🔥 work sucks, start a company, it’ll be fun. we’ll match your salary, you keep ~90% equity. interested? check out: https://www.athena.vc/ 🔥

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Step-by-step guide with screenshare on how to start a startup with the exact steps I took to build my own business, ContactOut to over $10 million in revenue.

 The startup process can be broken down as

1. IDEAS
2. TESTS
3. LEARNINGS

And we want to do this repeatedly as FAST as possible.

I made a fun acronym LIFT (Learnings, Ideas, Fast Tests)

IDEAS: We'll go through how to come up with startup ideas by studying 100s of companies in your industry. I'll do a screen share where we:
- study dozens of competitor products
- reverse engineer marketing channels
- record sales calls from other companies in order to learn sales process.

TESTS: We'll talk about how to test startup ideas by talking to users and validating that there's demand before building.

I'll share lots of real world case studies of how companies found product market fit. Companies like Zoominfo, Pilot, Rupa Health, Luminai.

We'll cover building product in the leanest way possible via:
- manually providing the service first
- building one product line first
- building on top of open source software
- white labeling a competitor's product

LEARNINGS: I'll cover what we've learnt at ContactOut from our tests, and share our process for writing up weekly learnings and company goals on Slack.

Finally the most important thing for success is grit and perseverance according to Steve Jobs.

0:00 Introduction
1:05 Coming up with business ideas
2:57 Testing and validating ideas
5:15 Product market fit
8:07 Will people buy your product?
9:52 Building product in leanest way
14:30 Learnings
18:12 Perseverance and Git