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Noticing the Patterns

I’ve been a surfer for many years. In the time I went from a teenager to  married man with children most of my old surfing buddies gave the sport away. But I’m one of those die hard surfers who still goes surfing winter or summer. For years I would mostly go surfing by myself, which is never as much fun as going surfing with a mate. Half of the joy is in the anticipation while driving down the coast and talking about the session on the way home. Luckily as the years passed, I’ve met other ‘married with kids’ surfer dudes. Mostly people through work and the Startup Scene who love surfing. It’s surprising how many techies and founders are into the sport.

So I’d have different friends I started surfing with and as each weekend approached we’d all be texting each other to organise a car sharing trip, so we could co-ordinate who is surfing where and so on. I had about 5 mates who I’d do this with. Some I even met through #hashtag surfing on twitter to see who locally was talking about surfing. All my mates also had about 5 friends they did this organising with too. What was interesting was that none of us did this via social media, the communication always gravitated towards text messaging. We’d all be getting texts from each other from different sub circles. Every Friday night my phone would be beeping like mad. Often I’d put two of my surfing mates together for a session who didn’t know each other. Yep, it’s the exact same behaviour we see many other apps where people connect over interests rather than via natural social connection. It is comparable to Eatwith.com where you share dinner at a strangers house.

Using a proxy to test in the real market

It was clear there was an existing behaviour pattern here, it could even be a startup opportunity. But rather than go build something wasting time and money, I thought I’d plug the people into a proxy app to test the product market fit. We (a mate and me) decided to use Trello for this purpose.

Trello is a planning tool for project management. It’s not really perfect for scheduling surfing with mates, or documenting surf sessions, and checking into the locations your surfed. But it is good enough. In fact, it has been the perfect tool to find out if there was actually a product market fit. We set up a project page and invited our mates to download the app. A bootstrapped startup which took minutes and cost nothing. We invited 10 mates in total to test it out, and despite the UX issues using an App which is designed for something else, it did two important things for us:

  1. It proved there was demand for a specific product for this purpose.
  2. It gave us significant insight to the UX requirements.

All of us except one mate in ten, and (I don’t want to mention any names – Tim Courtney) are now using this instead of the text messaging. It has even evolved into it’s own forms of Bravado and Gamification – who has been surfing the biggest waves? Who has been going most frequently? Things the users invented themselves. Simultaneously, we are building a V1 of our own app with the lessons we have learned – Surf Troppo or Sneaky Surf – we can’t decide what to call it yet…. Further split testing is needed ☺

We also made sure the target was tight. We figure our audience at this stage is: blokes with families who surf on weekends and live at least 30 mins drive away from the beach. And I know what you’re thinking; ‘a social app to organise surfing with married men who live do not live directly across from breaking waves does not sound like a very big opportunity’ – but I strongly believe in the law of focus: serving a small market first is what gives us the best chance of success later. My worst case scenario here is that I’ve made myself a cool product to improve my social and sporting life.

2 Key Insights for Startup Launches

The first is that best startups are often those that leverage existing behaviour pattern they just add efficiency – they put a ring fence around what is already happening. The second is that we can never be sure until we test in market. We should always test before we build, and using another proxy piece of software is the perfect way to hack that system – just like we have with Trello.

In subsequent posts I’ll detail the lessons, insights and processes to getting off the ground, quickly cheaply, and with an lean iterative approach.

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