Here's the complete guide to starting up. I tried to cover the product at an early stage, hiring, team building, growth, marketing, founder's role, and management practices. Each slide has further reading resources to learn more on each topic. I briefly touched upon Product Market Fit (PMF), 10 ways to get the first 1000 users, 10 ways to make product viral, and building product in the long run. If you have doubts or need more resources to read on each topic, contact me on Twitter @TheRajatDangi My side projects can be found at https://byxyz.net. To know more about me: https://about.me/rajatdangi.

1. Building a
Successful Startup
This is a collection of learnings on best practices to
build a successful consumer tech startup. I tried to
put it in sequence from “very early stage” to “later /
mature stage”.

2. Before you proceed
This presentation is made solely for pure-play tech or
tech-enabled consumer startups. Some learnings
might apply to B2B startups as well. Each slide has
resources to read further. Building your startup is
about setting the right priorities, grit, and hard work.
These are guidelines that you can choose to ignore.
For any feedback or collaboration on this presentation,
DM me on twitter at @TheRajatDangi

3. What’s covered in
these slides?
#1 Very Early Stage
#2 Early Roles and Team Building
#3 Growth, Marketing, and Advertising
#4 Product Building in The Long Run
#5 Management

4. #1
Very Early Stage
1-3 founding team members, an idea (an insight),
and a dream.

5. Discover and define
the problem (Idea)
#1. Solve your own problem. (Organic Startup Ideas by Paul Graham)
#2. Improve an existing solution by 10X. (Such that once users
switch to your platform, they don’t want to go back to the older solution).
#3. Build in the future. (Ambitious ideas where founders envision a
future and build for it)
#4. Build using/for unaddressed/underserved market gap Or
Inflection point in technology, consumer behaviour, or legal
policies.

6. Find your unique solution,
refine->validate->refine->validate
# Find your potential users (in-person) and pitch them your idea.
# If they say they like it, that’s good.
# In a few days/weeks, take the MVP to them and pitch it again. If they say,
“This is awesome. I would pay for it.” -- that’s an early sign of validation.
# Ideas are useless. Validated Ideas are priceless.
# Build the core of your product first and refine based on user’s feedback.
# Refine for-- Virality: Every new user brings more new users + Retention:
Every user who starts using your product, uses it again.

7. The most important validating
factors for your solution
- Virality / Distribution
- Retention

8. Virality / Distribution +
Retention
= Product Market Fit (PMF)

9. Your startup’s first
milestone = PMF
Doing anything that doesn’t help you move towards PMF
(before hitting the PMF) is waste of resources.
Nothing is important before finding the PMF.

10. Early Phases
Idea → Traction = Finding PMF (Hardest Stage)
Traction → Growth = Optimising PMF
Idea to traction requires to your build the MVP. Once you start
getting traction on your MVP, you focus on the Growth. For growth,
you’ll need to build viral loops, delight users, and hack the UX such
that the product grows itself. This is not the place and time to think
about monetization/revenue. Sustainable and continuous growth,
retention, and achieving network effect are the fundamentals for a
great product. Revenue is a resultant.

11. Measuring PMF
Method #1
Time Interval
[day/week/month/year]
%
of
Users
who
did
[KPI]
Product KPI (Key
Performance
Indicator)
Frequency
(Ideal for KPI)
Uber Ride Twice/Week
Instagram App-Open Daily
Airbnb Booking Yearly
Letterflix Sale (Letter sent) 6 months
Blinkstore
(See Method #2)
-- --
100% in Week 1
10% in Week 12

12. Measuring PMF
Method #2
Time
Key
Metrics
Blinkstore’s Hypothetical Example:
Key Metrics = Store Creation / Sales /
Product Listing / Visitors
Time = X Daily
Expectation Reality
Press Mentions
PMF =
organic/sustainable
growth in key metrics

13. How do you know
you’ve achieved PMF?
- Product growing itself.
- Retention and repeat usage.
You’d know!!

14. #2
Early Roles and
Team Building

15. Two kinds of people
(broadly)
1. Generalists
Generalists are people with T-shaped skills. T-shape skill structure
means that they knows a lot of things on the surface and one
skill/domain in depth. These kind of people are crucial for startups.
They can adapt to changing needs, wear multiple hats, and as a
result the teams stay lean.
2. Experts
Experts have a I-shared skills. They understand one field the best.
They supplement with generalists by performing complex things
with perfection. Startups need experts in key roles that have highest
impact on product.
You need both in a startup. Generalists adapt and do multiple
things as the needs arise. Experts take those things forward
and do them the right way.

16. Role of the founder
Define-Execute-Analyse. Build teams. Keep all the stakeholders
motivated and excited.
- Quickly hacking the product, releasing it, and setting priorities.
- Setting the north star* and goals.
- Repeating the north star and priority.
- Regularly communicating with the team in written.
- Keeping people excited and motivated to work towards the goals.
- Building the team (hiring) and culture.
* North star is the ultimate goal/vision that you want your product/startup to achieve.
** I didn’t put resolving blockages and taking decisions in the list. Eventually, founder(s) must bring in
experts in each domain and delegate it. Setting vision, short/long term goals, communicating, and keeping
teams excited is a lot to do. They should then trust the teams to execute.

17. Building a Culture
1. Early Stage: Culture = How founders behave
2. Culture is not written in stone. It is flexible, it adapts and
improves with time.
3. Later Sage: Culture = How the organization behaves.
4. A culture written on pages is not your startup culture.
Things founders and everyone around them do is the
startup culture.
5. Don’t worry about culture if you don’t have PMF or if your
product is suffering in the market.

18. Team building / Hiring
A Players, high impact initiatives can
only be lead and executed by high
performing individuals. Keep them
invested in the company’s success (ESOP).
Team size, high performing individuals
should get resources that help them
improve organization’s performance.
Generous Salary, people can put up
with tight deadlines, high pressure, bad
management, and overtime if paid the right
amount. Overpaying doesn’t hurt as much
as paying less to the right talent does.
Promise them a better future money wise.
Adam Neuman told all seniors, “I will make
you millionaire”.
Low Ego and High Empathy, people
with these characteristics are easier to deal
with and perform better in a team setting.
Speed of learning, how fast they
learned in the past and are willing to learn is
very important. These people give your
organization agility.
Motivation and excitement, these
feelings are psychological and do not
depend on reality. People happily went to
wars and now they sadly go to office.
Feeling of progress, achievement,
friendship, care, appreciation, and collective
mood around them affect these. Make sure
you build that or fake it.

19. #3
Growth, Marketing,
and Advertising

20. Paid advertising and
traditional marketing
Refrain from spending in paid advertising and
traditional marketing without PMF or revenue
channels.
Try to remove the advertising and marketing from
your vocabulary. Instead, talk in the terms of
awareness/discovery, distribution/virality, and growth.

21. 10 Ways to get your first
1000 users (Distribution)
1. Go where your users are. Tinder founders went to
college campuses. Jugnoo (India) went to offline public
events to promote Jugnoo app. Find your users offline.
2. SEO. Create a website. Use the right keywords. Create
your startups online profiles. And get the first 10-15 easy
backlinks.
3. Online forums. Find relevant Reddit threads, Quora
questions, or online forum. Present your product’s solution
there.
4. Online communities. Find relevant Discord servers,
Slack communities, or Facebook groups. Launch on
ProductHunt. Share your product’s journey in IndieHackers.

22. Distribution...
5. Social Media. Create your social media pages.
Share what your product does, how it does it better,
share small wins, and engage with your audience.
6. Teaser/Trailer. Create a teaser or trailer video and
share it on YouTube + your social media. Engage
with the viewers.
7. Offers/Free-trial. If your product is a paid product,
run offers for early users, create a referral program,
or provide free-trial.

23. Distribution...
8. Provide value. Create E-book, write blogs, or
make videos that are valuable for your audience.
9. Use your own online presence. Share what you
are building on your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook,
About.me, in your email footers, Instagram, and
blogs. Ask people to try it out and share their
feedback with you. Incentivize feedback.
10. Friends, family, and their network. Use personal
messages to reach out to your own connections. If
they are not your ideal users, tell them who is your
ideal user and request an introduction.

24. 10 ways to make your
product viral
1. Utilize social graph of your users. Utilize social
logins, take permission to view contacts, and make it
easy for the user to invite his/her network. Cleverly
use those contacts and enabled them to discover
your product.
2. Referral & Rewards. Incentivise referral. Reward
users to refer the app. The rewards can be in any
form.
3. Make switching easier. Create tools and features
that help new users switch to your product from
their current stack. Ex: Medium made it easy to
switch from Wordpress.

25. Virality...
4. Compensate for cold-start problem. Two-sided
marketplaces face cold-start problem. Stick to one use case
and user segment. Manually (spend if required) onboard
one side of the marketplace and aim for the tipping point.
5. Aim for deep network (not widespread). To get network
effect, you need lots of users on your platform who already
know each other. This creates a sense of virality in the users
and they tend to invite more people to it. Grow into specific
cities, communities, and demography.
6. Meticulously craft the “Aha moment!” Read Hooked
and figure out what’s the reward in your product that users
get, when they get it, and how they feel in that moment. A
great Aha moment is a must for “word of mouth”.

26. Virality...
7. Create reasons for users to share your product.
Nudge them to bring their connections to the app.
Demonstrate value they’ll get if they do so. Give them
shareable content.
8. 10x the ease of use where competitors are lagging.
This could be as simple as easy signup or as complex as
simplifying loan process in a fintech app. Aim for 10X
ease of use in every part of your product. Ex: Groww
made investing simple.
9. Do One thing GREAT! The key use case of your
product that the users care about should be crafted for
greatness. This leads to word-of-mouth virality.
10. Cater to a fundamental human need. Help your
users save time, save money, showoff (increase status),
save from complexity, etc.

27. Three Types Of Startup Growth
Classic Scale-Up Optimizing the team for efficiency
(rapid iteration and fast learning)
Aiming for PMF
Fast Scaling Optimizing for sustainable growth Scaling with certainty.
Predictable growth. In the
absence of massive competitors.
Blitzscaling
(must read)
Optimizing the organization for
speed at all cost
Scaling with uncertainty. Aiming
for market dominance or
creating strong network effect.

28. The Three Key Techniques
of Scaling
1. Business Model Innovation
High gross margins, new models of generating revenue, etc.
2. Strategy Innovation
Figuring out product virality, cracking/hacking growth, etc.
3. Management Innovation
Optimizing the team structure and human resource to achieve big
goals.

29. Four Growth Factors and
Two Growth Limiters
Growth Factors
1. Market Size
2. Network Effect
3. Gross Margins
4. Distribution
Growth Limiters
1. Lack of Product Market Fit
2. Operational Scalability

30. #4
Product Building in
The Long Run

31. Product is everyone’s
responsibility
Founders, developers, designers, growth hackers,
and people in each and every role in the company
are working on The Product. Any role or activity that
doesn’t benefit the product achieve its goals is
eating your scarce resources.

32. Product building is about
prioritizing and organizing
Prioritizing: What gets built when. What gets built first.
How to release quickly. How to iterate quickly. How not to
delay release. Whose feedback to listen to. Which bug/issue
is the most severe. What can we ignore. Which platform to
build for. Whose issue we resolve first. Etc.
Organizing: The problem statements, potential solutions,
written and designed resources, code base, documents,
and product roadmap. Picking the right tech stack and
components to build different parts of the product. Setting
the most efficient process for your stage and team size.
Collecting feedback. Validating hypothesis.

33. Four BBs
Bread & Butter
Your Core business which generates enough money to
stay operational as a business. This part/product of the
company must get required resources and should rely
on strong processes in the long run instead of key
people.
Brilliant Basics
Processes and tech that you need to run your product
but isn’t unique to it. These are the building blocks. The
tech infrastructure, scaling needs, code cleanup,
technical debt, basic user flows (parts where you do not
innovate), etc. The basics must be kept brilliant and
time and again, resources should be allocated to keep
it tidy and running.
Big Bets
When the core product is growing well, generating
revenue, and the team feels confident of it. At that
stage, companies start taking Big Bets. To spin-off new
initiatives, product lines, and customer lines. This is to
leverage the resources, learnings, and the existing
market capitalization. Big Bets needs new/separate
teams, early-stage mentality, quick execution, and a
sprint towards PMF.
Breaking Bad
Breaking Bad is a bigger version of Big Bets. A
successful company can take only one (at max two)
chances of breaking bad in a year or 5. It’s different for
the Big 4 tech companies where they are betting big
and breaking bad at the same time. When you want to
enter into a new market, expand your product line,
changing the definition of your company, and building
beyond the core of your product.
-- Shivangi Srivastava

34. Data, Insight, and
Hypothesis
Write down hypothesis for everything you build and
execute.
After execution and release, match your hypothesis
with the outcome.
Call spade a spade. Be quick, honest, and truthful to
yourself and your team.

35. Data, Insight, and
Hypothesis

36. Prioritization Framework
Focus on Customers
50%
Focus on Competition
10%
Focus on Economics
20%
Focus on Future
20%

37. Quality Ideas Over Busy
Work
Startups operate in scarcity of time, money, and
resources.
- Not enough time to build the products with
perfection.
- Not enough capital to spend on big teams, senior
talent, and advertising.
- Not enough human and tech resources to do
hundreds of things.
Hence, it is better work on quality ideas (do less),
faster.

38. #5
Management

39. Hierarchy of roles at later stage
1. Founder and CEO
CEO manages the executives/co-founders. Leads with 1 to 10 years of vision, builds
key relations in the industry, sets priority/goals, and leads the direction.
2. Co-founders
They overlap with the executive roles. For several years (1-4), first time founders play
all the roles, from 1 to 5 (they have no money or options). But with time and progress,
co-founders should assume roles on which they are the strongest and take new
initiatives. They work on 1 to 5 years vision.
3. Executives
Manage managers. Executives take decisions, resolve blockages, manage funds, do
key hirings, build organizational structure, introduce and improve processes, and
lead new initiatives.
4. Managers
Manage contributors. They work on weekly and monthly timelines and tasks. On
some long-terms goals, they also work on 3 to 6 months of timelines. They resolve
blockages of contributors. Manage teams and keep people happy.
5. Contributors
Work on daily and weekly tasks. They make progress every day and execute the task
at hand.

40. Introducing OKRs (Objectives
and Key Results) + Initiatives
Management by objectives, is a method
for defining and tracking goals, and
prioritizing initiatives.

41. OKRs Framework
Objectives Key Results Initiatives
Where do I need to go? How do I know I’m getting
there?
What will I do to go there?
Non-measurable and
inspiring
Measurable, ambitious, and
not impossible
Good balance of high impact
initiatives with low, mid, and
high complexity.
SMART Objectives: Specific, measurable,
achievable, relevant, and time bound.

42. Implementing OKRs - The
Executional Heartbeat
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
1 Year
Leadership defines organisation
wide OKRs for the year.
Different teams define their own
quarterly OKRs, alignment with
the annual OKRs
Teams take initiatives and
execute. Reviews progress
every two weeks.
Best Practices:
- Set OKRs frequently
- Keep prioritizing for agility
- Don’t have too many OKRs
- Make them transparent
- Align teams
- Update progress regularly
- Appoint OKR ambassador

43. Main Reasons Workers Quit
Their Jobs
For More Money 44%
For a company with a higher purpose / stronger mission 12%
Don’t feel appreciated 12%
Bored / Unchallenged by work 12%
Bad commute / want something closer to home 7%
Corporate culture is not a fit 7%
Unhappy with boss 6%

44. Finances, Legal, and
Administration Work
Outsource, spend minimal time on it,
spend generously for quality work, ask
right questions, and work with those whom
you trust.

45. Thank you
To collaborate or share feedback on this presentation,
DM me on Twitter @TheRajatDangi.
About me | LinkedIn
Email: rajatkumardangi@gmail.com