What I learned launching an AI MicroSaaS start up in a month
Three key learnings to take into the next startup
I am building 12 AI MicroSaaS startups in 12 months!
This is a fascinating and inspirational project to dive into the AI revolution… getting hands-on to build useful, profitable businesses fast. 🚀
It is also a great way to learn my craft at pace, covering ideation, design, research, business modelling, product market fit, go to market and growth.
It’s also just really good fun! 😀
Idea Forge - a platform for startup founders to generate and refine business ideas
In August we launched Ideas Forge: https://ideaforge.me/
This is a platform that allows founders to generate, assess and refine their next big startup idea.
The app allows you to create a business canvas, improve and iterate on this using AI and assess the likelihood of business success.
Three things I learned
1. Focus on a single feature
seems like an obvious approach when launching in a month… but it is easy to go too wide.
on reflection we covered way too much ground with Idea forge v1. This had several features:
Collect ideas in a list
Generate new ideas
Assess and evolve ideas with AI support
Conduct fast research with you network
See emerging trends
Wow! That’s a lot to pack into a month! In reality, several of these features were very basic to demonstrate a concept so we could collect feedback.
For a future iteration we will zone in the one killer feature and go deep on this.
2. Find an acute customer pain point
This is critical for go to market… You need your target market to think, ‘Damn! I need this in my life!’. Otherwise traction will always be an uphill struggle.
The idea we were solving with Ideas Forge V1 was, ‘Generate ideas, validate these and test with your network.’
Firstly, these are all OK ideas, but going back to my first lesson learned, offering 3 features actually weakens your proposition.
secondly, who needs help with generating ideas?! I’ve got ideas in my head already. Almost too many. In my research calls, not a single person said, ‘My big pain point is that I have no ideas.’
one insight did come back from several early stage founders though… they had an idea and had an acute challenge with validation. ‘I love this idea, but will it work? How can I be sure? How can I get insights that help me shape this into a winning business proposition?’ Insights suggest this is a burning issue for founders, and also for other professions that depend on finding product market fit, like VCs and venture builders.
2. The narrower the target market, the better
It is super important to get really specific with the target market.
The target for Idea Forge was too wide. Founders, people with a business idea, Indie Hackers. We also considered venture builders and VCs who also have a critical need to assess startup ideas.
For a next iteration I will get narrower with the target market, tailor the offer specifically to speak to the needs of this group and focus product discovery calls with these users.
3. Product discovery deepens understanding
Face to face interviews provides wider, deeper insights into why a product is valuable. This is critical at this early stage where value validation is unclear.
We got some super useful insights from the launch, including user numbers, repeat visitors, Product Hunt popularity and follow up questions from the users to let us know what they liked and what could be better.
We complimented these with additional insights through face to face interviews. These go deeper, looking at the goals, needs and pains of our target audience, understanding the jobs to be done, finding out where our audience ‘hangs out’ and getting to the ‘why’ of the app from our customer’s perspective.
These deeper, wider insights are key to effective product positioning and go to market strategy.
4. it is amazing what can be built in a few weeks
Amazing what can be built in such a short space of time!
The app is simple, but has a coherent value proposition, it provides useful and meaningful results for our target market and there is a product led pricing approach with a free tier to encourage use.
I’m a firm believer that getting something into the market and iterating is better than perfecting forever. But the app does need to be useable and useful. Impressive that this can be acheived in a month.
Next steps with ideas forge
We got some interesting signals from the Idea Forge launch. Not enough to drive forward with this into a second month, but enough to warrant futher investigation.
This month I will take these learnings forward and iterate to further validate this startup.
I’ll keep you posted of progress here.
About me
That’s strange… I thought this newsletter was about Journey Management!
I still publish on Journey Management… you can Visit my other blog solely focussed on Journey Management here
This blog will focus on my wider interests in B2B SaaS, AI, Product Management as well as Journey Management.