David J. Phillips

Being lean really means shipping and progressing in an iterative fashion. Ship, listen, continue building, repeat. This allows you to get an ever improving version in front of your users to find out what’s working/not working and change course as needed.

Use plain English and articulate your solution in a simple way that makes your customer segment nod their head. Try explaining it to several different people in a couple of different ways until something clicks. Many founders will keep their solutions to themselves in fear someone will copy them — this is a bad strategy. No one will copy you. You need to explain your solution many times to many people in order to find something that resonates.

If you want to maximize probability of success, it helps if your customer segment includes you. This will make finding users to talk to much easier. And if you can’t find users to talk to, you are done.

Before PMF, while NPS is great, if you are super early you can measure satisfaction by looking at how often they use your product, if ever. First you need to ask how often is your product designed to be used — Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Did they use it as expected? If no, not satisfied. If yes, probably somewhat satisfied.

It’s always helpful to set measurable and objective KPIs: - revenue - customers - or another metric your mentor is an expert in that will meaningfully impact your startup Set a 3 month goal and keep them in the loop weekly or monthly via email and meet 1x per month to discuss.

The best mentor is someone who is succeeding 18 months ahead of you. • they know what your going through • they made it to the other side • they remember what works