

The First $300: A Startup Launch Tale - byoung2
https://medium.com/@morphmail/the-first-300-a-startup-launch-tale-f074d957da4e

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nhoven
Thanks for this! People hardly ever share hard numbers, so it's great to have
a specific data point for a lean startup. I hope you continue to share with
the same transparency as you grow, but even if you can't, it would be
interesting to see a blog post on why that changes.

Side question - I've found that market validation can be an equally
significant cost, whether running surveys, or Adwords, or generating content
to test SEO. Did you do any sort of market/customer exploration before kicking
off development?

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byoung2
Thanks for taking the time to read the post. We plan to write more posts to
share more about the process as we go through it. I was surprised that I
couldn't find any specific numbers for lean startups. I wanted to know if we
were over/under what others are spending to validate an idea. I guess someone
has to be first!

Market validation could be a post (or book) of its own. Before writing any
code, we did surveys to see what people thought about the idea in general and
to gauge the need for a product like ours[1][2]. We got quite a few responses
to the survey, and we were actually surprised at some of the responses. For
example, 53% of people said they wanted our product to support their existing
email address. Then a later question asked them to check off pain points. Then
we asked again, if we could eliminate half of the pain points they checked,
would they ditch their existing email address, and 78% said yes. The biggest
pain points identified were too much email, can't organize email, can't search
email, and email not being secure. If we could solve 2 of those (we actually
solve all 4), we could get 78%. That was encouraging.

1\.
[http://www.reddit.com/r/SampleSize/comments/29hpfk/marketing...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SampleSize/comments/29hpfk/marketing_lets_admit_it_email_sucks_what_do_you/)

2\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8051078](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8051078)

