
Startups need execution, and that's where most fail. 

No market demand? Execution, out of touch with your customers.  
Running out of funding? Execution, misallocation of limited resources.
Beat by competition? Execution, moving too slow.

All founders I know and work with who knocked it out of the ballpark have one thing in common. They are all roll-up-their-sleeves hustlers. Some had no strategy when their product took off on an exponential growth curve. Others ended up building entirely different products for different markets than initially planned.

So how is it possible to succeed without a strategy, and why? There are too many unknown unknowns. You can't predict anything in advance. Instead, you must reach out to customers and constructively chat about their issues. You must show prototypes of your idea and get feedback on everything. Doing this consistently and over time gives you enough data points to develop a successful business.

Think of strategy as not an input to start your hustle but rather the output you would get if you hustle enough.


Your startup strategy ain't as important as some make it out to be


A new startup building a new product is like an untrained sniper trying to hit a bull's eye from a mile away.  You are likely to miss the target.  Luckily, you have the superpower to change the trajectory of a bullet mid-flight.

That superpower is called a customer feedback loop.

## What is a customer feedback loop?

A customer feedback loop is a process that involves collecting customer feedback, analyzing it and then implementing changes based on the collected feedback.

## Why should you use a customer feedback loop?

Feedback helps you build a relevant product, enhance customer relationships and make informed decisions.  The loop lets you stay on top of what your customers think and how they react to your product.

## When should you start a feedback loop?

As early as possible, usually at the proof-of-concept stage and throughout product development.  If you are developing a minimum viable product version without a feedback loop, you are increasing the risk that the product will not meet the customer's need.

## How often should you get customer feedback?

With the new product, you should use a short feedback loop measured in weeks, allowing you to focus on relevant features and pivot quickly.  As the product matures, you can increase the length of the loop.

## How can you get customer feedback?

* Send customer surveys about product features, usability, customer service, and overall satisfaction.
* Monitor online reviews and ratings.
* Track conversations and interactions in public forums and compare those with your competitors.
* Conduct customer focus groups where you can directly talk to customers to get detailed feedback on specific features or areas of improvement.
* Display a customer feedback form or a chat on your website or as part of your product to make it easy for customers to provide feedback.

Prioritize customer feedback loops for any new product or feature you develop, thus curving your product bullets towards your targets.



How to Curve Product Bullets with Customer Feedback Loops


Trust will make or break your startup.

Trust is what closes the deals and makes customers buy your products. Trust is why people return to the same stores or buy the brand. People trust the brand based on their previous experiences with that brand's products and services.

Your startup level of trust with your customers will determine your ability to acquire, retain, and monetize them.

As the saying goes, you cannot manage what you cannot measure. So how do you measure customer trust?

Customer trust has six measurable components: satisfaction, sentiment, loyalty, churn, virality, and value.

First of all, your startup should focus on customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction influences customer sentiment, loyalty, churn, and virality. You can measure customer satisfaction via surveys and feedback, product and customer service ratings, and response times.

Your customer sentiment is your brand reputation and influences your customer virality. The sentiment is cumulative of your reviews, social media comments, and google searches. You can measure your customer sentiment via social media channels and how others speak about your company. You can also calculate the share of voice to determine what percentage of people are talking about your brand as opposed to your competitors.

Customers you gain trust with are much more likely to engage with your company and repurchase your products.  You can calculate the repeat purchase rate to measure customer loyalty or how many customers repeatedly buy your products and services. 
 
Also, keep track of your customer churn. Your customers churn because they lose trust in you. A startup could cause churn by promising too much and not delivering, thus causing a mismatch between customer expectations and reality.

Measure customer virality using Net Promoter Score (NPS), and determine how quickly your business grows via word of mouth. NPS is a simple tool that asks customers to evaluate how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others. Viral cycle time, or how long a user invites another potential user onto your product or service, is one of the best indicators of your growth. A high NPS will decrease your viral cycle time.

Customer loyalty, churn, and virality will influence your startup's profitability. One of the most critical measures of a successful startup is the Lifetime Value of Customer (LTV). Use LTV to identify high-value customers and market segments. If you acquire and keep customers cheaply, you will be in a great position to grow your business.

A startup customer journey starts with customer satisfaction and ends with monetization. Use customer satisfaction, sentiment, loyalty, churn, virality, and value as your compass.


How to Measure Customer Trust from Satisfaction to Value


We hear the terms POC (Proof of Concept) and MVP (Minimum Viable Product) used interchangeably daily. When a startup seeks to build a product and engages a third party, this ambiguity could misalign expectations between a startup and a service provider. So what is the difference between POC and MVP, and when would you build each?

Startups use POC to test the feasibility of their idea with a few potential customers when the startup is unsure if their idea works. POC is not built for scale but only for those few initial users. You would not use POC to discover PMF (product market fit) since PMF is a degree to which a product satisfies customers in numbers.  

POC usually takes days to weeks to build and is an excellent option for bootstrapped startups to validate a business idea as efficiently as possible. POC is more of an exercise than a product and does not scale beyond a few users. As a bootstrapped startup, building an extensive product before getting feedback from the first few users means spending too much time and money on something that might have little to no use.

POC also does not have to be automated or be software at all. For example, if you are building the next Amazon, your first goal should be to move a few packages from a seller to a buyer. You would use people to package, deliver, and send notifications without always being concerned with automation. If you managed to satisfy those first users of the system and demonstrated your idea's differentiators, you might have completed a POC and are ready to build an MVP.

To measure the success of POC and validate your idea, you would get feedback from those users participating in the exercise through surveys and interviews.

Once you have already validated your idea and proven it works, congrats! You might be ready to build your MVP. Now, you are ready to automate and scale your core processes and functionality. The goal for MVP is to discover Product Market Fit and be able to pivot, test, and iterate with your product.  

MVP usually takes several months to build and is used by bootstrapped or funded startups to find PMF. Since finding PMF involves validating with customers in numbers, your MVP should be a quality product that scales to support the increasing number of simultaneous users.

Unfortunately, many MVP implementations sacrifice product quality. That's the wrong approach. The critical letter in MVP is V, which stands for viable. MVP saves effort vs mature products by providing a minimum number of polished features and should be built to the standards of commercial products. The subpar-quality product would block user growth and prevent PMF discovery.

To measure MVP's success, you want to go beyond gathering direct feedback from users via surveys and interviews. You want to analyze customer reviews and track user analytics, such as viral cycle time or the amount of time it takes a user to invite another user to your product or platform.

|| POC | MVP |
|-| --- | --- |
| Why build it? | To validate your idea | To find product market fit |
| What is it? | An exercise focused on testing if your idea can be turned to reality | A usable quality product with a minimal set of features |
| Build to scale with users? | No | Yes |
| How long to build? | Usually Days or Weeks | Usually Several Months |
| When to build? | Bootstrapped startups with zero to few users | Bootstrapped or funded startups with few to many users or customers |
| How to measure success? | Surveys, direct user feedback, interviews | Surveys, direct user feedback, interviews, customer reviews, viral cycle time, user analytics |


POC vs MVP


### Amelia’s Journey

Hi, I am Amelia, and I heard about this fantastic web platform that your startup has developed. I open my Macbook and type in your web address. Your website tells me it can’t be reached and gives some unintelligible error about the DNS probe. I try again and get the same message. I am going to tell my friends that your platform does not work.

Your tech-wiz friend later tells you that he made a small error in the NS configuration. It doesn’t mean much to you, and they say it’s no big deal, and they fixed it, so it’s ok.

Or, something popped up on your newsfeed about the latest DNS flood attack bringing down DNS Resolvers in the western part of the US, but boring, and who cares anyways.

### Sean’s Journey

Hi, I am Sean! I am about to go check out your website. I alt-tab from Call of Duty and open your site in another tab because I don’t want to close live streams I watch on another monitor. Great logo and graphics! I scroll down, but it is choppy. I click a button, and nothing happens. I click 1000 more times to be sure. This site sucks! Alt-tab back to the game.

Your web dev said something last week about optimizing your uncompressed images and videos due to their memory usage and blocking javascript. But hey, that’s not important since the website already looks good, and you need to ship a feature that your competitor released last week.

### Giorgia’s Journey

Ciao, I am Giorgia from Genoa, Italy! I heard about your excellent website. I type in your address in my browser. I see something loading… still loading… still loading… Ciao!

Your dev mentioned something about using content delivery networks more effectively and deploying to another region to improve latency. She said it was going to take two weeks. That’s two weeks too long, and the site loads fast on your laptop, so nope.

### Sanjeev's Journey

Hi, I am Sanjeev from Mumbai, and we need that enterprise tooling from your website for $999. We fill out your order form with our address and excitedly click submit. Your site surprises us with 400 error. We need that tool now, so we are buying it from your competitor.

Last week, your devs rolled out the backend address validation library since you got a lot of order spam. They tested it in US and Canada, and it works great! Particularly proud of the regex that passes on only Zip and Postal codes and fails on everything else.

### Karen's Journey

Hi, I am Karen from Indianapolis! Your product is gold! I tab tab tab through your order form and click submit. Nothing happens. I click again. Nothing happens. I look up, and one of the fields is red. I guess I somehow skipped it. Oh well, I'll go back up and fill it out. But wait, my moms calling me, so I will do it later.

Two hours later: what was the name of your site again?

Your old dev left, and you asked your new dev to quickly add a product field that should only take five minutes. He did it quickly, in five minutes and deployed the new site. What's a tab order anyways?

### Bob's Journey

Hi, I am Bob from Seattle. I am on the go and order a bunch of your products on my cell. I put in my credit card information. Darn it, that card is expired! Ok, pulling out the new one…. What happened to my order???!

Last week you overheard your devs arguing about ephemeral vs persistent state and potential data loss. So you asked them to keep the argument ephemeral and go back to coding. So they did.

### Marina's Journey

Hi, I am Marina from Kyiv! I am in the coffee shop, and I found an open WiFi! I go to your website, enter my username and password, and log in. I order a bunch of stuff and put in my credit card information. I love your site!

Next week: My credit card is blocked. :( Who ordered all those purchases for $10,000?

Your operations folk claim your site is secure and show you an encrypted end-to-end ordering process. They uploaded the certificate to your server. The site works so well that users can access it via HTTPS and HTTP.

### Cheng's Journey

I am Cheng from Vancouver! I am using your service to stream how-to videos from the library PC. The library is closing, so I've got to run.

Two months later: I didn't watch any of those videos. Why am I getting those usage upcharges?

Your engineers quickly implemented token-based authentication. The design's key features are the storage of tokens in persistent storage without an expiration date.

### Black Hat's Journey

Hi, my name is unimportant, and neither is my location. I go to your website and signup. Your site returns ?customer_id=5000. Then, I go to ?customer_id = 4999, 4998, 4997… My pet bot got the emails and addresses of all your customers.

Your junior dev shipped authentication. Only authentication.

### Annette’s Journey

Salut, I am Annette from Lyons! I integrated my client with your API, and the client is fetching critical data for my application. Now, I get calls from customers saying my app does not work. The API calls take over 20 seconds or time out. I am losing customers!

Your devs quickly wrote queries for your single-instance SQL database. The queries work, even without indices, JOINs, or LIMITs.

### Mike’s Journey

Hey, I am Mike from Toronto! My app now uses your API. What a terrific product!

A month later: My app is broken. What’s wrong with your API?

Your dev released all kinds of goodies and features. All are deployed to the one API version to rule them all. Who needs contracts, anyways?

### Emma’s Journey

I am Emma from Philly! I integrated my open-source app with your API. My engineer created an API integrator module with production API credentials and pushed the module and credentials to my public repo.

A week later: You are charging me $20,000 for usage?!!

Your API request logs have all kinds of funny IP addresses. Emma from Philly issued millions of requests from all sorts of locations. However, your devs are working on features, and your single operations guy is burning the midnight oil, just keeping the lights on.



A Startup Customer (Mis)Adventures Through The Web 


### Validating Market Idea with Serverless
To validate your market idea, you want to develop and deploy your prototype as soon as possible and iterate on it. When building a proof of concept or minimally viable version of your product, the last thing you want is to be slowed down by infrastructure and operations. Worry about that after you validate your idea and have paying customers.

The serverless model has transformed software development by eliminating the need to manage your application infrastructure. Serverless leverages your cloud provider data center capabilities to manage your infrastructure. Adopting a serverless model means faster application development and deployment while leaving scaling and securing your infrastructure to your cloud partner.

According to the State of Serverless studies done by Datadog in 2021 and 2022, over 70 percent of organizations running in AWS cloud adopted serverless functionality.

The two frameworks that help the development of serverless infrastructure are Serverless by Serverless Inc. and Serverless Application Model (SAM) by Amazon Web Services (AWS). These frameworks enable you to deploy and get started with your application in minutes.

Both Serverless and SAM act as shorthand for complex declarative infrastructure templates. In addition, they give you CLI tools that allow you to deploy and manage your application from the command line.

Serverless supports different cloud platforms, such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure Cloud, in addition to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and gives a web-accessible UI and dashboards.

AWS SAM provides a local Lambda-like execution environment and integrates with AWS SAR (Serverless Application Repository) for publishing serverless applications in AWS.

### AWS Lambda Under the Hood
AWS Lambda is Amazon's implementation of serverless computing as an alternative to a container or virtual machine infrastructure.

*What can AWS Lambda do?*

We ran AWS Lambda functions for a wide variety of use cases to do the following:

* Backends for web and mobile applications
* REST and GraphQL APIs
* Queue producers and consumers
* Data transformation and processing
* Authentication and authorization
* Near real-time analytics
* Scheduled cron jobs
* CI/CD pipeline monitoring

*How does AWS Lambda work?*

AWS Lambda runs on Firecracker, a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that uses the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to create and manage microVMs.

KVM controls the host CPU to perform hardware virtualization, memory management, and hardware abstraction.

Firecracker sits in the host OS on the IO path, configures KVM, and emulates hardware. Firecracker is optimized explicitly for serverless with 5-10MB overhead, can boot Linux in 125ms, and supports the creation of up to 150 microVMs per second per host.

Thus, Firecracker enables running thousands of Lambda functions on the same hardware without having thousands of network cards or SSD drives.

Here's what the AWS Lambda stack looks like:

1. Code
2. AWS Lambda
3. AWS Lambda Runtime
4. Guest Kernel (Minified Linux)
5. Firecracker / KVM
6. Host Kernel
7. EC2 Instance

### AWS Lambda Deployment
*Do you deploy bugs to production and take too much time to recover?*

You can solve this problem using serverless AWS Lambda by leveraging the functions' built-in versioning and aliasing. A Lambda alias points to a function version, and you can update the alias to point to a new version of the function after deployment. Thus, AWS Lambda allows you to create and manage multiple versions of your function code.

Each AWS Lambda alias has a unique ARN or Amazon Resource Name. Other system components in your cloud system architecture reference this alias ARN. Thus, if you configure a production alias and change the underlying version of Lambda, you don't need to update the other system components, saving you time and effort.

Thus, you can leverage Lambda versions and aliases to deploy safely and recover fast from production defects.

### Running Data Intensive Workloads on AWS Lambda
*You can start running your machine learning or data-intensive workloads in the AWS cloud in no time on serverless infrastructure.*

The standard way to upload a code into AWS Serverless Lambda Function is to create a .zip file. Unfortunately, Lambda has a frustrating 50 MB .zip file limit that can prevent data scientists and engineers from using it to deploy their workloads, which usually reference large libraries and can grow to gigabytes in size.

Luckily, you can package and deploy your containers on AWS Lambda. Using a container image with Lambda can be as simple as fetching an AWS base image and creating a Dockerfile with your dependencies installed on it. This approach enables you to deploy applications up to 10 GB in size and supports most machine-learning and data-intensive applications.



Going Serverless with AWS Lambda


True meritocracy is necessary to create a fair and prosperous society where every person, regardless of race, gender, class, or background, has an opportunity to contribute meaningfully and rise to positions of leadership and responsibility.

Upholding true meritocracy is why I choose to work with startups.

Startups are mission-driven and the primary forces that change the world for the better. All startups must excel in fulfilling their mission objective, and only those who can fulfill their mission better than anyone else can succeed. Startup founders live and breathe their customers and go further to help them than anyone else.

Many organizations become politically driven as they grow. They lose their primary mission and purpose and become bastions of self-interest. They gradually reduce the quality and value of their goods and services to accumulate more money, only benefiting internal stakeholders. And thus, they must be disrupted and reconstructed for the benefit of society.

More recently, meritocracy came under criticism because of its implementation in parts of our society. Elitism and nepotism are the dark forces that often use the guise of meritocracy to promote mediocre companies and individuals. As a human collective, we must identify and work against those forces.

This morning, I woke up at 4 am with an epiphany and crystal clarity of what I stand for. I am for an egalitarian society that gives opportunity to everyone regardless of who they are, how they look, where they came from, what institutions they attended, or what titles they are bestowed with. I am against any form of elitism, nepotism, or political favours. In its purest form, meritocracy is a noble ideal worth dedicating your life to pursuing.


Meritocracy is a Noble Ideal


### Are you still shackled to the monolith when building your startup product? Why not break free and embrace serverless cloud architectures?

✔️ Yes, the monolith is simple to start.

✔️ Yes, your development and deployment might be easier at the beginning.

✔️ Yes, you do not need an operational team right away to maintain the complex infrastructure.

As the monolith grows, so do the associated pains.

A monolith is hard to iterate and deploy quickly as changes in one place affect functionality in others. You must test the entire app with each change since a single error can bring down the whole application. And so, your dev teams are paralyzed by fear of making a mistake.

As your startup user base grows, a monolith scales all the components together, regardless of whether those parts require scaling.

You started with a monolith, and your startup finally grew. Your tech team says you cannot develop further and proposed a six-month rearchitecting effort that stops your feature development dead in your tracks. At the same time, your competitor is releasing a feature that you needed yesterday.

All right, you don't want to deal with those pains. So what are the advantages of microservices?

1. Faster iterations. Each microservice can be independently tested and deployed, thus minimizing the chances that one deployment can bring down the entire application.
2. Scalability. Pay for only those components that need to grow as your user traffic grows.
3. Resilience. An error in a microservice will only bring down that microservice and nothing else, at least in theory.
4. Reusability. You can reuse microservices across different applications.

Meh, you say, who cares about the above since you are a small startup?

❓You have a few people and need to get a product out, not scale it.

❓You have one unfinished product, so what's the point of reusability?

❓You can't afford to maintain complex infrastructure.

That's all the proper reasoning. Cloud and serverless change the game, though.

🚀 Scalability becomes free. Let your cloud provider be your operational team. Why not take it? After all, you founded your startup to grow.

⚡️ You can iterate on your product lightning-fast. Putting a serverless function into production is simple, and you can use various deployment strategies offered by your cloud provider.

🧩 To prevent your software from becoming a spaghetti mess that is either thrown away or permanently frozen in time, you would use a modular architecture, whether building monolith or microservices. Serverless functions encourage a modular architecture by splitting your application into small chunks that developers can wrap their heads around.

💰 Finally, the serverless pay-for-what-you-use model plays well with services that require less scaling since you don't need to stand up and pay for servers.


Why Embrace the Cloud and Serverless


Do you want your startup to reach its full potential? Without an experienced CTO, many startups encounter the following problems that could have been avoided.

### 1. Misestimating your project.
Estimating is a skill that comes from years of experience. It’s widespread for studios or inexperienced developers to misestimate the project resulting in late delivery or non-delivery. We’ve seen projects quoted for three months delivered in a year or not delivered at all, thus disrupting go-to-market plans. A CTO estimates your project accurately and increases the chances of timely delivery.

### 2. Building something that does not align with your business needs.
Do you build a mobile app, a website, or an API first? Why do you need them? Who are your target customers? A CTO helps identify your business differentiators and align technical decisions appropriately.

### 3. Lack of feedback cycles and transparency in the development process.
Without incremental delivery and the opportunity to give feedback early and often, your product will likely miss the mark. A CTO arranges team demos and customer feedback sessions while pivoting on the fly to adjust to changing requirements.

### 4. Low standard of quality.
Your development team output might not meet industry quality standards, resulting in expensive rework. A CTO holds the bar for technical deliveries, thus avoiding the rework altogether.

### 5. Lack of support when trying to obtain funding.
Investors perceive a solo founder without a team to be less investable than one with an experienced team. A CTO reduces investor risk when trying to secure funding and supports your fundraising efforts while answering questions from investors.

### 6. Inability to attract technical talent.
How would you find the right people without a network of proven professionals and the ability to screen engineers? An experienced CTO has a network of software professionals they work with who can join your startup.


Why Your Startup Needs an Experienced CTO


## Are you struggling to generate traction for your startup?

Over the last couple of months, I chatted with over 100 startup founders and identified problems that might get in the way of progress.

1. You could be married to your product idea.
2. You could have prohibitively expensive user acquisition costs.
3. You might measure growth using freemium users or headcount.
4. You might be developing your product in a silo.
5. You might be over-relying on contractors.

### So what do you need to set the right environment for traction?

### 1. A deep understanding of your target market and what problem you are solving.

As a startup CEO, you are a subject matter expert in your market niche and deeply understand the problems and opportunities. Thus, you are not married to your idea or product. You consider your idea valuable as long as it solves the problem in the market. Once the market shifts or the idea is invalidated, you move on.

### 2. A marketing strategy that empowers you to reach the target market.

Even if you solve a problem in your market, how will you reach your users? Is your product too complicated to explain and spread through word of mouth? Are you paying too much for user acquisition in a business where customer acquisition cost is the differentiator?

### 3. A well-defined business model and obsessive focus on revenue.

Too many startups measure their growth in free users, headcount, or other things. That's bullocks. 0 to 100 employees is not impressive. That's why so many people are getting laid off now. 0 to 1 million free users is also not remarkable. That's a guaranteed way to burn your capital on OpEx without discovering if any will pay for it. You are running a business, not a charity. 0 to $10 million ARR? Now, we are talking.

### 4. A development plan that includes incremental milestones and deliverables.

There is no such thing as development in a silo. You are disconnected from your market if you develop your product without user feedback for three months. Demand demos and transparency from your development team. Get them to partner with your customers and establish the feedback cycle early. 

### 5. A dedicated team of employees who are committed to your company.

Are you relying on contractors? Mercenaries aren't going to protect your kingdom once you run out of money, and they sure ain't going to fight for you as hard as your home-grown troops. Read The Prince by Machiavelli. So yeah, you need a team, and to make it happen, you've got to give up some equity. 

By focusing on getting the business fundamentals right, you set the right environment and tilt the odds in your favour to generate traction, increase cash flow, and raise that next capital round.


Our thoughts on technology, leadership, cloud, software, and more

Your startup strategy ain't as important as some make it out to be

How to Curve Product Bullets with Customer Feedback Loops

How to Measure Customer Trust from Satisfaction to Value

POC vs MVP

A Startup Customer (Mis)Adventures Through The Web

Amelia’s Journey

Going Serverless with AWS Lambda

Validating Market Idea with Serverless

Meritocracy is a Noble Ideal

Why Embrace the Cloud and Serverless

Are you still shackled to the monolith when building your startup product? Why not break free and embrace serverless cloud architectures?

Why Your Startup Needs an Experienced CTO

1. Misestimating your project.

How to Create the Right Environment for Traction

Are you struggling to generate traction for your startup?