Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 44. Don't Wait Until You Are Proud of Your Product

Ajay Kulkarni and Andy Cheung

Ajay and Andy are co-founders of Sensobi, a company that makes better mobile address books, and completed TechStars in 2009.

Startups are like music bands—without fans (or users or customers), you don't have much. At first, we thought building a business was a linear process: build the product, charge for it, and people will pay you. If you're launching a business in a known industry with a known product, like a coffee shop, you can follow that model. But tech entrepreneurs don't live in that world: we live to innovate and to build a new product that transforms an existing industry or creates a whole new industry.

If you are innovating, you actually don't know what your product needs to be. Furthermore, your customers don't either. No one does. But what you do know is that there is a problem that the right product will solve. It's through rapid iteration—trial and error—that you can figure this out. You're basically running experiments, and for these particular experiments you need test subjects. You need users, especially the kind who want to experiment alongside you because they believe in your vision.

When we started at TechStars, we had a working demo but no users. We thought we had a good idea of who our target user was. Our goal with our product was to help professionals stay on top of their ...