App Store since July. And we didn't launch officially till November. So from that whole month period, I was constantly doing tests with my friends and friends of friends. And I would be— it's very easy once it's in the App Store. You can just tell people to, oh, go to the App Store and download it and let me know what you think of the onboarding flow. And so you can kind of start to collect signups that way, especially if you're doing a marketplace. That's really important.