Denis Shatalin 2022

Startup
Killers
Common Mistakes That Kill Ambitious Products
Idea Stage Killers

Getting cofounders for the sake of getting cofounders 3

Trend-glazing 4
Not working on something you care about 6
Idea over problem 6
Collecting emails to validate the idea 7
Validating ideas over chat 8

MVP Stage Killers

Shipping before finding users 9

Putting own vision above real demand 11
Not getting hands dirty 13
Tech over real required solution 14
“Let’s include the community” 15

Product Stage Killers

5 features before 5 users 16

Avoiding pivots 17
Pivoting too early 18
Building for everyone 19
Not believing in your product 20
Being too hungry for money 23
Lowering prices for the sake of getting more users 25
Secret chapter 25

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 Intro
I have made countless mistakes through my entrepreneurial journey.
Every time I see someone repeating them - it feels awful. It’s sad when
ambitious makers take action that increase their risk of failure. I convince
people that building a product for everyone leads to no one buying it, but
many don’t listen. I tell that more features don’t mean better product, but
many ignore me. I look like a random hater from the web while I truly care
about founder’s success. I believe that by helping founders bring cool
projects into life I turn the world into a better place. With this book I want
to save you time, money and dozens of awful periods I faced when
struggling with my products. If I can save you from 1 mental breakdown,
writing this piece was worth it.
Startup Killers outlines most common mistakes that take away cool
projects around me. I went through all of them. At first, I wanted to format
the book like a startup guide (do X, don’t do Y) but then decided to share it
in the format of stories. This way I don’t make conclusions for you.
Throughout the book I’ll jump from one project to another. Here’s
the timeline:

- Left corporate
- Jewelry business
- Dropshipping backpacks from China
- App for exam preparation
- SaaS for achieving goals
- Selling dog toys
- Mental support SaaS, pivoted into 1-1 coaching

Let’s dive in.

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 Idea Stage Killers

Getting cofounders for the sake of getting cofounders

My first venture was a jewelry store. The founding team had a
designer, a jewelry maker, and me. Jewelry maker found a good job, I
didn’t find a replacement for her in a few weeks and dropped the business.
Why? No idea. My next venture was drop-shipping techwear backpacks
from China. I started it with a friend. After our marketing went awful, I
looked for inspiration in him, and he looked for inspiration in me. We were
both demotivated to move on and soon stopped working on it. My other
thing was selling dog toys, started it with two other friends. Profits came in
little chunks of $4 - $9 over a long period of time. I was spending my
money on fuel, wasn’t doing anything exciting, and didn’t see much
enthusiasm from my friends. All of us saw that others aren’t pushing it and
stopped bothering. Now I see it’s totally stupid, because we found a
money-making machine: after 10 discord meetings, couple days of
research and 6 car rides we made $180 profit after tax, as all our dog toys
sold out! Our system proved to work, but none of us wanted to work by
then. Repeating the exactly same process 100 more times would make
$18000. Sadly, we haven’t experienced wow effect, and all of us counted on
someone else. Exciting work makes us excited, boring work makes us rich.
The problem with searching for cofounders or investors to start a
startup is that it’s our excuse for procrastination. It’s great when we have a
synergy with somebody else. But this partnership shouldn’t be 1+1=2, but
rather 1+1=10. There is nothing wrong with sharing responsibilities, but only
when everyone is fine doing everything. I haven’t had a single successful
project where I spent more time setting boundaries than working.
One principle changed everything for me: “Do what you can, where
you are, with what you have”. It allowed me to discover no-code
instruments that allow any non-tech founder to bring their vision to life. I
saw how some startup teams tour across conferences with their pitches

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hoping to get funding. I knew this is not my path. I’d never do 20 presales
for my SaaS if I spent time asking VCs to play tennis with me. I hold the
same belief with my investments. When a founder wants to have me in
their board but hasn’t done anything to scale their startup, it’s a no. Pitch
decks and collected emails don’t count.

Trend-glazing
Bezos saw convincing stats for a growing number of Internet users.
But it didn’t start his company. We first convince ourselves in something
and then see proof for it everywhere. There’s no founder who grew a
unicorn after saying “that’s a hell of a chart, let’s build this”. Most of the
time billion-dollar companies begin with an entrepreneur facing an
annoying problem. One guy couldn't find kitchen furniture that fit the
design of the flat, and then made his own. Shout out to Ingvar Kamprad
and IKEA.
A group of friends went to a conference in another town. They
couldn’t afford the hotel and hardly found a flat to stay in. This issue drove
them mad. They were enthusiastic to solve it, and this enthusiasm led
them through hurdles. Remind me of AirBnB’s valuation.
When I want to launch a new product, I build it from my
dissatisfaction with the current options. I convince myself I can do better
than these folks and go for it. By the way, I can’t code.
When we believe in something, we find proof everywhere. When
we're sad the world is dark, people are rude, friends are ignorant. When we
feel good, we don’t see any of these. The same applies to startup ideas.
After I started running ads for backpacks, I saw 3 signals a day. There was
promising data on growing online sales. More grandparents were
purchasing online. RetailTech startups were raising VC every day. I felt I’m
in a good market. Same happened was with my EdTech startup. I smiled
every time influencers gave positive forecasts.

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 Some founders told me that they want to be sure they build a
unicorn in the market they select. Great. Let’s say you ask me to bet on one
of two companies. The first company makes $50M revenue a year. Founder
is super enthusiastic about the problem their company solves. The second
founder makes $0 revenue and finally found an incredible market. Any day
of the week, I’ll bet on the first founder to reach a unicorn level first. It’s
realistic to earn enough cash for grandchildren unless the market is clearly
shrinking.

Not working on something you care about

I started a dropshipping business soon after I left Big 4. I started it
with my friend, and we had ambitions of scaling a great international
company. My friend was working in Moscow, while I was finishing my
Masters in London. We opened a business in the UK, found cool backpacks
on AliBaba, and planned to ship them to States. Our Shopify store looked
decent. I'm picky about design, so we didn’t copy common trends for
pushy dropshipping websites, but kept it Nike ACG techwear vibe. We
connected Stripe, did thorough research on FB ads, paid for extra Shopify
plugins, and were ready to go. The first campaign, 5 days, 5 ad sets, $10 on
each ad set, 0 purchases. We cheered each other, saying everybody starts
little. The second campaign, 5 days, 5 ad sets, $10 on each ad set, 0
purchases. For our third campaign we did more research on FB ads,
improved ad our sets, increased the budget, had 0 purchases. We ran 6
campaigns and haven’t sold a single backpack.
It felt awful, but we didn’t give up. We set up a new store in a beauty
niche, planning to sell ultrasonic black dot removers (lol). We put even
more money into this casino and made the best video creative of all. The
same day, we launch our campaign and get a permanent ban on our
account. I assume it was because I wrote “anti-black dots” or “remove black
dots”. This day ended my 3-month story with Shopify dropshipping
because we didn’t push more. If we badly wanted to succeed in it, we

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would run Google Ads, collab with influencers, or record TikToks. However,
not working on something we cared about made us give up on it after
facing many obstacles.

Idea over problem

I spent months watching trends, checking hot startups, and
browsing Product Hunt in search of good products and ideas. After 2
months, I found many trends, hot startups, and many nice products. Have I
moved forward? Not really.
I now start with problems, not ideas. I decided to write Startup
Killers after repeatedly helping founders overcome these blockers. I didn’t
research global e-book trends. I got confident this information will help 50
people I know, so I started the same day. Can it reach 1M readers? Maybe.
But aiming to create a great product for a million people cost me months
of procrastination. Trying to launch products straight into space is a sure
way to do nothing for years. Solving a real challenge keeps us productive.
Many of us want to get into blue ocean opportunities, markets that
will skyrocket in the next decade. I want to be in one too, but copying ideas
that don’t resonate with me will never get me there. Reaching a 1000x
multiplier starts with 10 people saying “wow".

Collecting emails to validate the idea

I posted surveys in Medical student groups to get emails from
future users. I asked people interested in the product to share their email. I
collected 60. Reached out to them, thanking them for their support and
interest. After I was done building, I texted all of them at least 4 times. No
one replied to check out the product.
My last startup was a platform for founders to share obstacles with
each other. I knew that collecting emails means nothing, so I presold the
access to 20 people. After I shipped the platform, only 10/20 showed up. It

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was fascinating to learn that half of the people don’t bother even after they
paid for something.
A team of 3 co-founders reached out to me to do their problem
discovery interview. They asked me 5 questions, didn’t listen to my replies,
and then put their product demo in front of me. I repeated that I don’t
need it, but they pushed me to give them my email. For a few months, I
saw their enthusiasm in tweets about getting 100, 200, 300 emails. Then
was a Product Hunt launch. A couple of weeks later, they removed the
startup’s name from their bio.
I find it great to collect emails before the product is ready. I will keep
doing it for my future products. But never again will I consider collected
emails as the fact that my product’s idea is validated. If I’m launching
something in the existing market with high demand and high
competition, I don’t have to worry there will be no demand for my product.
If I’m going for high risk / high reward opportunity, there’s an excellent way
to decrease the risk by preselling the product.

Validating ideas over chat

I heard that I should validate my idea before building it in various
YouTube videos. That’s why when I came up with the idea of a note-taking
app, I created a survey and posted it on 10 student groups, hoping that I’ll
convert respondents into my initial users.
I made a couple of surveys asking what the person does, what are
their main pain points, and their opinion about currently available
solutions. After a couple of weeks, I had more than 30 respondents. They
left their emails in the section called “leave your email if you want to get
the product”. I was super convinced I’m working on something epic.
People wrote they are “totally dissatisfied” with the current solution, they
“get mad”, and it’s a “huge problem for them”. How could I not jump into
building the prototype?

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 1 month passed, I finished my MVP and got back to respondents.
They ignored my emails, but I managed to get 3 people on a call. During
the call, I showed my product demo and heard that it’s very cool. I headed
to sleep thinking about the interior of my startup’s office. After 2 days, I
understood that these few users didn’t do anything on the app. I asked
them to get on another call, push them into it, but reached no success.
After chasing other potential users for weeks, I realized how hopeless I am
pushing randoms into the product and gave up on this venture.
This experience pushed me to read The Mom Test and I totally
changed my approach. I got inspired to build my next product, put surveys
and chats to the side and focused on Zoom interviews. The result was
totally different. I could see people’s emotions when they spoke about their
dissatisfaction. They never gave a damn. When I asked to elaborate on the
issue, they didn’t even blink. They still were saying “It’s such a problem” and
“it steals so much time from me”, but looking into their eyes, I finally
followed up with “okay, so what did you do about it if it’s such an issue?” I
wish you witnessed that silence. Dozens of times I pumped into people
who badly wanted to succeed with their goals, but put absolutely no effort
into achieving them. That’s how I discovered that my key target audience is
all-in entrepreneurs and not the teenagers who want to play the guitar.

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 MVP Stage Killers

Shipping before finding users

I got super encouraged to start building my first app with bubble.io
after hearing that I don’t need investors to start a startup. After weeks of
fighting the interface, I spent even more time making the product in
Adalo. Months later, I returned to potential users and nobody wanted to
use the app, including me. I had vision that I’m my own customer and will
ship something I’ll use myself, but halfway I thought I also want somebody
else to use it. I ended up somewhere in between. Sadly, this result gave me
no joy nor cash.
I failed to find customers for 4/4 products I didn’t presell. People
weren’t returning to something they didn’t need, and I couldn’t get any
feedback to work with. Absence of feedback for growing my startups killed
them. After this happened, I said "never again do I want to be desperately
chasing the first 3 users to signup".
When launching freemium or free-trial products with my partners,
we start with preselling the idea at least 20 times. This helps us realize who
needs it more, what are the features customers need, which part of the
product is useless, and how we position it after it’s ready.
Sometimes makers with 0 users tell me: “I put months of hard work
into building my product. I won’t kill it before someone uses it”. Well, I
usually lasted for 2-3 weeks, then the emotional pressure took over and I
stopped paying for the domain.
There is a scale from 1 to 10 for product validation. 1 - collecting
emails to validate the idea and not asking for money. 10 - preselling for the
full price. Selecting between 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 depends on how
quickly we want to find our ideal customer profile. I tried collecting emails
for validation. It left me with 50 emails and 0 sign-ups. My MAU metric in
the first months was way higher when all guys who joined beta paid to be
there.

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 For me, startups have never been a hobby, and I always wanted to
make money with them. I’m not in the position of investing years into
products without expecting output. For everyone like me, it's safer to
validate the demand before putting effort.
Right people will buy our product after they see the right solution
to their problem at the right time. Look: I meet a thirsty stranger who’s
been going through the desert for 5 days. He’s got a $100 note and I
promise that I’ll get him water in 3 hours if he pays $100 upfront. He pays
the full amount upfront. I meet the same stranger on a city street one
month later. Same person, same offer, but he won’t even give me his email
to validate he’d like some water. My goal is to find the right person, in the
right condition, at the right time. Matching components of this equation
takes time, but allows me to find easy sales to thirsty people. When Marcus
partnered with me to scale Feedbucket.app, it took us 20 calls to find that
experienced web developers and agencies convert easiest.
Let's say you're creating a tool for freelancers that lets them
showcase their portfolio. You try to push every freelancer into it, but no one
uses it. Then, you select top 3 buyer personas and start selling. Your
mediocre tool for freelancers turns out to be an amazing tool for motion
designers with over 3 years of experience who started freelancing less than
6 months ago and now want to conveniently manage their portfolio to get
more clients.
It’s so weird to realize that such product can make millions of
dollars a year, but with a 90% chance the founder drops it after full-stack
engineers, copywriters, email marketers, and graphic designers call it
useless, and say "the founder must be mad to ask money for it". A
committed founder makes their way to their ideal users, builds on their
feedback, and then expands to other markets.

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 Putting own vision above real demand
After my dropshipping hustle quietly came to an end, I understood
why it’s better to work on something I deeply care about. When project
drives you, you overcome annoying obstacles easier. While killing our
dropshipping business, I realized that want to help people reach their
long-term goals.
I used to put down my goals in Google Sheets, but it was
inconvenient to manage them there. I looked for a better app to do it. I
tried 10 alternatives for managing long-term goals, didn’t like any of them,
and decided to make my own. During my ideation stage, I heard about
no-code tools and thought it would be possible to make my app real
without raising capital.
From the very beginning, I knew it shouldn’t be an app only for me.
I felt that other students would also be interested in my note-taking app
because they have to prepare for exams. Who needs to prepare for exams
most badly? Medical students, because you can’t cheat when making a
surgery. I reached out to 50 Medical students from various groups to get a
better understanding of what my app should be like. 15 people responded,
and I had a few conversations via chat. In these conversations, I asked
about the main challenges of exam preparation. People told me that it’s
difficult to find info as it’s hidden in dated web resources or libraries. Well, I
didn’t care what they answered me because I already thought about the
layout for my app. After exchanging few words with these guys, I jumped
into a no-code tool called bubble.io.
YouTubers said I should expect to learn it in 2 months. I fought
bubble’s interface for three months and lost my patience. I consistently
came across obstacles I couldn’t get an answer to. It was the first time in
my life I couldn’t google the question either, because I had no vocabulary
to explain it. After getting fed up with bubble’s interface, I switched to
another no-code tool called Adalo. That’s how my web app turned into a
mobile app.

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 3 weeks later, I shipped it to those students I chatted with. 70%
ignored me, and I spent a week pushing them into downloading my app.
They opened it once and uninstalled it. This was an awful period for me
because four months of daily effort brought me to 0 active users.
Looking at this scenario now, I don’t know what I expected. I knew
nothing about problems Medical students face, shipped something I
wanted for managing my long-term goals and pushed them into it. I
should have done dozens of in-depth interviews to reach any success.
Being stuck with my own product’s vision made me deaf to users’ words,
and that’s how the app died.

Not getting hands dirty

Inability to listen killed my product, but I still wanted to help people
reach long-term goals. That’s how I came up with another product that
could do this. Accountability buddies platform. I paid a freelancer to set up
automations because my MVP “required” complex matching scenarios. I
regret that I didn’t test the whole thing manually before throwing money
away.
My idea was to connect goal-driven people every week, so they
push each other towards goals. I was super enthusiastic about it. My initial
feature list included ratings, application process, scenarios when someone
misses the call, filtering system, and matching algorithms. Money spent on
freelancer, everything tested, it was time to start getting users. I got 26
people into beta in 3 weeks. Sunny afternoon, I ran the automation and
prepared for getting amazing feedback. The day ended and none of the 26
people showed up. I felt so awful I couldn’t sleep.
I changed positioning and asked people to try it for free. After 2
months, I got sick of chasing users and shut down the project. I learned
that people who love running will run a marathon without accountability
buddies. Those who don’t enjoy it may hire 3 coaches, buy 5 pairs of
sneakers, purchase a $10k nutrition program but will not run a marathon.

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 Many times, it’s possible to test a product’s usefulness even without
building anything (especially for SaaS). I could’ve done my MVP without
fancy automation and bots, using hands. It’s tempting to start building
once you have the skills, but overcoming this temptation saves piles of
burned cash.
One startup team wanted to build a platform for delivering
furniture from shops. They went to the local shop, approached people who
were placing a wardrobe on top of their Mini and offered to deliver it to the
house for $100. This service grew into a multimillion-dollar SaaS.
My friend is a full-stack engineer. He wanted to make a product that
notifies travelers about restriction updates. He ran the service manually for
2 weeks, even though he could build it overnight. After figuring out the
right positioning, he got the first 50 users in 2 days. His UX was far from
perfect, but people didn’t care. The product solved their problem.

Tech over real required solution

Being emotionally attached to the tech side of my product caused
me being deaf to what people were saying. I spent 2 months building my
MVP on the web app maker bubble.io. There were numerous problems I
couldn’t google, I lost all my nerves and switched to Adalo. After another 3
weeks of building on Adalo, I show my prototype to potential users. They
found UX odd, but I kept pushing them into the app. I spent so much time
creating this product that they had to use it no matter what. They thought
differently and were all gone within a week. I could have saved the project
by going into more interviews, but it was more convenient to put blame on
others.
The more time we spend building the prototype without showing it
to potential customers, the higher chance we’ll end up being the only
customer. First weeks we work on key features, then think that it’s nice to
add a few more, then start improving UX. After months of effort building
inside comfort zone, we get used to it and don’t want to return to the

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outside world. During this period, people we interviewed forget about our
existence, and we ship into a vacuum.
I met founders who want to embed AI into their projects just for the
sake of embedding AI. They fell in love with their tech instead of falling in
love with the problem they’re solving. I could see sense in it if their idea
was to raise a decent Seed round, drop the startup, and head over to Ibiza.
Otherwise, there is no adequate reason to pump the project with Super AI
IoT Blockchain technologies before making a single dollar. Teams end up
chasing investors for a year and split after getting tired. If I can test my
billion-dollar idea by manually searching the web, I open the browser. If I
absolutely need a lot of money to make something real, I pre-sell the
product. If no one purchases with a 50% discount before it’s ready, it’s a
very high chance they won’t pay after I sell my house either.
Pushing AI into any idea doesn’t work. Once we were working on a
university project, which was a startup for managing personal finances.
Our initial product included AI algorithms. We wanted to impress judges
with fancy words and put $150k for our initial required investments.
Expectedly, the project never moved forward.

“Let’s include the community”

I know it’s exciting to visualize how your venture will unite a lot of
people. It will happen. But put community outside your MVP unless your
product is a community. I buried two products because I wanted to go
community first. It’s very tough to grow two things at once while jumping
priorities. After you get your first 1000 users, you can get a community of 50
people within a day. It will take you an hour to write 1 message to the most
active users. It’s much harder to do it vice versa.
“What if I’m growing a community?” - keep it niche, build it around
1 topic. It’s easier to grow a community of ramen lovers, than a community
of food lovers. When people see our community they should feel “wow I
gotta be there”, and this happens once they come across something they

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closely relate to. I’ve never paid for being a member of global DJ
community, but I payed $500 to be a member of Moscow Scratch DJ
community. There are always ways to differentiate and be one of a kind. I
understand this desire to become big fast, but being the best community
for our niche in the world will eventually make us big. Focusing on best
makes us biggest.

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 Product Stage Killers

5 features before 5 users

I had a world-changing vision for my note-taking app. I wanted to
start small, deliver an outstanding product and grow into the unicorn. I
prioritized my product beyond users because there was no way they don’t
become evangelists after seeing what I built (ha).
I thought features are the way you get evangelists. So more features
meant better startup. I generously kept packing my production list with
every cool idea I came up with. My features were inspired by other
products, friends’ ideas, and my workflow. As you see, by everything except
from the first potential customers. My pre-MVP feature list looked like this:
note creation, topic creation, subject creation, theme creation, filtering,
ability to drag notes among sections, profile info, ability to make questions
for each note, and a quiz mode. Of course, it took me months to bring all of
this into life. I have very high standards for design, so I spent 7 days on it. I
chose the color palette, worked on contrast, fonts, icons, and logo.
I ran tests. Everything seemed to work, and I headed to present this
banger to students I talked to earlier. 100% of them ignored my message
within 24 hours. Hm, something should be wrong, they all might be
celebrating a medical event or something. Reached out again the next day.
And the next day. Finally, few of them download my web app to their
phone. 2/3 users stop replying, 1 girl gets on a call with me. We go through
UX, her eyes are shining, I think everything is set, one hardcore fan is at
least something. Next day she starts ignoring me too. I kill the startup the
in 3 weeks.
The number of features has nothing to do with how much we help
our users. We earn evangelists by significantly improving people’s lives in 2
ways: saving them a lot of time and saving them a lot of money. Google is
one freaking search bar. They saved trillions of hours to users around the
globe.

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 It’s possible to make thousands of dollars with a crappy design and
3 functions. One core feature and two to back it up. Show me a startup that
has more features than users, and I bet a smoothie it will die in 2 years.

Avoiding pivots
Pivots are necessary strategy shifts in product or marketing to keep
the startup alive. The first reason why startups sink is failing to find a
problem-solution match. The second is not growing in the right way.
Before I started my projects, I couldn’t get how you may shut down a
startup that already generates profit. Easily. In my situation, it happened
because I stubbornly stayed with my initial idea. People were using apps
for a different purpose than I was thinking. I made updates without
interviewing the right users, and soon all of them left.
Now my methodology for choosing features changed from “I build
and push them into it” to “they pay and I build what they paid for”. I’m
lucky you haven’t seen me doing the first. After months of fighting
unknown programs, I shipped the product, and begged people to use it a
few times. Enthusiasts who signed up left in a couple of days without
leaving me any feedback to work with. This silent move left me no clue
what to do next, and killed my hustles. That’s why now I give constructive
negative feedback to all entrepreneurs.
For all my products, I never predicted the 3 core features right. It’s
because it’s nearly impossible to predict what people will really value about
the idea. The group of friends wanted to cruise to fancy clubs at the back of
a limo. They made an app to order limos and started testing it. The crucial
pivot that turned Uber into the company we know today was shifting focus
from premium to affordable rides. If they were convinced that it will only
scale as a limo ordering app, it would still be a local limo-ordering app.
Billion-dollar startups always iterate on their initial products. Google
wouldn’t reach its size if it still was for librarians only. Google found the
problem they wanted to solve and stick to it decades later. Ending hassle

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across libraries evolved into their mission statement: “To organize the
world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Airbnb
wanted to make the business on airbed rental. Thanks to YCombinator,
they figured out their business is in flats, not airbeds.
There are different types of pivots. I can change the problem I’m
solving, the product I solve it with, the people I offer it to, and the way I
position it to them. I prefer to stay with the issue that resonates with my
values as the main element of the equation. I’m solving the problem that
it’s tough to bring amazing things to our world, and that’s why I’m writing
Startup Killers. I can launch new products daily, but they’re all united by
one issue I’m solving. It’s harder to pivot the passion you’re bonded with.
In my note-taking app case, I was solving the general problem of
helping people achieve their long-term goals. I thought you need to write
down your goals somewhere, and that’s how it started. After I niched down
to Medical students, I forgot to niche down the problem too. Ambiguity in
the problem caused me to ship the product that doesn’t help my
audience.
If my new product doesn’t make money, I’ll consider pivots in
descending order. First, I’ll edit my website and message and offer it to the
same audience. If this doesn’t work at least three times, I’ll look for another
audience that may need it.

Pivoting too early

I gave up on my accountability-buddies project quite early.
Sometimes I think it would still make sense, but for people who’re studying
the same course. 6 months after we stopped selling Ali backpacks, I saw
one of them in TV series and thought, “what a cool techwear backpack!
Wait…”
Seeing your startup sink is always unpleasant. I haven’t shut down
any of my projects, they simply faded. I stopped putting effort or pivoted

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after my belief in failure became more convincing than my vision for
success. In reality, I could have made a few more tries before giving up.
The next time I run a startup, I will offer it to at least 3 markets
before I kill it. Cherry Labs made an AI monitoring system that allows to
track human movement and predicts behavior. They tried selling it to
families to take care of their elders - fail. Then they tried selling to
retirement homes - fail. They were convinced their thing should bring
value to someone and found success in selling to big industrial companies.
If I have a tech-heavy product (as Cherry Labs case with AI
monitoring) I’ll try at least 5 audiences, each try being at least 2 months of
daily work. I know that no matter which market I’ll be playing at, there will
be hundreds of unexpected issues. I’ll better plan 12 months of the runway
from the start and push in one direction, then inconsistently push in five.
That’s why I told myself that I’ll be playing the founder coaching game for
years.

Building for everyone

When building my first projects, I was happy that others shared my
enthusiasm. I wrote down ideas from all the people who heard my pitch.
When I reached out to potential users, they told me “this thing will be even
cooler if it can do this, this and this”. I thanked them, packed my to-do list
with new feature requests and jumped into building, waiting for that day
my startup is going to hit the first $100k MRR.
Weeks later, I noticed that none of the people who gave me feature
requests returned to use my product after I built them. Funnily, others
even ignored my messages. I was shocked by that, thinking: “wait, you told
me to add filtering, plugins and change these functions. How can you just
disappear, after I spent 2 weeks adding all that every day?” Somehow they
did. This happened a couple of times before I realized that my approach is
wrong, and months spent on improving the product don’t get more users
into it.

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 I find one bar really cool. It has chill music, nice cocktails, and
enough place to seat. My friend doesn’t like it, because there is no music
he can dance to, there is no beer and no dance floor. The bar still has
guests every day and is doing well. If the owner treated all feedback
equally, he’d go bankrupt with a bar that has big rooms, small rooms, 4
menu sets, option to order at the bar or call the waiter, dishes from 6
cuisines, and Miley Cyrus playing after Chet Baker. No guest would be
emotionally connected to this place because it is made for everyone and
for no one. None of the big startups we know today built on every feature
request.
I changed the way I treat user feedback. I put paying active users
above everyone, because they may even see some value in my product
which I haven’t discovered yet. Their feedback is more important than
what my friends say, though my friends have the best intentions.
Second, are paying non-active users. I had them because I sold
cheap lifetime access during beta. As they weren’t active, they tended to
ignore my reach outs. It’s bad that they gave me no option to improve my
product for them, but they didn’t lead me in the wrong direction with
requests either. It’s better not to pre-sell lifetime access to SaaS. Now I
chose to give 3 months for the price of 1 for validation.
Next are non-paying active users. If they return to my product, I still
count their feedback valuable, however they’re also the most dangerous.
They may be giving more feature requests than those who pay, and pivot
the product in the direction where there is no cash. If I have confronting
requests from someone who paid me and someone who didn’t, I always
prioritize the former.
The last are non-paying non-active users, who killed a bunch of my
products with their eager suggestions. I now inspect their feedback under
a strong lens, even when their words make total sense to me.

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 Not believing in your product
The battle ends when one of the armies surrenders. When they
believe in what they’re fighting for, they’ll stand till the last soldier is gone. I
regret not pushing my note-taking app to success. If I had a stronger vision
and was convinced that it will be useful to people, I’d keep going.
First, I had many unanswered questions. Many people outside my
audience were asking me questions, and it became more challenging to
drag answers from my head. Who needs the product, why do they need it,
why can’t they stay with alternative solutions, what features would bring
them back? Days passed, and I couldn’t answer these with the same
conviction as when I started. Second, I began spending less time working
on the product. A couple of weeks later, I stopped browsing my
unanswered messages and logging back into it.
Believing in my product when everyone constantly challenged me
was extremely hard. I had days when I pitched my startup 5 times and
people always followed up with more questions because dots didn’t
connect in their heads. I know that successful startup founders fit their
pitch in one clear sentence, like a platform for webcam models to make
extra money with their photos. The difficulty is that it takes months to
understand what I sell, who needs it most badly, when they need it and
how it helps them. Most of the time I dropped products before reaching
this conclusion.
Once, I met an entrepreneur at the accelerator’s demo day. The guy
won 3rd place. After the event, he told me that he’s got nothing. I couldn’t
believe it because he’s been bragging about growing user count to a big
audience, while in reality, he had no prototype and no paying users. Later I
saw him go to couple more startup championships to raise awareness for
his product. He made Instagram stories about how he got offers from VCs
which he rejected. From his example, I realized that startup’s valuation is a
bubble. Surprisingly, it’s easier to sell a dream than a working product.
That’s why raising Seed Round is easier than A-Series: your metrics aren’t
challenged that thoroughly. I learned to balance hustling and hard work. I

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can ship an incredible product, but if nobody knows about it - it will never
scale. Or I can sell the idea to investors, partners, and users without putting
in hard work, but this strategy will eventually kill my business and
reputation.
The founder should be the main evangelist of their startup. Having
a strong belief in what we sell changes the way we speak and the
conversions we get. If my product solves the problem I experienced myself,
there must be someone who had it too. My role is to find out how much
they’ll pay for solving it. I charged 25% of my full price while my product
was in beta, which caused me to sell it to people who never logged in. They
made it more difficult for me to understand who really needs it.
I knew all the good and bad about my startup. I knew every feature
I haven’t added yet, all the lags, broken pages, remembered that I haven’t
sold it to anyone in more than 2 months and that none of the 30 people
who tried it logged in for the second time. Everything changed after I
heard I’ll never have a perfect product, but I can always have the perfect
intentions. It’s totally realistic not to meet a single person that fits the ideal
customer profile months after the product is ready.
When we go to buy a BMW M5 and ask for the price, the dealer
doesn’t stand like a guilty child, trying to recall all the engine
characteristics to make a sale. It took me 40 calls and 10 sales to stop
shaking when saying the price. This happened after I realized a couple of
factors: I won’t die if they don’t buy, I have another call in 2 hours; I
shouldn’t blame myself for every missed opportunity, those who need it -
purchase it. Most people who made a purchase kept a positive vibe during
the call and sent their money 40 minutes after meeting me. All those who
drilled me with questions for 2 hours dropped out. That’s how I chose to
make an exceptional product for the few, instead of shipping the average
service to many.
80% of Rolls-Royce’s price is air, and they made 11 billion pounds in
revenue in 2020. Rolls-Royce buyers know less than 5 characteristics about

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their car. At the same time, Ford’s managers sweat retelling 3 booklets and
giving lectures on seat material.
I never had success selling on the feature level, but things changed
when I led people to a “life before the product + life after the product”
conclusion. The more people pay, the less they want to bother about the
magic behind the curtains. Every time the conversation led to me missing
features, it’s always been a shy way to say “no”. Letting randoms ruin the
belief in the product is a symptom for soon startup’s death.

Being too hungry for money

When I was starting my first project I was driven by 1 principle: do
what you can, where you are, with what you have. I don’t regret taking
action for a second, but having a better look at the market would prevent
me from getting mad a lot of times. I had a strong belief that I want to
scale a startup, so I jumped into building the product as soon as I liked my
idea. After months of work, I faced a very challenging scenario, because I
kept putting in a lot of effort without seeing much output. I never
expected to make millions in a short period of time to retire at the age of
24. Neither have I thought that I’ll end up with no product and no users
after shipping apps and SaaS for half a year.
Next time I launch a startup, I’ll soberly evaluate how long I got to
be pushing hard without making money. There are 2 opposites when
choosing the market: A is high competition and quicker money. Z is low
competition and hard to find the money. Many of us want to go after blue
ocean opportunities which appear in niche markets which blow up within
a few years. However, going after blue ocean opportunities without 12
months of runway caused me to jump from 1 opportunity to another
without bringing them to success. I lasted 8-12 weeks before telling myself
it doesn’t work and dropping everything. I would have got them to profit if
reached out to more people for a couple more months. Being short on

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budget, I couldn’t see the broad picture and always found more money in
the opportunity I wasn’t working on.
When scaling a product in a market with no intense competition,
it’s ok to see no money for the first 2 months. I met SaaS founders making
millions that had their first check at the end of Y1. I couldn’t imagine it
takes so much effort to get the project off the ground. It was easier to
agree with people who doubted my idea, and switch to another one.
A great attribute of a promising product is when it saved me time
and money. Then the risk of working on something totally useless
becomes much smaller. When the customer can see how much money
the product saves them, it’s easier to make a sale.
After I started pre-selling my ideas, I stayed with them longer and
got them to profit. Having 20 paying users at the start meant it’s a matter
of time until I get more.
Startups are about high risk. The founder’s job is to bring certainty
to the ambiguous adventure of growing it. If launching startups was easy,
success wouldn’t be as thrilling. However, startup is not a hobby and it
should make money. In case I’m not approaching investors to cover my
living expenses for the first year, I wouldn’t go after the blue ocean
opportunity again.
I still believe in going after small markets which will exponentially
grow in the future, building an amazing product for this niche and turning
into a wealthy monopoly. But one of my main takeaways from 2021 is that if
it’s tough to find competitors, it’s going to be as tough to find customers.
Not being prepared to put a lot of work to see the first output, buried the
projects which I still find legit.
When we are short on money, women and potential users can
smell it a mile away. This is a dangerous spot, as no one likes to buy from a
hungry salesman. Customers should be excited by the product to feel
they’re getting a good deal. Trying to push the offer down their throat
finishes with no sales and spoiled relationships.

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 Lowering prices for the sake of getting more users
Never works for various reasons. If people don’t buy our product, it’s
because they don’t find it as valuable as we assume. I gave one guy a
discount to my program, he dropped out on the second week. Decreasing
the price tag doesn’t make our potential customers want our product
more, but ruins positioning. When the buyer will die if they don’t get from
A to B and see we have the bridge, they’ll buy for any price. When
somebody doesn’t care about getting to B, low price doesn’t boost the
desire.
Max and I are both entrepreneurs browsing Indie Hackers. We have
same amounts in savings. Bob wants to sell us alcohol and thinks we’re the
same profile. However, Max may spend $500 on a bottle of champagne
and finds it absurd to spend more than $30 on whiskey. I can buy a $200
whiskey but don’t spend money on expensive champagne. Similar profiles,
but I will want Bob’s champagne with an 80% discount and Max will see it
as a good bargain. If we get discount requests, we’re selling to the wrong
people.

Secret chapter
Ok so if all these Startup Killers kill the startup, how do we build a
successful one? Pick an idea that saves time and money. It’s best if this
idea is a solution to the problem you experienced yourself. Draw 2 main
screens with 3 core features. Reach out to people who faced the same
problem. Make 10 sales to understand who converts easier. Ship the MVP.
Close 10 more sales. Build features they ask for. Ask why they bought. Put
their answers into the landing page. Get 100 users by sharing the link with
the right people. Reinvest in ads. Find strategic partners with your
audience. Scale.
I summed it up into 1 paragraph, but can talk details for weeks.
Usually people turn their service into SaaS, while I turned a SaaS into a
service. My last SaaS was helping founders overcome obstacles. Users loved

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1-1s with me and that’s how I became a Founder Coach. Now I help SaaS
founders like you to get skills for turning broke SaaS into money printers.
If you feel I can help you, I need to know you exist. Apply for my
Founder Transformation Program at denisshatalin.com, and we’ll fix your
startup in days. Feedbucket.app partnered with me at 0 users. We closed
the first B2B client in 17 days, 7 of which were their free trial. We got 4 more
by the end of the first month. I don’t want you to experience these
sleepless nights, frustration and hopelessness like I did. You’ll get the skills
to never struggle with scaling a SaaS project ever again. Let me help you.

Talk soon,
Denis Shatalin

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