I’m a big proponent of experimenting with businesses — testing quickly (and cheaply) and possibly failing at some. I also believe in taking care of one’s team.
This is probably why I found Justin Jackson’s post about his journey with Transistor inspiring and insightful. Jackson took the business from 0 to $30k monthly recurring revenue in just under a year. What I really liked was that each month, half the revenue went to paying the co-founders.
No-code tools these days make it really easy to get a minimum viable product up. Some people compare writing code to using a pro DSLR camera, while no-code is like using a smartphone camera. When it comes to taking photos, I know which one I prefer.
Lego has some really cool ideas for the innovation process. They’ve even created a stage called “pretotypes” which comes before prototypes. They’re super low fidelity, as well as quick to develop and test.
After finding something that works and is generating some kind of revenue, further planning is required for growth. There are ways to plan effectively. This article has some learnings from Eventbrite and Airbnb.
If you want to get something attractive up quickly (and cheaply), Open Doodles is a cool resource for illustrations to snazz up your landing pages. Created by Pablo Stanley, who was also behind Humaaans.