nextBIGidea Startup Framework (NSFW)
Everyone has an opinion and a framework about how to build a startup. Opinions and frameworks are like assholes, everyone has one, this is mine, as acquired from opinionated masters like Steve Blank (UC Berkeley), Paul Graham (YC), Max Mullen (instacart), Jerry Engel (UC Berkeley), Shailendra Singh (Sequoia), Lloyd Nimetz (Stanford & The Spike Lab), Will Bunker (Match.com), Erik Melander (Astellent), Jennifer Aaker (Stanford and UC Berkeley) and above all Nipun Mehta.
For my techie friends, this website is like a Jupyter notebook that you can follow as a playbook for building and operating your business. I have aggregated all the different lessons, resources, articles, books, podcasts and nuggets I learnt over the years as I built QashCow, vChatter, Cervoo and Astellent.
This framework is rooted in the real life battles, and is based on the first principles, no bullshit kind of thinking.
THIS WEBSITE IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AND I WILL RELEASE CHAPTERS, ONE AT A TIME AND BUILD THE FRAMEWORK OVERTIME.
What is a startup?
A startup is a temporary organization used to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. - Steve Blank.
Quick Summary of Steps/Chapters
Identify Opportunities
- How to evaluate startup ideas
- A startup idea is a hypothesis that needs to be tested through a series of tests
- Three aspects of the hypothesis that you need to focus on to evaluate
- The customer problem
- MRP (Minimum Remarkable Product) solution/test
- Your unfair advantage
Explore Prototypes
- How to talk to users
- Questions to ask in a user interview
- What’s the hardest part about the thing you are trying to solve
- Tell me about the last time you encountered this problem
- Why was this hard?
- What, if anything, have you done to try to solve this problem?
- What don’t you love about the solutions you have already tried?
- Three stages of your company evolution when it makes sense to deeply talk to users
- Idea stage
- Prototype stage
- Iterating towards product market fit
- How to plan an MVP
- The goal of a pre-product-market-fit startup
- Iterating vs Pivoting
- Lean MRP vs Heavy MRP (How to build an MRP quickly)
- How to set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and goals
- What are the right KPIs to test
- Five things that users do that you need to measure
- Come to your website, app or your vehicle for acquisition
- Sign up
- Do something valuable for them
- Come back to do that stuff again
- Tell other users about your thing
- Buckets of KPIs to choose
- Revenue (if you make money) or active users (engagement)
- Primary and secondary metrics
- How to set goals?
- How fast should you grow?
- Defining your own goals
- Tracking progress
- Analytics for startups
- Why analytics
- Funnel
- Collecting data, analytics and data flow
- Metrics
- Signups per week
- Retention cohorts
- Which metrics to pick?
- Have I reached product market fit?
- Dashboards
- 9 business models and their respective metrics
- Large Enterprise
- Number of contracts
- Bookings vs Revenue
- SaaS
- Subscription
- Transactional
- Marketplace
- E-commerce
- Advertising
- Hardware
Develop Product
Coming Soon.
Grow Market
Coming Soon.