The 7 Day Startup Experiment

Vulnerabilities that are exploited just means that people care about what you are doing enough to hack it. I think that’s a form of startup validation right?

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Just posted an update for day 2 - WTF is a MVP? http://retromocha.com/7-day-startup/#day2

Love it. Curious how you’re planning to reach out to shopify merchants. I skimmed your posts so sorry in advance if you already discussed that :slight_smile:

Our plan to begin with is to hopefully get some attention with our journaling of the process, but beyond the initial bit of content marketing and launch, we plan on cold emailing 100 Shopify stores.

Longer term if this works we plan on doing content marketing by posting solutions to common Shopify problems and so on, but that wont’ get us customers for the first 30 days.

If anyone has any better ideas on how to get customers in the first month, I’d love to hear it!

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Good stuff. Sounds like a pretty good plan!

Brian,

I’m doing some research on MVP validatidation. You can see my post about that here in the forum.
I’d love to find out about what validation you did (or did not do) and why, as well as what the benefits were of the validation you did do.

I know you’re probably super busy but I may be able to provide some suggestions (I’ve got 19 years of startup experience and have launched over 12 successful products. In fact, All but one of the products I have created have made money. (And the one that didnt’ was the one I didn’t do validation on).

Alright I updated with a day 3 report. We picked a name for this. We are calling it My Shop Heroes. We were able to snag the domain myshopheroes.com and are pretty pleased with it. We added a coming soon page with a countdown timer using the Landing Sumo theme. We are working on the actual landing page as well, which we plan to complete today.

You can read more here: http://retromocha.com/7-day-startup/#day3

I’ve added the day 4 report. We created a coming soon page for My Shop Heroes and we created a landing page ready to go for launch. A couple of cool surprises were how cheap and fast this can be if you go straight HTML. We used Landing Sumo from WrapBootstrap for design and Plasso w/Stripe for payments. The actual building of the page was pretty easy once we picked a design.

Here is the full rundown of day 4: http://retromocha.com/7-day-startup/#day4

There is a typo in your home page…

Unlimited Shopfiy support & small jobs, 24/7

I noticed it in the jpg but it is still in the html…

Oh good catch! Fixed. Thanks!

Alright day 5 posted: http://retromocha.com/7-day-startup/#day5

We locked down a marketing plan that fits what we can get done in the next 30 days. We are actually launching tomorrow so I’ll be posting day 6 later today. We got a bit behind this week, life is busy.

This is interesting.

After invalidating 3 Shopify app ideas in the last 4 months, I started exploring a similar idea last week.

Researching about existent alternatives I’ve just discovered yours and also Shopkare.

My approach to validate the actual value of the idea is to first test by myself the actual value of something like this.

To do that, I’ve just purchased some hours at Fancy Hands and will start testing it with my own store (1899), which I created basically to test my products ideas.

Let’s see how it goes!

Just stumbled upon this one http://shopenhancer.com/ on Product Hunt.

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Wow they just posted that today. Looks like they dropped their landing page before we could. Feels like a copycat job. Not surprising. Oh well.

By the way, My Shop Heroes is live!

You can read the latest update: http://retromocha.com/7-day-startup/#day7

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Hey Brian,

I’m the founder of ShopEnhancer.com . Nice to see that there’s competition :slight_smile: This in fact further proves that both our ideas are valid. Just wanted to clear things up. We soft launched Shop Enhancer a week ago and have had one or two paid signups before the launch. So we’ve been building this since the last month. And we’ve tried posting to Product Hunt since a week or so ago but just got featured by a Hunter today :slight_smile:

Not being rude or anything. Just letting you guys know that we didn’t copycat it. And it’s nice to see that you guys are live! Your site looks cool!

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I totally understand. Waking up this morning to see your service featured on Product Hunt sort of blew my mind on the day of our launch. The timing seems like a huge coincidence.

If you say that you didn’t copy us and that you’ve been working on this for weeks, then I believe you.

After all, we both are taking the model from Dan Norris and doing our best to make it our own. With 140,000 stores on Shopify there is plenty of room for us to both do well.

Good luck!

Yeah, I get what you mean. I’d have had the same reaction with such timing.

Yeah, WPCurve has been the biggest inspiration for us and we owe them for the model. Yeah there’s plenty of room for both of us to do well. Lets keep in touch. Excited to see how it goes for you.

Thanks and best of luck to you too!

Final update:

We did a podcast episode to brain dump on the final result. It didn’t turn out like we thought it would, but we learned a lot. Very valuable experience for us.

Listen to the episode here: http://retromocha.com/show/5/

Would love any feedback if you’ve had similar experiences.

Hey guys - I just want to say… I didn’t copy you guys… I copied Dan Norris. Anyway, I just launched http://planda.co a 24/7 Support company. Oh, and we do unlimited quick fixes.

Would love some feed back from anybody who has or previously has a similar company. Even a “Hey you’re a copy cat” would be appreciated. :smile:

If there isn’t anything to be said that was already said feel free to not respond. I’ve been looking through the last posts and the corresponding links thoroughly.

Thanks!