What I think this newsletter will be about

About the newsletter - About me - Release 1

“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.

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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