Sharing my journey of building a startup

The first step is finding a customer to serve.

Hey friends!

As some of you may already know, I decided to leave my job at Teachers Pay Teachers to pursue building a startup full-time. This has long been a goal of mine and I’m excited to be able to devote my focus towards it.

This newsletter is a way through which I plan to share my journey and learning!

What am I working on?

Good question. I’m working on figuring that out right now. What I can share with you today is my approach, which was inspired by these talks by Patrick McKenzie and Justin Jackson that I highly recommend.

The first step is to find a customer that I want to serve. This means finding customers that I would be excited to talk to and work for everyday. It also means finding customers who have tractable problems, or ones that I and a small dedicated team could solve. Finally, and importantly, I want to find customers that have paid money to solve those problems.

In the past, I have explored serving junior developers as a target customer. While I love talking to and helping junior developers, I’ve learned that they don't often reach for paid software solutions. I'm always ready to help junior devs, I just won't be making that into a business for now.

So, I’m putting together a list of potential customers that could fit these three criteria such as online course creators on platforms like Teachable or Udemy. Then, I’ll be reaching into my network, twitter, and slack groups to talk to people with that background. In these conversations, I want to better understand if customers really do have tractable problems, have paid for software, and energize me. A few of the key questions to ask would be:

1. What was the last product, service, or tool you bought for work?

2. What's the least favorite tool you have to use right now?

3. What kinds of tasks are you currently doing in Excel?

In addition to online course creators, I’m also interested in talking to people who are tutoring.  If you know people with these backgrounds or in a related area, I’d love to be introduced! Just hit reply and we can figure out how to get connected.

Excited to share more with y’all soon and thank you so much for the support,

Abhi