Podcast #10 - Derrick Reimer - selling Drip and starting StaticKit
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Google, and most other platforms.
Derrick is the co-founder of Drip, which was acquired by LeadPages. He started an app called Level, worked on it for a year, and it ended up failing. We talk about why it failed, his framework for validating products now, and how he is applying that to his next project StaticKit.
We talked a lot about lessons Derrick learned about product validation. Here are are some things that don’t work:
- talking to potential customers (but asking the wrong questions)
- doing a pre-sale to gauge interest (can be a false signal)
- finding a problem that exists (but it’s too much work to switch)
Derrick did all of these with Level, but it still failed. Here is his new product validation framework:
- market must exist
- MVP must be shippable in a few months (trying more things is better)
- the product should not be mission critical, like hosting or checkout
- making a sale shouldn’t take more than one decision maker (ie enterprise)
- a native app shouldn’t be a minimum requirement
- market should overlap his existing audience
This is a great episode, enjoy!
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