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!