Missives for Developers & Founders

Startup Step 1: Answering “What is it?”

The alarm goes off. It’s 6:45 in the morning and you have a meeting at 8. Time to get out of bed. You jump in the shower. You’re standing there massaging shampoo into your hair barely awake when it hits you. You get this great idea for a virtual currency market. Your friends are always competing to be the mayor of that dive bar down the street. They’ve got mayorships, badges, check-ins, whatever built up in all these various services. You’ll setup a site where they can sell their accounts for cash. It’ll be like those MMORPG marketplaces, but for the check-in crowd. Seems straight forward enough. Now that you’ve got this great new idea what do you do next?

The Next Step

There’s a lot to do. You have to bounce the idea off your friends, find an available domain name, and put up a launching soon site. Next weekend you’ll get started working on the backend.

Wait. You short changed the most important step. You haven’t really answered the question, “What is it?” You think you did in the shower this morning. But there’s more to this answer that’s required. I used to make this mistake. Until you have one simple phrase that answers the who, what, and why of your idea you haven’t really answered the question.

Fully Answering the Who, What, and Why

Every time you talk about your new project “What is it?” will be the first question you’ll have to answer. It’s important you get the answer right. The answer to the question will be the description of your idea and should touch on the why and who in addition to answering the what.

Take a stab at writing the answer as soon as you come up with an idea. Write whatever comes to mind first. You’ll probably find that it isn’t as easy as you thought. Your first attempts at answering the question probably sound awkward upon reading them.

“A site for buying and selling your profiles on location-based services so users can purchase badges, mayorships, etc.”

How about this?

“A marketplace of mayorships to popular venues for location-based junkies”

It’s a start, it answers the three w’s, but could be improved. In the process of evolving the description you’re going to be forced to think about your target audience, the value proposition, and other specifics of the site. You’re not going to get the perfect description on day 1. Allow yourself to keep coming back to it early on in development. But make sure you have a working description before you do anything else.

Practice Makes Perfect

At a recent Startup Weekend event I used this tactic with a team to help them better define their project. Before jumping into feature development we spent 15 minutes on the description. Each team member spoke their description of the project. We quickly realized we all had a slightly different concept of the startup. A single description started to form out of us discussing it. The pieces started to fit together and before long we had a description we all liked. In the process we focused the scope of the concept and got everyone on the same page. The description was written in big letters on the whiteboard. It could then be used throughout the weekend to check if the team was still on target or to reign in a feature debate.

Writing a description for my own startup, Talentopoly.com, was one of the best things I did. For months I didn’t have one. The site lacked focus. I didn’t have a full understanding of who my target audience was and why they’d use my site. Writing the description caused me to re-target the site and it’s a big reason why the site has attracted users.