One of the most valuable skills to have as an entrepreneur is the ability to strip an idea down to its core essence so that you can validate it quickly and cheaply before creating the full product.

This is the story of my most recent launch (GUIToolkits.com), how I tested the market demand for the idea before creating the product, and how I stripped out part of it, made it profitable and used it to bootstrap the rest of the product.

Phase 1: The Idea

In 2010, I launched Keynotopia in 3 hours with $47.50 budget, and had the first paying customers in the first 10 minutes (you can read the full story here). A few months later, I was receiving emails asking if I had similar UI templates for other tools like Visio, OmniGraffle, Illustrator and Fireworks. After doing some research, I found some templates scattered around the web, but they were either incomplete, low quality, or not frequently updated.

In other words, I found no one-stop-shop for someone creating a web or mobile app to buy and download ready-made wireframe and high fidelity UI components for their favorite tool.

So I got excited about the idea of building that marketplace.

But before jumping in, I needed to validate two assumptions:

1) There was enough market demand beyond the requests I was receiving by email, and

2) That people were actually willing to pay for the product if it existed.

At the time, I was working on a couple of projects projects while updating Keynotopia templates, which was consuming most of my time, and I was concerned about another project on my plate.

So I decided to run a fun little experiment.

Phase 2: The Minimum Viable Product

First, I needed to build a proof of concept that would validate my previous assumptions.

I am not a fan of building “Coming Soon” pages, since they don’t provide insights into potential demand or purchase behavior. So I pretended that the product already existed, and built a site where I could measure how many people would go through the entire purchase funnel to buy that product.

I got a WordPress theme from ThemeForest and created an eCommerce site that included various product SKUs (UI templates) for different tools, along with screenshots that I generated with Keynote. I also added “Buy Now” buttons, and hooked up analytics everywhere on the site to measure clicks and conversion.

Whenever visitors clicked the “Buy Now” button, they would be taken to a page where I informed them that the product is still under development, and asked them to leave their email to get notified when I am done with it.

Over 70% of people who left their email addresses ended up buying the product when I launched it later on.

The whole process of creating the website, including the logos, buttons, etc… took less than a day. I used Keynote as my design tool to create new graphics, and to tweak and customize the graphics of the WordPress theme that I bought.

Next, I ran some ads (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn) for a couple of months and drove traffic to the site. I regularly worked on optimizing the design and copy of each page to make sure they converted well, while optimizing for search engine keywords to generate and measure organic traffic.

I ran dozens of A/B tests on several pages until I found the best combination of graphics/copy for each one.

It took a couple of hours each week (mostly on weekends) to measure and tweak, and things were starting to look promising: I was seeing over 4% conversion on some templates, which wasn’t bad for an eCommerce site without an existing brand.

Phase 3: The Minimum Profitable Product

Even though results from the MVP testing phase were promising, I was still concerned about investing time and money to design all the templates for 5 different tools (I’d estimated it would take 6 months to create them all)

Looking at the analytics, I noticed that there was more demand for Axure UI templates than other tools, so I decided to create and launch the Axure UI templates as a standalone product. That way, I would minimize the upfront investment, and I’d know for sure if the numbers I had measured would translate to real sales.

Since I wasn’t experienced enough with Axure, I had to find someone to help out. After testing several designers on oDesk, I found a designer who helped me design the Axure UI templates.

It took 8 weeks to finish them, and in April of last year, Axutopia was launched.

It quickly became a hit with the Axure/UX community and was featured on Axure.com as one of the top UI libraries. Axutopia recouped its costs (WordPress template, hosting, and design contractor) during the first month, which encouraged me to put similar effort and time to take the dive and create the interface toolkits for other tools, like Visio, Illustrator, Fireworks and OmniGraffle.

Phase 4: The Final Product

During the following 6 months, I worked with a full time designer to create the largest collection of user interface elements and icons for those tools. It took over 1,000 hours to finish them (when it comes to the final product, I am a quality freak). I also designed the full website (in Keynote), and outsourced its development.

I paid for the design and development of the full product using the revenue that was being generated from Axutopia.

GUIToolkits launched last February, and it started generating organic sales before I even told anyone about it (thanks to the SEO work I’ve done on the test site).

Lessons Learned

Don’t just measure potential interest; measure actual demand

Instead of creating a coming soon page with a text field for people to enter their emails, create your site as if the product already existed. Create screenshots and demo videos, add a pricing page, include some buy-now buttons, and measure how many people will click all the way through your purchase funnel.

It’s one thing to ask someone if they would be interested in your product, and it’s another to ask them to take out their wallets and pay for it.

You can bootstrap your idea using a subset of that idea

Big ideas can be overwhelming. They are exciting to tell friends and investors about, but they often require more time and money to launch. After validating your idea and testing market demand, find out if there is part of it that can be created and launched independently. This would enable you to acquire early customers to validate your idea further, and to generate revenue to bootstrap the remainder of the product.

People pay for high quality products, even when there are free alternatives

One of my early concerns about creating GUIToolkits was the existence of free lower quality alternatives. What I found out is that people will pay for high quality products, especially when you’re committed to improving and updating them regularly. If your product targets a professional audience, saves them time or helps them make more money, and you can outline these benefits to that audience, they will pay for it.

Keynote is a great web design tool

I use Keynote to prototype and test apps, but I’d never used it to design an entire site before. It took less than 5 hours to design the whole GUIToolkits site in Keynote, including graphics, logos, typography, etc… It helped that I had chosen a flat UI design for the site, and I was able to translate the elements into CSS/HTML very quickly.

I should write a separate post about my Keynote web design process. In the meantime, there are lots of tutorials here.

Every one fails at some point or another. However, very few can survive so many failures, and fewer would take one hit after another, and turn them into a lifetime of accomplishments.

The following is the true story of a man who did exactly so…

On a cold autumn evening, a middle-aged man stood alone by the shore of Lake Michigan. The plan was simple: to walk into the cold water and swim until he gets tired and drowns.

Before him was a life full of failures and shame: he was expelled from college, the business he started had gone bankrupt, he’d lost all the money he’d borrowed from friends and family, he was unemployed, and his two year old daughter Alexandria had just died from Polio.

Removing the burden of his own life sounded like the best option; that way, his family doesn’t have to deal with him coming home drunk every night, and his life insurance policy would provide for them for years to come.

As he was getting ready to commit to his suicide plan, he was seized by a strong voice that caused time to stand still while speaking directly and clearly at him:

“You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantages for others”

Despite being a pragmatic engineer and a rational thinker, he didn’t question or resist that experience. He didn’t know if the voice was speaking at him or coming from within his own head, but it sounded like a plan worthy of trying.

Little he knew that the simple plan of turning his life around and offering it to the greater benefit of others would transform him into one of the most successful scientists, designers, architects, engineers and authors.

By the time Buckminster Fuller died at 87 (55 years of having this transformative experience by Lake Michigan), he held 28 patents, wrote 28 books, received 47 honorary degrees, and traveled around the world dozens of times teaching and lecturing. His most popular invention, the geodesic dome, has been reproduced over 300,000 times throughout the world, and during his lifetime, he commanded millions of dollars in research and development budgets.

But Fuller’s contribution wasn’t just his inventions, but the philosophies and principles that led to these creations and accomplishments:

“A human being fulfilling her role in the universe is entitled to being sustained and supported in a similar way that nature sustains and supports its own ecosystem. Financial gains should not be factor in selecting an area of work; a person would make money if he concentrated his efforts on activities that made sense and supported the greater good of humanity.”

Fuller’s beliefs were supported by his observations of the perfect design and order that governed nature, and his life was a perfect validation of these philosophies: he never worked for money or attempted to accumulate wealth, he turned all his profits toward doing further research and product development, and he never attempted to market and sell his ideas or tried to impress others with them. Instead, he identified problems that no one was fixing, created artifacts, and waited for the problem to become critical enough to gain massive public awareness then introduced his solutions.

In a time where many products are born out of ideas rather than critical problems, Fuller’s words couldn’t be more true:

“Find something that needs to be done, and that no one else is attending to, and go do it”

The following is one of the most inspiring interviews with the man himself, 50 years after having that experience.

The full interview is available on YouTube (part 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) 

Recommended Readings:

- Buckminster Fuller’s Universe

- Pilot for Spaceship Earth

It all happened too fast…

The raft entered the rapid, heading directly toward the rock wall, and bouncing up and down through the waves. I heard the guide yelling something about leaning in and holding on. The side of the raft hit the rocks and was thrust by the strong current further up the wall. The four people who were sitting across on that raft a minute ago were now almost directly above me, holding on to their dear lives.

Then Ralph fell off the raft and was swept away by the strong current.

But that wasn’t the worst part…

The huge raft behind us was now entering the rapid, with 9 people onboard, and was heading on a direct course toward the rock wall that Ralph was trying to swim away from.

I heard our guide yelling “NO! NO!” and took a final glance at Ralph’s floating body disappearing behind the big blue raft.

I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth. That was NOT how I’d imagined a relaxing white water rafting trip to end…

***

It started out a beautiful Friday morning on the banks of the south fork American river. My girlfriend and I had camped the night before, and woke up on the sound of crashing river waves. One of the perks of running your own business is that you can decide when to take your weekends, and we had decided that Thursday and Friday would be our weekend, and booked a white water rafting trip.

But what I did not expect is that we’d end up on a raft with 60+ year old seniors who’d just made their big escape from of a retirement home in the East Bay to come and have an adventure on the river.

“This is going to be booooooring!” I thought.

Once we got into the water, I realized I was wrong: Apparently, when the remaining years of your life drop to a single digit, you start to take life less seriously, and more adventurously. After all, hitting the ground a couple of years sooner, and hitting it on your own terms, is more exciting than going quietly on a bed in a retirement home.

These guys turned out to be a fun and relaxing crowd. And when the raft was floating peacefully on a quiet segment of the river, I asked them:

“When you look back at your lives so far, is there anything that you regret, or something you wish you would have done differently?”

“I wish I had taken music more seriously,” said Marianne, “I grew up in a family where everyone is a performer or a musician, but I’ve chosen the safe route and took on a career that I didn’t like. Now I wish I’d continued my practice and never fallen into the status quo”

“I wish I had relocated to a foreign country where I’d learn a new language and experienced different ways of living and thinking, instead of locking myself up into the same culture and perspective my entire life,” added Kent.

“I wish I had become a rock star,” Doug said with a smile that carried a hint of melancholy, “As a child, I’d always believed I could become one, but when I grew up, I worried what people might think if I had tried and failed. The closest I can get to that dream right now is to grow a pony tail and sing on Karaoke nights at the retirement home”

In turn, each of them added to list of wishes and regrets, except the gentleman sitting quietly at the end of the raft.

“What about you, Ralph?” asked Lindsey, “What would you have done differently if you were to live your life all over again?”

“Absolutely nothing,” said Ralph with a confident smile.

“Why is that?” I asked “What did you do with your life?”

“I started 8 companies, hired and worked with the best people, and had a blast every single day of my life!” Ralph answered “I’d do it exactly the same if I were to do it all over again”

I smiled and nodded in agreement.

“What about you?,” asked Lindsey who was now more curious to get everyone’s answer.

“I’d have started my business much sooner,” I replied, “I thought I had to wait until I knew what I was doing, but that was a mistake. I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I became much better at figuring things out as I go.”

It was Ralph’s turn to smile and nod in agreement.

***

Less than an hour later, Ralph’s body was being carried through the cold waves toward the rock wall, and a huge blue raft with 9 people onboard was on course to crash his head against it.

Fortunately, the guide steered the raft away from the rocks in the last moment, turning it around so that two people could manage to pull Ralph into the raft.

For the remainder of the trip, I contemplated the regrets of the group on that raft…

I realized that all regrets were things that people DID NOT do, rather than things they DID. They did not follow their dreams out of fear of failure or worry of judgements. And it’s only near the end of the journey that they realized they should have done all those things when they had the chance to, and before it was too late to do so.

And the only person with no regrets was someone who did what he wanted over and over again.

I didn’t ask Ralph if his companies succeeded or failed. It didn’t matter. What mattered is that he started them. And for that reason alone, he had no regrets.

Related Posts:

- What I wish someone had told me 4 years ago

- How I launched a profitable product in 3 hours!

- How to prototype iPad apps in 30 minutes or less

Over the years, I’ve heard mixed opinions about this topic. Some people say keep your job and work on your idea on the side, because you need the income and you never know if your idea is good enough. Others say having a job will prevent you from giving your full attention to your idea, which might be the reason it fails or someone else beats you to it.

And I’ve seen friends who left their jobs pursuing an entrepreneurial dream, only to start looking for another job a few months later, and others who never regretted their decision to quit.

In my case, I quit even before having an idea or a plan. My corporate job was draining my energy, and I knew that quitting was the right thing to do. Not having mortgage or kids definitely made that decision easier, but it took three years and a couple of failed products to start generating revenue from my ideas. In the meantime, I supported myself by consulting for other companies, which gave me the freedom to work when I needed to make money, and to focus on my products full time otherwise.

I am not recommending quitting before having an idea or a plan, but in retrospect, it was the best decision for me.

So when should you keep your full time job?

- If you need a regular income to sustain your current lifestyle, pay your mortgage, put your kids through school, etc…

- If your idea isn’t clear enough, or if it hasn’t been validated or tested with the market.

- If your job is actually giving you the experience you need (business, marketing, design, development,…) to execute on your idea.

- If you have enough time to work on your idea during the evenings and weekends, and you’re seeing good progress and results.

Sometimes having less time to work on your idea may work to your advantage: you’ll be more focused and more productive, and you’ll be wasting less time reading news and attending events. Having less time will force you to use it wisely.

And when should you quit your job to pursue your idea?

- If your job is draining you from the energy you need to work on your idea.

- If you have enough savings, or another source of income, that can support you till you start generating money or secure some funding.

- If you can consult or freelance for other companies to make some money while working on your idea. This is a great option because you’re in control of your own time, and you work only when you need to.

- If you can quickly implement part of your idea that becomes profitable enough to support your work on expanding and improving the product. This is my favorite option because your idea has already been validated, and you no longer need to divide your time between making money and working on the product.

Keynotopia, which was launched in a weekend and became instantly profitable, was literally a bullet point in a large product vision and business plan that I had been working on at the time. I stripped it out and launched it as an individual product, and it’s now helping me bootstrap that larger vision.

At the end, it doesn’t matter whether or not you quit your job. What matters is that you do work on your idea. If you’re passionate enough and you believe in it, you’ll make time either way.

Related posts:

- How I launched a profitable product in 3 hours

- What I wish someone had told me about startups 4 years ago

I recently learned an interesting fact: Most of the fuel in a space shuttle is burnt in the first few minutes of launch, in order to bring the shuttle to enough speed and altitude to escape Earth’s gravity without falling back.

That speed is called escape velocity.

Once the shuttle breaks free, much less fuel is needed to make it to the orbit.

Why is it interesting?

Because starting something feels the same.

A great effort is initially needed to break free from the gravity of our inaction: thinking about the idea, talking about the idea, reading about other people’s ideas, and anything that’s not “working on the idea”.

During that gravity stage, much effort is needed just to get something off the ground. That’s why most people give up on their ideas too early, believing it’s going to always be this hard, and without seeing significant results.

But once we reach escape velocity, less effort is needed to keep pushing up. Our effort is then used to move forward, and to change direction. We have momentum, we’re getting results, and we’re improving them.

And most importantly, we have a new habit: action.

We shouldn’t feel intimidated by the effort it initially takes to launch an idea and get it off the ground, or frustrated from the lack of early results. This is normal.

Our biggest challenge is not failing; it’s starting.

Once we’re moving, and once we’ve reached escape velocity, it gets better.

Or at least, it feels better

I recently had a very interesting conversation with a friend who recently launched an online business, and it surprised me how our fears are never what they seem to be

It went something like this:

B.: I need your help. I launched my product a few months ago, but I am not getting any sales.

Me: Do you have traffic?

B.: Not much, about 100 visitors a month

Me: Then you need to get more traffic. You probably need at least 100x that amount in your market to start seeing any sales.

B.: And how do I get that many people?

Me: It might take a while, but find out people who would love to have your product, or who are buying similar products and tell them about it. Start with people you already know, then ask them to spread the word.

B.: I thought about sending a blast email to my contact list telling them about the site, but I am afraid they’d visit it and never buy anything.

Me: Then at least you know that there is something that needs to be fixed or changed. In that case, you contact them and ask them why they didn’t buy and what you can do better for them to buy next time.

B.: hmmmm….

Short silence…

B.: OMG! I just realized that I am not really afraid that my idea would fail, I am afraid that people would think my idea isn’t good enough. I am not afraid of failure, I am afraid of rejection.

That was one of the fastest entrepreneurial epiphanies I’ve witnessed, and it made me reflect on my own fears as well.

Maybe what we’ve always believed to be a fear of failure is really a fear of rejection, which is a much more instinctive and concrete form of fear. Maybe that is the threshold that is keeping too many people from following their ideas: becoming outsiders, and being judged or ignored by others.

The other option is not to follow our ideas, which makes us automatically accepted among the multitude who never followed theirs, and that’s a very comfortable and safe place to be.

Because failing isn’t fun. And being rejected isn’t that fun either.

So how do I deal with it?

I keep some distance from my ideas and products. I love what I am working on, but I don’t identify myself with it. The fact that it fails or succeeds doesn’t make me a failure or success, it just means that I gotta keep improving it, or try something different.

So. What are you *really* afraid of?

You will also like reading:

• How I launched a profitable product in 3 hours
• What I wish someone had told me 4 years ago
• How to prototype iOS apps in 30 minutes

Do you check your email first thing in the morning? Do you answer your phone when it rings? Do you reply every message and tweet you receive?

If so, you might be sacrificing a lot more than just your time and focus; When you do these things, you are playing your role in the selfless game.

It’s a mutual game that we’ve been playing for decades with our families, friends, teachers, managers, and spouses. And the rules are simple: we are expected to answer other people’s requests, and we are greatly rewarded with praise and approval, and with the comfort that others will also do the same for us. Failure to play by the rules might cause others to feel ignored or unappreciated, which may lead them to treat us the same way in the future.

The problem?

When we play the selfless game, we’re sacrificing the long term impact and value of our important work to the short term of other people’s urgent requests. We’re giving up what we want to do to make other people happy. We’re losing our dreams and winning the virtue of self sacrifice.

That’s why my biggest breakthrough happened when I became a bit selfish: when I stopped responding to other people’s urgent requests and started working on what really mattered to me.

And that made all the difference:  I had a lot more time in the day, I was being interrupted less, and I got more accomplished in less time.

In the beginning, I expected many people to get pissed off. After all, my phone was off most of the time, I had my email auto-responders on for weeks at a time, and I said NO to most proposals and requests that come my way.

Surprisingly, people respected my time a lot more when I set up my rules and managed their expectations. They understood that I wasn’t ignoring them, and that I was just working on something important.

I even took selfishness a step further and started creating things that I’d really enjoy using. I created a prototyping toolkit that I really enjoy using, and thousands are buying it. I stopped writing blog posts to get buzz or traffic, and started writing ones that I’d really enjoy reading, and when I did so, more people were reading my blog than ever before!

The biggest gift we can give others is to be selfish and focus on the things that matter to us. Those who love us will forgive us, those who are equally selfish will respect us, and those who may get upset that we’re not always available to them will someday be proud of us.

- "Mr. Roark, we’re along here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."

- "But I don’t think of you"

- The Fountainhead

The past couple of months have been very interesting. Since launching Keynotopia, I’ve witnessed many serendipitous events that made me believe that the simple act of starting up something without knowing how to finish it ends up attracting those who can help finish it.

This is one of those events:

One of the most frequent requests from Keynotopia customers had been a mobile app to help preview clickable PDF files without accidentally popping up toolbars and breaking the illusion of the prototype (especially during user testing). Obviously, no PDF reader on the iPhone or iPad was ideal for that scenario, and I knew it was time to create a viewer app for Keynotopia.

The problem was that I had no experience with iOS development, and didn’t have the time to learn it and create the apps. I also knew that finding a good iOS developer who wasn’t working on his own app was like finding a needle in a haystack. At that time, I was doing some updates to the templates, and decided I’d revisit the idea after I finish.

Before the updates were done, I received the following email from a customer:

Dear Amir,

Since we last exchanged emails I have created many prototypes using your libraries. Your method has been taken up by many companies after they saw what I can achieve with it in so little time.

The only issue I could see is that there wasn’t any decent PDF reader for the iPhone that did a good job displaying the clickable PDFs I exported from Keynote. They allowed slide-to-slide navigation, had controls that block the view, allow zooming or didn’t even support internal links. Since I wasn’t happy with this situation and being an iPhone developer I could actually do something about it I have created a PDF reader app just for this purpose.

My plan is to release it for the smallest possible price allowed on the App Store and would be happy to share a portion of it with you if you feature the app on your site. If the app has any success, I will have it released for other platforms as well in no time.

Cheers,

Márton

A happy customer (who later became a good friend) saw something that needed to be fixed, fixed it, was offering his solution to other customers, and offering me a share of the profits.

Does it get any better?

Actually it does!

Not only did Márton create and publish the iPhone and iPad apps within a few weeks, he also convinced Adrian, a friend of his, to create the Android version of the app.

In the first month, Keynotopia iOS apps sold over 500 copies at $1.99 and $3.99, just through word of mouth. But most importantly, I’ve received dozens of thank you emails from happy customers who tried the apps and loved them.

Sometimes, putting half the solution out there is an invitation for someone else to come in and help with the other half, and that someone may be one of your customers.

Related Posts:

• How I launched a profitable product in 3 hours
• What I wish someone had told me 4 years ago
• How to prototype like a pro using tools you know

Photo Credit: Pranav Mistry

Being a good hacker is an invaluable skill. But is being a coder the same as being a hacker? Is it possible that coders are at a creative disadvantage to hackers who don’t know how to code?

Here’s a story that helped me see the difference.

I was recently invited to mentor at Startup Weekend. On Friday night, we gathered to eat pizza, pitch ideas, create teams and discuss launch plans. At the end of the day, everyone was feeling great about what they’d be working on for the rest of the weekend.

I arrived Saturday morning to find people hard at work. Some people stayed overnight to jump start their ideas. That’s the startup spirit!

But I was surprised to see so many teams already writing code! It seemed that the rush to get something up and running by Sunday evening made most teams focus on implementing their first ideas, rather than exploring different ideas and hacking the best ones.

Sounds familiar?

One team stood out because they didn’t have any coders. So they spent their time creating prototypes with PowerPoint, going around the room testing them with other teams, getting feedback, and returning to their table to discuss and refine their ideas. They were the loudest, most animated, most outgoing, and they seemed to be having lots of fun. Most importantly, they were progressing much faster than other teams because they weren’t lost in the details of figuring out how to make something work in Rails or PHP.

On Sunday morning, they had an epiphany that made them abandon all their previous prototypes and go back to the drawing board. I saw them creating a new concept in a matter of hours. Because they didn’t write code, they didn’t feel bad about throwing away previous day’s work (that’s what prototypes are for, anyway). And because they were using PowerPoint to "hack" their concepts, they were able to get new idea done quickly.

On Sunday evening, they didn’t present a working application, but they walked the audience through a great presentation with a click-thru prototype of the final concept. Not only did they present the final idea, but also took the audience through all  the previous ideas and iterations that led to it.

The result? They won first place!

They didn’t win because their idea was significantly better or more functional than other teams’ ideas. There were many great ideas that weekend. But when other teams were focusing their limited time on implementation detail,  that team stayed focused on high level aspects of their ideas, and spent more time hacking it and less time coding.

They weren’t coders, but they were hackers. And that ended up working great for them!

Many founders believe they are at a disadvantage to someone who knows how to write code.  They believe they are not hackers because they are not coders. The truth is they might have a creative advantage because they won’t be jumping into code too soon. Instead, they’ll be forced to "hack" their ideas and test them using high level tools and platforms that will keep them at the level of detail. They’ll be focused on solving user problems, rather than solving implementation problems.

Hacking isn’t just about coding skills. it’s a mindset of getting things done while focusing on what matters the most at each stage, without getting lost in the detail too soon.