Page 61 - The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch - PDFDrive.com

He threw a party!

Everyone who came paid $15 and got a bottle of wine. Some were $15 bottles,
some were $100 bottles. Everyone loved the excitement of checking out what
they got, particularly the ones with $100 bottles! People passed them around and
chatted about the wines.

The actual business would have needed a custom website platform, a
randomization technology, payment gateways, and much more. Jeff needed to
know whether or not people would go for this concept. He was able to test it
without any technology.

Undergroundcellar.com10 was born and is now a profitable and established
business.

Bare Metrics

The Baremetrics.io11 story is one I love because Josh started something that was
very similar to Informly, but he didn’t make the same mistakes.

Josh Pigford was a user of the popular payment gateway Stripe and was
desperate to get some decent analytics from his account. He had the idea in
October 2013 and he built the first version in eight days.

He focused only on what he needed to make it worth paying for. He didn’t
overthink the details on the design or the development. His sole focus was to
“get this to a point where I can prove people want it,” and the only “proof” that
is valid is money. As soon as it was remotely valuable, he shipped it.

He didn’t ship a free version for people to play with. He shipped a working
version and charged for it. After a month he was making $1,000 in MRR. Over
the next few months, he continued to learn from paying customers, focusing on
what they wanted (and ignoring the rest). After nine months he was earning
$18,800 MRR.