There's three critical phases to an early stage company. Talking to users is useful at pretty much all stages of your company. Some of the best companies are are orr our products or services that are built for the founders themselves. At the idea stage, before you've even begun developing any, am any of your product,. You need to begin finding the first people that will be interested in either providing information about the problem they've encountered, or potentially signing up to be your first users.
We've cut down the first week of Startup School lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.
First, a lecture from Kevin Hale. Kevin is a YC partner and a cofounder of Wufoo. His lecture is about How to Evaluate Startup Ideas.
Then, a lecture from Eric Migicovsky. Eric is a YC partner and the founder of Pebble. His lecture is about How to Talk to Users.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
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Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:43 - Kevin Hale on How to Evaluate Startup Ideas
2:04 - How can I predict if an investor will like my idea?
2:50 - A startup idea is a hypothesis
5:44 - Problem
6:59 - Solution
8:16 - Insight
8:57 - Unfair advantages
13:45 - Two beliefs about startups
15:19 - Eric Migicovsky on How to Talk to Users
17:36 - Three common errors people make when talking to users
20:20 - Five questions to ask in a user interview
20:28 - What's the hardest part about doing the thing you're trying to solve?
21:02 - Tell me about the last time that you encountered this problem
21:22 - Why was this hard?
23:08 - What, if anything, have you done to try to solve this problem?
24:10 - What don't you love about the solutions you've already tried?
25:21 - Three stages in which talking to users is extremely beneficial
26:07 - Idea stage
30:40 - Prototype stage
33:41 - Iterating towards product market fit