 So demand was crazy for it. It was crazy time for us So what we did after that was We shut it down So I'll touch upon why we shut it down in a bit later but before that I want to get into The title of the talk and what I mean by design and why it's called designing your startup Does anyone have a definition of design here anyone want to attempt? What does design mean for you? No one Whatever the one so curious about Enough so I you're using the word design As a noun there is it like like a plan for what do you want to do? Okay? So when I use the word So I also looked up the meaning of the word design and there isn't a generally accepted definition of it Everyone has their own definition. It means Different things to different people which is which works out for me because then I can go ahead and define it How I want to and so this is my definition of the word form of design So design is a process of solving problems or achieving goals given a set of constraints Right. Does everyone agree with that? Does anyone disagree? anyone Okay, the two key points here are that you're solving a problem You're fulfilling a need but you're doing that within Given constraints, right? So there are these boundaries. There are these constraints that exist That that's the context of the problem and you're always trying to solve them within that So what that necessarily means is that design is about making trade-offs Right, you have to balance all these constraints that you have you can't have your cake and eat it too So, you know There is a give-and-take and there's a balancing that has to happen. Does that side look interesting? So I Want to pause That discussion of a design for a while and I'll talk about something else that happened last year and that was the next slide I became a dad as well last year, right? That's one of those events that can have like a profound impact on you and how you perceive What you're doing in life and what your goals are and so it did have an impact on me it made me realize that These years that my daughter's growing up The formative years are the most important for me and that's something that I didn't want to miss out, right? So it made me realize in in turn that Time and location independence was very important for me and that became one of the most important goals in my life I wanted to have time and location independence. That means that I want to be able to work From where I want to work and when I want to work, right? Before this I was doing a job So, you know, we would have flexi hours and stuff like that But that means I still need to give in a fixed set of hours. I need to be at a certain place You know because I have to interact with a lot of people have to get stuff done But now suddenly my time was very important to me because I wanted to spend it with my daughter There you go. So that became one of my constraints for the startups I'm sorry that I wanted to create now If you don't remember anything else about this talk This is one thing that I wanted to take away about it, which is that when people talk about startups You know, there's there's a lot of talk about the idea There's a lot of focus on solving the right problems finding the right solutions How do you acquire customers when no one's talking about the startup founder what you want out of this, right? There's there's this myth that Ideas or good ideas are very rare to find Yeah, so everyone takes the first idea that they get and they start working on it You know and they give everything to it the idea becomes the most important thing and they have to make it work at every cost That might be the case if you're looking for big ideas, right? If you're if you want the sort of ideas that will make you millionaires, right? But that's that's not everyone's goals. It certainly wasn't mine. So the the thing that I want to emphasize here is that When you when you think of an idea Think about what that idea is giving you as well, right apart from the money What is it? Is it going to help you achieve your life goals or not? And that's the sort of criteria That's the sort of framework within which you need to think about the ideas that you work on That's that's that's what I was talking about. Just give me a sec. So This is now I can I can tell you why we shut down the first start of that I started, right? It was it was one of those startup ideas that Wanted to be big it had to be big it had to get economies of scale for it to make sense and I Realized that at this point in my life. That's something that I don't want to do I don't want to work on an idea that's going to take up a lot of my time and it's going to have me running around all the time so Which is why I walked away from that idea It's it's it's a very hard decision to make because here's something that's making a lot of money has a lot of potential But I still chose to walk away from it because for me it was a very clear decision, right? I have this constraints that I have and I have to You know work within those constraints and it's very clear to me that this idea is not going to take me where I want to go in life so here are some of The criteria that I came up for the ideas that I'll work with right that makes sense for me Given my context given my needs and given my constraints The first one is passive recurring income. What this means is that I? Want to sort of income? Let me let me backpack. I want to build something that makes money for me without me having to be actively involved in that product all the time right seems like The perfect idea for everyone, but The way to do this Right is first of all the recurring part is very important You need to have money coming in every month, you know, you can't just charge a one-time Charge for the product you can't sell someone the product and the guy disappears and then you don't make any money we need that money to becoming every month month after month and That way you can sustain yourself for much longer and focus on other things while that's making money for you The next criteria was multiple products the idea here is that Statistically I'm more likely to fail When I'm working on an idea then succeed which is why it makes sense Which is why it makes sense for me to work on multiple ideas because and also On small on smaller ideas as well, right? If I take a big idea and I spend too much time working on a on a big Idea that doesn't work out. I would have wasted a lot of time, right? Which this is why I need to scale down and focus on very small things So that there's very small turn around time and I can get immediate feedback and see whether it works or not There's also this aspect of luck luck is a game of probability, right? The more I play the game the more better my odds get so which is why I Would prefer Working on multiple ideas and take that one big idea and bet everything on it and hope that it succeeds The chances of a big idea succeeding could be maybe one in a million, but a chances of a small idea succeeding Could be maybe one in hundred or one in thousand, right? And you can control that by doing your research in terms of the sort of space that you're building the product for The sort of niches that you're building the product for Sure Sure good. That's a good idea. So that's a good question. I meant When you say spreading yourself to thin you mean not focusing enough on each product, right? So that's where This concept of building small products Comes into the picture, right? If you're building a big product It requires a certain critical mass. It requires a lot of investment from you before it can succeed And in that context if you're focusing on multiple products, you might not do justice to any given product But if you're building these small products and you're solving very easy problems And there's lots of easy problems out there to solve I'll come to that in a bit, but in that context you can solve that problem and you can move on, right? It won't take so for example, there's one product that I've that I've built That's taken me about a month to build and it was no work for me after that There is something to be said about taking that product to the next level if you wanted to right? that product competes in a market where there are about Nine competitors, right? All of them are VC funded companies with about, you know, 20 plus employees And they're playing a different late game, right? I'm playing a different game So I'm not looking at achieving those sort of goals with that product for me. It's about you know solving a very specific problem for a subset of those users and Making money of that does that make sense I'll come to that in a bit. Yeah So feel free to ask me any questions. You as you can see I'm sort of winging it So if you ask me questions, it helps you get information out of me as well I think I touched upon this 37 signals talks a lot about this Who knows 37 signals here? Okay, so Solving hard problems is means a lot of time and investment again and that's something that I didn't want So which is why I focus on easy problems and there are easy problems everywhere for people to solve 37 signals DHS has this very famous quote about how he talks about base camp being just a little bit better than email Right, there's there's all these competitors that they have the thing that they need to be far far ahead Of just email, you know, they build all these complicated projects Project management systems, but they don't realize that people just people right now are using email to do this thing They're using email to collaborate to communicate. They just need something. That's a little bit better than that That's enough for a small sort of users which which makes them money This is the other thing right if you focus if You have if you build a bit big product and you're trying to you know Make a mass market product and target a lot of people You're you're setting yourself up for failure if you're going to make everyone happy, right? Which is why no one does that And which is why you end up with a product. That's the least common denominator for everyone Which in turn means that you you're not making everyone happy In fact, you're not making anyone happy with a product like that But instead if you focus on a very small niche of people who have you know within that big segment have a very Small need you saw their problem beautifully for them And that that totally works out right then they love the solution They don't they don't go to these other winners because they don't need the the the other things that the software is doing They just need that one one problem solved for them. So that's about niche markets there's this talk there's this drive that I went to with with a Friend of mine a while back who spoke about having enough money in life I think a lot of us think when we think about enough money We think about how much more do I need to make how much more do I need to save up and you know We were stuck in this mode of thinking about how much more to make and he sort of changed that perception for me by saying that He has enough money now because he reduced the amount of spending that he made What he did is he's he sold of his house in this big city and went in state in a small country In a small country house, and he's very happy doing what he does. He loves what he's doing, but he got his freedom and his independence By reducing his cost by changing his lifestyle not by getting more in life, right? So there's something to be said about About giving up things as opposed to getting more and that's what working by myself is is for me It's about reducing my cost if there's more of us There's more money that we need to make if there's just me I just need you know just a little bit of amount of money to do well basically so This is feedback that Some of my users have given for that product that I mentioned this product This is an interesting story as well, right? Since I'm working alone. There's only so much I can do I'm doing the programming. I'm doing the designing the marketing sales all of that stuff So and like every programmer. I'm lazy. So I need to optimize for my laziness so I looked around for ideas that That where I could get away by doing very little and one way to do that is Is apps these days, right? I found a platform known as Shopify, which is an e-commerce platform They have an app store, which is very cool for people like us because we don't have to spend time acquiring customers Shopify has an incentive to Sell or to tell people the shop owners about The marketplace and people automatically come to the market. So I don't spend time requiring customers And so that's what the product does what it does is it takes their inventory off of Shopify and creates a Facebook store So it enables social commerce and like I said that space has about nine competitors one of them is is a y-combinator company as well from 2011 last year and I'm competing with them when I launched this product there were about six competitors and There's two of them in the top ten right since I've launched I'm in the top ten above all the others that are there and I think the reason I'm there is because I'm solving a Very small problem for which exists for a lot sort of people, you know people don't read this as software developers We like DHS says as well that you know, we try to solve elaborate problems for people but Not realizing that for example in in Shopify a lot of these people Are not techies, right? They're just regular people who want to sell stuff. They don't understand all these features So what it what I did was build a product that basically has no features It has absolutely no features. You just click click click it installs and it's done I did take some default decisions for them and that's it. That's all it does and people love it and It's obvious from those reviews that they love it. So, yeah, that's about solving solve small problems Are there any questions a pertinent thing I've said so far does anyone disagree? Does anyone have anything to say? What is the product you didn't get the product so what the product does is it's basically an app that takes That people were using the Shopify e-commerce platform for to build a e-commerce store It takes their inventory off of Shopify and creates a Facebook store for them So the product is actually a Facebook store for people who already have a regular e-commerce store. Does that make sense? Yeah, right So that's one of my products. That's that's sort of doing. Well, I make a little money Based on what I've described so far, but it should be obvious that none of these ideas like you know a million dollar ideas That's not what I'm looking for The eventual goal is to have about nine or ten products each of them making a small amount of money for me And and you know sustain me for a while. I think sustain is a really bad word For me to have a decent life and not a rich life. Just a decent life. This is other aspect about Recognizing your strengths as well I'm I'm the sort of person who gets bored very quickly with stuff So this plays to my strengths, which is building small products moving on building other products And you know, therefore, it's fun for me as well. So don't forget your strengths play on your strengths as well I don't know about that. My my graph has been going So I don't know what that any other questions investment My investment right now is a line or slice. That's that's a VPS, which is about 19 dollars And I pay them five bucks for backup And that's about it. That's all my costs. I work out of home Do everything by myself so my my There is there is another cost where which I pay get up for a private repo But so everything is inside $30. So everything about $30 is profit for me And that one VPS because these are small products These are not targeted towards millions of users that small VPS can host about, you know, five to ten apps for me So my cost remains fixed while I keep making more and more money. I'm sorry Yeah, that's that's the line or VPS that I'm talking about At some point, I think I'll move to getting my own bare metal machine. But for now, this works out for me Any other questions? Right. So that's something pricing is the most fun part of creating a startup. I Made a lot of mistakes with this product at least So I went with a freemium model Where I have a free version and then people pay me for a little more features You know, so the the mistake that I made was giving away too much in the free version It's so good that people don't need to upgrade to the paid version. Which is really stupid of me But even given that I still make a decent amount of money so right now That ties into this other thing with with the shopping buy platform, right that made it very easy for me They take care of billing for me. I have no billing system Shopify collects money From my users and they give me money once a month. So I it's almost like getting a salary from Shopify It's brilliant. I don't have to worry about any of the hassles of dealing with customers and stuff like that I Intensely didn't put anything in here. So you could come and talk to me and I can tell you and I know They're interested in it, but the startup that I found it is called sim things simple things Yeah, simp th ings.com any other questions So with that app I have over 1500 shops using it and on the world In less than two months, I think in about two or three months I Get support emails. I do support by email and it's mostly the free users who ask for support. I Rarely get support requests from paid users so And then there are users who don't belong So I think free users have a tendency to complain a lot more I don't know why I've seen this over and over again in lots of different contexts The guy who's complaining the most is always the free user who's not giving you too much business And that reminds me of another Value that I have if I Believe in firing customers as well. If there's someone who is giving me too much trouble is not worth the pain I would ask that person To stop using the product and move on to something else because I I don't want them on the product Yeah How did I launch that's again part of why I chose Shopify They have a place where all their customers are focused on right? They have a blog and they have a forum All I had to do was do a blog post On on no on the platform So the company has a blog and the company has a forum. So I just made post there. That's it. That's all I had to do The answer question Ha So who's familiar with the freemium model, okay, do you know what sort of conversions people get on the freemium model? One who said one person Five percent what else anyone any other? three percent So that's I think That's where the range is in the industry as well, and that's where I am as well Yeah Somewhere in between that somewhere in between Thank you