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What I think this newsletter will be about

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What I think this newsletter will be about

About the newsletter - About me - Release 1

Ian Johnson ✨
Mar 3, 2022
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What I think this newsletter will be about

ianwdj.substack.com

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

- Pablo Picasso Ian Johnson

In this vein, I plan on stealing the 3-2-1 format of my favorite newsletter by James Clear. For this newsletter I will be sharing a mix of the following update types 2-3 times a month:

  • General updates

    • 3 things that worked

    • 2 things that didn’t

    • 1 question that I have for you

  • Case studies/learnings/guides

Before I launch into that format I will give you the briefest TLDR of who I am that I can manage.


About Ian Johnson

Personal
  • Grew up in the suburbs of Dublin, Ireland

  • Raised by a family of lifestyle entrepreneurs

  • I love movies, brewing specialty coffee, making playlists, drinking whiskey and philosophy

  • Left my job in January 2022 to go build something

Jobs
  • Principal Product Manager at Flow.io (Acquired by Global-e)

  • VP of Product at Showtime Analytics & its joint venture with Alibaba Pictures

  • Product Marketing Lead (for Google) at Accenture Interactive

  • CX Programme Manager at eir

Businesses/Projects
  • Ones that made money

    • The Funeral Planner - Funeral Planning

    • One.Six1 - Mobile coffee

    • Big Deal - Coupon website

    • White Collar Boxing - One off event to raise awareness for depression in teenagers

  • Projects that died before the money making stage

    • Facked - Trying to make the perfect white t-shirt

    • Good2Go - Vending machines selling sanitary products at festivals

  • The ones for fun

    • Unicorn Chasers - Slack group for PdMs at high growth startups

    • 3 book clubs

    • The Philosoraptors - A remote philosophy meet up

    • An Craic - A curated list of things to see and do in Ireland

Now…. for the actual Newsletter I promised


3 Biggest Things I Have Done (Since Beginning This Startup Journey)

I.

Conduct research interviews with 150+ SaaS professionals
  • 100+ Product managers and designers

  • 57 Customer success professionals

(Happy to share aggregated findings on request)

—

II.
Launched 2 products
  • P1 - Decision making app for product teams

    • Signed up 40+ companies

    • Web app that allowed you to explicitly request your team members level of agreement of a new project proposal

    • Killed it because (a) solution wasn’t good enough to solve the pain relating to building alignment on major decisions, (b) it wasn’t a painful enough problem to have solved for teams or (c) a mix of both

  • P2 - Automated user interview analysis and synthesis

    • Ran pilots with 10 companies to automate user interviews using AI (NLP and Sentiment Analysis)

    • Analysing interviews is a valid problem but wasn’t as frequent as projected to justify the unit economics

—

III.
Participated in Startup Communities
  • Won best pitch in NDRCs Founder Weekend

    • Competed against 50 founders for best pitch

    • Won 6 months office space at Dogpatch labs

  • Completed Founders Boost Pre-Accelerator New York

    • 1 of 5 startups accepted from 2k+ applications

    • Pitched at virtual Demo Day


2 Biggest Learnings - So Far

I.
Get out of the building!

My biggest breakthroughs to date have always come from a conversation with someone else. GOTB usually refers to customer research but I would expand it past Customer Research and include other people in the startup community.

In person > phone calls > video calls > email > nothing

—

II.
Define (somewhat flexible) Go/Kill decision points

This is something I am still struggling with because knowing when an idea is a stinker to its core vs your current line of thinking being the stinker is hard. I recently introduced custom measures by project to determine this. Roughly it’s based on

  1. Validating is the problem a real one i.e considered of high importance and users have low satisfaction with existing solutions

  2. Is there a big enough market to serve based on a bottoms up TAM.

    • (# of potential customers) x (price) = TAM

  3. Level of excitement of your target audience towards having the above problem solved


1 Question For You

What starting point do you believe is more important for building a startup

  • Market first

  • Problem first

  • Inflection point/Change event first

    • Inflection = a external change that sparks a radically different future


Coming Soon (What I am actively working on)

Validating
  • Potential solutions that can help CSMs serve their clients better

To explore
  • Better product analytic tooling for Sales and CSMs

  • Running public omnibus style focus groups

  • Market for helping writers grow their audiences

  • POS solution for specific crypto currencies

  • Market for multi-tenant blockchain-based systems

Searching for
  • Tech co-founder who is interested in exploring any of the above

Would someone else you know enjoy this post, feel free to share below.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and follow the journey.

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What I think this newsletter will be about

ianwdj.substack.com
2 Comments
Scott Ashmore
Writes PitchedIt
Apr 27, 2022

Hi Ian, thanks for sharing!

Personally I don't think anybody should go looking for a problem, it should be something that unearths itself organically through life experiences. What you can be though is more aware in your day to day activities, be that at work or at home.

Think about inputting hundreds of things into an excel sheet. Something that could be better solved using some type of automation software. Generally people will move through their day without being affected by these minor or even major irritations. It's really important to be purposefully aware, combined with an entrepreneurial mindset, to pick up on these nuances and think "Hey, this is a real problem that could be solved in a better way. I wonder if anybody else is already solving this 🤔".

So to answer your question (and in my opinion):

1. Discover a problem through lived experiences

2. Is anybody already solving this problem? If yes, can I do it 10x better?

3. Figure out the size of the market for this problem

4. Start talking to some potential customers to validate the problem 😄

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