[VIDEO:] Founders Row with Justin Romano: Advice for Entrepreneurs

[VIDEO:] Founders Row with Justin Romano: Advice for Entrepreneurs

Featured Business Advice: Justin Romano, CEO & Co-Founder of Backspace and also Head of Product Development at Brandless Group

 

Entrepreneur Justin Romano share practical tips for entrepreneurs when marketing as an tech entrepreneur. Check on the video and more tips and resources below.

 

1. Discover a pain point or hole in the market and create a solution.

 

2. Validate your concept with potential customers/users to find out if solution makes their lives easier and how much money they would be willing to pay for it.

 

3. Create Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), or a bare-bones version of your product. Don’t overload your initial product with tons of bells and whistles. Take the ONE thing that your product/service needs to do to solve the pain point in your market, then create your MVP around that (and only that).

 

Pro Tip 1 – Building an app or website gets expensive. I highly recommend building a simple prototype first. Prototypes give users the look and feel of your product before you dish out the money for a native platform. Here are some of the design and prototyping tools I use:

      1. Sketch (14-day free trial) – Design – After your free trial, Sketch is $99. You can sometimes find a 20% off Promo Code on Google. Make sure to look, you’ll save $20.
      2. Principle (14-day free trial) – Prototyping
      3. Proto.io (15-day free trial) – Prototyping

 

Validate your MVP with your customers/users. Get a group of beta testers (your ideal user) and have them use your product and give you feedback. A lot of people skip this step and go straight to launch only to find out later that they should have done more testing in the earlier stages.

Pro Tip 2 – Your mom is always going to think your product is perfect. So don’t ask her for feedback. You’ll almost always get better quality feedback from people you don’t know personally because they’re not afraid to hurt your feelings. If your product is an app, I highly recommend Scout for getting your unbiased feedback from real people.

I spent 2 years and about $70,000 of my own money to build the first version of Backspace. We had to rebuild our ENTIRE app (multiple times) because we didn’t do this step correctly. Our users loved our concept, but our UIUX didn’t make sense. All that money went right down the drain *cue toilet flushing sound byte*. Don’t be like me. I learned an expensive lesson the hard way.

 

4. Launch – Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, said, “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” Your version of “perfect” is most likely different than your customer’s version of perfect. Expect to go through constant iterating and validating as time goes on and your product will continually improve.

 

More about Founders Row:

Founders Row is community for creative entrepreneurs of color whose mission is to provide entrepreneurs a first row seat in entrepreneurial success. Our mission is to share practical solutions and opportunities with founders representing start-ups in the tech and creative Industries through a variety of online and in-person forums.

Subscribe to the Founders Row Community here: http://bit.ly/2h0Vyig

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