Tag: MVP

The Funnel Of Doing New Stuff

Whenever someone thinks of starting anything new, say a habit like working out or reading regularly, a side hustle, a passive income project, or even a full-time venture, they should expect to enter the “Funnel of Doing New Stuff”.

This past week, I launched an experiment of extending An Operator’s Blog into a podcast (I call them “jamming sessions”). Through these sessions, my idea is to discuss real operating questions and challenges faced by early-stage founders and folks in the venture ecosystem. Also, invite guests who are deep experts in their area but aren’t very visible.

The first episode is on “Doing 0-to-1 as a cybersecurity startup” where I went into brass tacks with two amazing venture-backed founders and engineering leaders in the domain – Buchi Reddy B (Founder and CEO of Levo.ai; ex-Traceable AI, ex-AppDynamics) and Ruchir Patwa (Co-founder and CEO of SydeLabs; ex-Google, ex-Mobile Premier League).

If there is one thing I learned from my past experience as a founder, it was to ship the MVP and put it in front of users as fast as possible so that the iterations can begin. Therefore, we recorded the episode on Apr 19 and I released a fully edited version to the public on Apr 23. Even before experimenting with this new format, I had resolved to ensure that whenever an episode gets recorded, it gets released within the next few days.

This idea also stems from my frustration wherein I was a guest on podcasts where the episodes were still not public even after a few months of recording. I thought this was just my experience but talking to others in my network, this apparently is quite common.

Given we live in an age where content is being thrown at us with high velocity from every direction, even the most insightful conversations have a relatively limited shelf life. An episode recorded 2 months back is likely to feel stale to listeners today. Then why are these part-time recorders hell-bent on maintaining a huge backlog of recorded material?

I was brainstorming this with my better half and an interesting idea developed during the conversation. Whenever someone thinks of starting anything new, say a habit like working out or reading regularly, a side hustle, a passive income project, or even a full-time venture, they should expect to enter the “Funnel of Doing New Stuff”.

The Funnel Of Doing New Stuff (©️Soumitra Sharma)

This is how the funnel plays out in real life – almost everyone out there is constantly ideating about something new they want to do. Everyone wants to start posting more on LinkedIn, or write more, or hike more, or network more.

However, this is where the first stage of drop-offs happens. Very few people take the first step. The inertia of being busy with daily life kicks in for most people. Other times, it’s the fear of failure that stops folks. Or the potential public embarrassment in case things don’t work out.

Next, for the few brave hearts who take the first step, a new challenge awaits them. This is the challenge of staying consistent with this new thing. This is another stage of massive drop-offs, where people begin but don’t consistently execute and eventually give up.

I see a few psychological aspects at play in this stage of the funnel. People generally struggle with any new habit formation, in part because they are unaware of nudges and brain hacks one can use to make the process easier.

Also, we are dopamine-driven creatures wherein our brain naturally seeks excitement. And this excitement is easily found more in doing new things and getting into new experiences (eg. travel, adventure sports, trying new restaurants, social media, etc.) vs. repeating the same task. Hence, consistent repetition is always a mental and psychological challenge for most people.

Now, even for this next cohort of amazing souls who have both started and also stayed consistent, the game isn’t over yet. For any new initiative to translate into real outcomes (business, financial, or life), it’s crucial to constantly iterate and improve on the initial minimal offering (eg. my podcast MVP).

The initial phase of any new project is almost always internally driven – a hypothesis, belief system, or worldview. But for it to resonate with others – your users, customers, audience, partners, or even your own sensibilities, requires running a continuous feedback loop that includes perpetual learning and refinement until people start loving it. Then, this love is a currency that one can use to drive many types of outcomes.

This loop of continuous iteration and improvement isn’t natural to even the best talent, hence there are again drop-offs at this final stage of the funnel. Staying grounded in reality, listening to feedback, and having the humility to change or let go of stuff are all ingredients needed to succeed at this stage. Many don’t make the cut here.

This funnel idea also has an interesting implication for how one should view competition. At a macro level, most fields look cluttered and competitive because one tends to focus on the top of the funnel (the ideating mass) as competition. The reality is that the real competition is at the bottom of the funnel – the handful of highly driven people who started, stayed consistent, and also constantly improved with each rep*. That number is usually fairly small in whatever area or field you look at, and in my view, there is always room for more there.

*An analogy that people who grew up in India would understand – for a serious student attempting to crack the prestigious IIT JEE engg. entrance exam, the competition isn’t the 1Mn students who have registered to take the exam but only the ~100k or so who have put in adequate reps to prep for it.

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How to think about building features at the beta stage?

It’s been an interesting journey for me as a product person, building Workomo over last few months. Having anchored the company mission on my personal pain point, the product roadmap for Workomo (at least for next 24 months) is quite clear in my head. Still, it’s not been easy to think through the order & prioritization of building features. This is a completely new “0-to-1” challenge for me as in my previous roles at Alibaba, Quixey and IDG Ventures, I was mostly used to evaluating, building & scaling products with at least some existing user traction.

As I work towards the private beta release of Workomo, the following frameworks have been really helpful for me in product planning:

  1. Running Lean by Ash Maurya — I really identify with the Lean way of building early stage products. While certain elements of the Lean process haven’t worked particularly well in my case (mockup based proto, hacking a solution without UI/ UX considerations), I have actively used the major core principles of Lean philosophy — iterative approach, user-pull over company-push, maniacally tracking return-on-effort, avoiding wastage, only focusing on 1–2 activities that matter at this stage of the startup. Though, it’s important to point out that I have found the need to adapt these approaches to my context by suitably modifying them.
  2. Focusing on the product’s “Atomic Unit” — I learned of this concept via a recent LinkedIn post by Pravin Jadhav. It was originally articulated by Fred Wilson in this 2012 post. What are the atomic units of popular products? Twitter — tweet, LinkedIn — resume, Instagram — picture, Gmail — email, Dropbox — file. It’s a lovely way to think about your product stack. For Workomo, the atomic unit is “a contact”. And that’s what I am building first for the private beta release.

I was on a Zoom call today morning — the moment I ended it, I received this version update pop-up, with following new features:

Zoom is releasing features like confirm starting video when joining a meeting, dropbox integration etc. ONLY AFTER going public!! Just proves that as early stage founders, we need to be much, much more disciplined about building additional features into our products.

Ultimately, there will be one, core UVP feature that will mainly drive user adoption. Our job as product founders is to discover & build it in an iterative manner while burning through minimum set of cycles.

PS: Workomo is your smart & simple professional relationships management hub. If you are sick of managing your networks on an excel sheet, do sign-up for free private beta access.