🎯 Sign up for August workshops: https://lu.ma/nascent

Startups WITH customers face wildly different problems from startups WITHOUT CUSTOMERS. However, most startup strategies don't address this distinction -- and those strategies are for startups with customers. If you're a founder of a startup with few or no customers, here's why conventional startup strategies (e.g., product market fit, minimum viable product, business model canvas, etc.) are a distraction right now.

Shout out to Paul Orlando at USC for all the support 🙌 https://www.marshall.usc.edu/personnel/paul-orlando

I attended SubSummit in June 2024 in Dallas, Texas to record an episode of the Nascent Startups podcast. Amazingly, Robbie Kellman Baxter filled in at the last moment when my originally scheduled interviewee was unexpectedly absent. Thanks so much and kudos to Robbie for sharing her insights on no notice!

Links we referenced in the show:

* https://robbiekellmanbaxter.com/

* https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbiekellmanbaxter/

* https://subsummit.com/

* https://www.strava.com/

* https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/

* https://pmfsurvey.com/

* https://boldcommerce.com/

* https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-pienta-15a8298/

* https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulcchambers/

Shout out to Pilot44 and Jon Corshen

In the summer of 2019, Adara Blake (https://www.adaranicole.com/) founded a startup, Believe in Breast Milk. Adara is a speech therapist and lactation consultant who wanted to solve the problem that 60% of mothers do not breastfeed for as long as they intend to. Typically, Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) is used for pain relief in muscles; Adara’s innovation was to use TENS to stimulate breast tissue and drive milk production. Adara’s vision was to create an internet-of-things (IoT) TENS device so that Believe in Breast Milk could track user data and yield better results, similar to how Omada Health uses an IoT scale to track weight data.

There was initial data showing this could work! Adara’s friend Susie used Adara’s TENS technique to increase milk production 5x in just a few days :

In this podcast, Adara walks us through her journey:

* Feeling inspired by other “delusional” founders in Silicon Valley / San Francisco Bay Area

* Deciding to create Believe in Breast Milk in summer 2019

* Struggling to determine her first steps

* Incorporating the startup into a business

* Taking out a personal loan of $5,000 to pay engineers to create a CAD drawing of a prototype of the smart TENS unit

* Avoiding paying another $5,000 to build the prototype.

* Adara used the Nascent Startups methodology to focus on “creating initial value”. Instead of the expensive and tedious IoT TENS, Adara quickly and cheaply created similar value for her first users by paying less than $100 for a conventional TENS and using a free Google Form.

* Recruiting 6 people to use the TENS and measure milk production

* Shutting down the startup informally when it “fizzled out” in summer 2020

When you have an idea for a tech startup, your first step is to deeply understand the people you want help in an Exploration exercise. Shout out to Lex Fridman and Jeff Bezos: https://lexfridman.com/jeff-bezos

A founder's journey: Carley had an idea for "BundleShop" but wasn't sure whether it was an opportunity worth pursuing so she used the Nascent Startups methodology to decide quickly and cheaply.

This podcast includes references to slides which you can see at https://www.nascentstartups.com/