9 out of 10 startups fail.
The right product execution is the essential instrument to leverage your limited wiggle room as a founder.
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Now lets dive in.
Solution
The most essential piece represents the solution that your product tries to bring to an existing problem.
So dont look for incremental enhancement opportunities look for a radical change that sounds too far away for outsiders.
Creating value to customers means that they return to your product, tracked by retention rate and churn rate.
Focus and execute onbuilding the skateboard right before you head down building the whole car.
The more often users return and use your product, the more likely they find continuous value in it.
What would be their alternative solution could your solution be easily replaced?
Furthermore, timing is an essential piece of this formula.
Look around and find new directions that can be leveraged as competitive advantages.
Appeal
Design can disrupt whole industries by taking usability patterns to a new level.
This reaction goes faster than our consciousness so we dont even realize it.
I summarized this in another blog post10 essential rules for good product designthat can help guide you.
Additionally, make a run at build a brand and a community around your product.
Sit down and think what your brand should represent and form a brand identity around it.
Some of the most successful startups built up one of thestrongest tech communitiesthat reflect the need of this initiative.
Communities will help to attract the second wave of customers dont under-evaluate this piece in the formula.
Trust
Trust is essential to win users and to go up market.
It will help to increase your conversion rate and give them the proof they want to see.
The bigger the clients you go after, the more important this pillar will be.
Find customers that can help echo your product and brand.
Reputation is key the subconscious of the customer will come into play again.
Additionally, re-evaluate and focus on the reliability of your product.
A strong infrastructure is essential to serve clients at scale.
Robustness of the core product is fundamental before you move into new feature sets.
Bring in transparency of your system uptime a simple status page will help.
Another avenue to build trust is to have transparent communication and a world class support team.
Accessibility
you oughta solve accessibility to accelerate product market fit.
Look at every possible dimension of your product to find answers for this pillar.
Start with an assessment of your top funnel can potential users access your product without any hurdles?
Analyze how potential users find your product.
Organic traffic reflects accessibility.
Continue your analysis with your landing page: to which audiences in terms of language is it currently available?
How does it look like with your product itself?
Having no language barriers is undervalued but essential for accessibility.
Look at theshare of audiencescombined with the attractiveness of those markets to strategize your next step.
Which integrations do you currently offer to your clients?
To which platform is your product compatible with?
Bring in the concept of accessible design.
The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both direct access (i.e.
unassisted) and indirect access meaning compatibility with a persons assistive technology.
Instagram continued their growth by making their platform accessible on the web to enable further scalability and coverage.
Look at your customer base and understand on which platforms they operate and how they built their own products.
Re-evaluate if and how you could make your core product more accessible without compromising security.
V. Compound loops
Your product wont hit massive scale if there is no native growth loop implemented.
it’s crucial that you design a system where every input generates minimum 1.1x more of an output.
There are two dimensions you should build into your product:Acquisition loopsandRetention loops.
Acquisition loopsare mainly focused on bringing in new users.
Retention loopsare in place when engagement at one moment in time leads to more engagement in another.
Building up a retention loop means creatingstickiness.
Also build a product that has multiple secure acquisition loops.
The most powerful loops are organic or through owned channels for increased defensibility.
Focus early on building compound loops that will help you to accelerate growth and native retention.
Use this framework to re-evaluate your product efforts.
It can help spot weaknesses and opportunities that might be the acceleration for adoption and growth.
Run this framework as an exercise and grade your product for each pillar from one to five.
I guarantee you will notice what to focus on next.
He was a guest-lecturer at Standford CSP and brings in deep experience in growth-driven product design.
Together with his co-founders, Felix was featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 2020 list.
