When I was building my pervious startup I got so burned out that it almost ruined my family. I found a solution: talking with peers about your issues, a bunch of people who can understand what you’re going through and rigorous group accountability for things like rest, schedule, workload and other things that can get you out of that state.
I started Clique so more people can find peer support groups fast. It’s free during beta (and you can reach out to me to keep it free for you if you need it).
We are not publicly launched yet, but we already run the group calls.
Chronic stress can cause a burnout. A real, full blown burnout is terrible, you literally loose interest for the life, everything becomes unimportant, to say the least. I’ve been there.
The thing that helped me the most turned out to be having a regular calls with other founders (my peers). We talked about burnout, asked questions to each other. It was like a group therapy but without a therapist.
I tried having the same calls with people with other backgrounds but it wasn’t really valuable, so I’d suggest you find 3-5 peers and setup a weekly call where your goal will be to slow down, become more mindful and talk about how’s everyone doing, what’s working or not on those calls.
I recently came across a post by NFX general partner Gigi Levy-Weiss: "The New Mindset for Product-Market Fit" (see the link). The main idea is that we first need to find a problem, then create and market a product promise (landing page), and only after finding a valid interest, start building an MVP.
I'm totally okay with this approach:
1. Discover a problem
2. Talk to people by manually posting on Reddit, FB, HN, other relevant communities, making calls on Lunchclub (if you want an invite, tell me), etc. Doing things that don't scale but also that costs only your time and $0.
3. Build an MVP if the problem exists
But Gigi suggests that you:
1. Find a problem.
2. Describe your solution in words and design. (I guess it means to build a landing page)
3. Market (he means launch a real paid marketing campaign on FB and measuring CTR and landing page's CTA) your product promise until you find a promise that a big enough group of people really want.
4. Then build your MVP.
What do you think? Is it okay to find the first 20-100 people by buying ads or this should be done manually and once you understand that problem exists and you know who has it and what messages work - do marketing?
ps. I love everything NFX is doing and posting that's why I want to better understand this approach to finding PMF.
I'm using it for two weeks now, and it seems like they got it right. Great people inside with a willingness to connect plus the thoughtfully built product is the only two things that really lead to success.
Sam,
How do you see the future of the "Sign Up with Email and Password" field across the World Wide Web? Do you think that this method is associated with inconvenience and seems outdated at all?
In short -- By your vision, what is the future of "Sign Up" in the digital world?
I started Clique so more people can find peer support groups fast. It’s free during beta (and you can reach out to me to keep it free for you if you need it).
We are not publicly launched yet, but we already run the group calls.
https://meetclique.com