Only Four Days Left Until Validation Program Starts
+ Applications Closing Soon, Request for Startups, Why Authenticity Matters
Four More Days To Go Until Validation Program Starts
The most common reason we reject applications at Iterative is because they haven’t sufficiently been validated. According to Hsu Ken, validation is the one thing he'd teach current and future founders.
We often see good founders working on bad ideas. Typically, they didn’t validate their idea properly in the beginning, kept working on it and continue to do so because of sunk cost fallacy.
We need those founders working on good ideas instead of being trapped in bad ones.Similarly, we believe that if more people knew how to validate startup ideas, there would be more startups. Starting a startup can be scary but is inversely proportional to how well it’s been validated. Quitting your job to work on a startup with 0 users and 0 revenue is much scarier than a startup with 10,000 users and $10,000 in revenue. Fight the fear with evidence.
Learning to validate is the first step to learning growth. The fundamentals are the same. In both cases, you’re running a discovery process on what your users care about, building something that resonates with them and figuring out the most efficient way to deliver it to them. If you know how to validate, you’re on your way to learning growth.
To help with this, Hsu Ken will be teaching a class on how to validate startups idea. It starts on November 21 - there's no application process and it's free.
Here's how the program looks like across the span of four weeks:
Week 1: Overview of Validation
Why validation is important, what the goal of validation is, why not all types of validation were created equal.
Week 2: Validating with Paid Marketing
How to use paid marketing to validate, why we like it as a validation method and how to get started.
Week 3: Interpreting Your Data
How to extract user insights, how to tell what value propositions resonate with which users and how to iterate on campaigns to generate more user insights.
Week 4: Using Insights to Iterate on Your Product
How to use user insights to iterate on your idea, verify new directions and how to know when to stop working on an idea.
It's open to everyone, and we'd love to have you join us. If you're interested, sign up here.
P/S We ran a livestream event last night, where participants shared their startup idea with Hsu Ken, and he shared how to validate it. If you missed the event, check out the video recording. If you're on the go, here's the podcast version.
Three Weeks Left To Apply if You Want Us To Invest This Year
Normally, we place our application forms at the bottom of the newsletter - but we're bringing it up this time around because our final interview date for 2022 is December 15. To be considered, please apply before December 2.
Iterative invests on a rolling basis. We invest up to $500K, and upon admission, we invest the full amount upfront and work with the founders closely for three months.
Ideas from Iterative
Reflections on 2021 Request for Startups
When Hsu Ken wrote last year's Request for Startups, he focused on these five major themes:
Allow Anyone to Sell Anything
The Financial System is Painfully Outdated
Digitize Everything
Celebrity Culture is Just Getting Started
COVID Accelerated Adoption
Now that a year has passed, he wrote a follow-up to that article - and shares his reflections and how he feels about the ideas/trends now.
One of them, the idea of allowing anyone to sell anything, is something he now feels more bearish. Here's why:
During COVID, many people started side businesses. Either because their existing job was negatively impacted by COVID or they simply had more free time because of lockdowns. Couple that with a sharp increase in online consumer spending (also due to being stuck at home) and it was a golden age for online small business entrepreneurship. I bought pasta sauce, brownies and more by direct messaging people on Instagram. It was fun!
I’d always thought more people should and wanted to start these kinds of businesses, but didn’t, because the inertia was too great. But once they did, they would find out it (1) wasn’t that hard and (2) was a fun way to make extra income.
That doesn’t seem to be the case. Although many of these businesses got started, most of them went away as soon as the world opened up again. My hunch is people (1) went back to their previous jobs and (2) spent their free time doing all the things they couldn’t do during lockdown. Basically, the reasons that drove people to start these businesses, once removed after COVID, were the reasons that caused them to stop. In most cases, there was a reversion to how the world was.
Although I still think eventually anyone will be able to sell anything online, the momentum has slowed and it will take longer than I thought a year ago.
Read the rest of the article here.
Finding Confidence as a Female Leader
Confidence is something everyone struggles with, but more so if you're the only woman in the room and everyone doesn't look or think like you. In this new episode, we invited Yolanda Lee from Uncommon back to the Iterative Podcast to discuss exactly this: how to find confidence as a female leader.
From sharing personal stories on losing (and gaining) confidence, to breaking down the way the workforce was designed specifically for men, it's an episode made for women leaders, by woman leaders.
Watch or listen to the podcast here.
Ideas from Others
Why Authenticity Matters
Amanda Cua is the founder and CEO of BackScoop, a newsletter that makes it easy to stay informed with everything on Southeast Asian business and startups. Recently, she shared this LinkedIn post on why she doesn't want to game the system.
“Recently, I had a conversation with someone who told me to game the system. To create certain types of posts to attract more attention — even if they don't align with what I really want to say or do.
While the person meant well, I want to be clear about one thing:
My posts are real, and they'll stay that way.
I won't climb a mountain just for a post. I won't make up a story. I won't say something I don't mean. I won't release a post (or a product) that I don't believe in or don't think has true value.
As I grow and as BackScoop grows, I want to remain authentic and do things because I believe in them, they align with who I am and because it's what's right — for me and for BackScoop.
It's easy to lose yourself while trying to build something great. I don't want that to happen to me.
It's easy to lose yourself while trying to build something great. I don't want that to happen to me.”
Hsu Ken: Obviously this is morally the way to go but it’s also the best long term strategy for her business. It’s a slippery slope, you compromise a little bit and tell yourself it’s only once. If you’ve done it once, you’re more likely to do it again. Do it enough and your users will notice.
Maybe somewhat counter-intuitively, doing what you think is morally right tends to be the right business decision long term (emphasis on long term) too.
Spotlight on Founders
Staying Laser-Focused on Your Values and Goals Will Pay Off in the Long Run
Alexandra Zhang is the co-founder of Factorem - and is part of our W22 batch. Recently, the company hit its two year anniversary and she wrote a short reflection on her journey as a founder. We wanted to share it out as we think the nuggets of advice shared could be useful for more founders, especially this part:
During our journey, there have been many distractions, leading us to question our business model and consider going a more straightforward route (or customising the product for a particular customer).
It has been tempting, but we stayed with the harder decision because going straightforward didn’t fit with the reasons why we started. We intentionally remind everyone during our monthly townhalls on why we started, our vision, mission and values as a company: making custom manufacturing and hardware more accessible and seamless for anyone. It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day firefighting, but staying laser-focused on your values and goals will pay off in the long run.While focusing on our goals, we may run into Murphy's Law on some days - where everything and anything seem to go 'wrong'. It has been increasingly important (and I often remind my team) to focus on what we can control then. We can’t control when the market crashes, or when our next cheque comes in, but we can stay laser-focused on the pain point we are hearing in the market and meet that need.
Hsu Ken: Maybe the most frequent mistake we see founders make during the batch is doing too many things at once, or like Alexandra says, not being laser focused. In our experience, founders do too many things because they don’t know what's the one thing they should focus on. Everything looks important so they try to do everything.
If that might be you, we recommend thinking: what’s going to kill your company today, next week, next month and the next six months? If there’s something that’s going to kill your company today, drop everything and only work on that. Once you’ve cleared those, work on the things that will kill your company next week, and so on.
Also happy belated birthday, Factorem!