Kevin Hale — A Workshop

How will I know if an investor will like my idea?

That’s the question eating away at most of us looking for funding. Fortunately Kevin Hale has a strategy for those of us who are engineering inclined.

Quite simply, he broke the entire process of starting a company down to an equation. Let the brain dump begin:

Let’s dig a little deeper into this equation. (And no it’s not commutative)

Problem

Here are some key traits of a problem:

• Popularity — How many people have this problem?
• Urgency — Is this a priority 1?
• Frequency — How many times a day, week, month, year do people have this problem
• Expensive — How much are people willing to pay for it?

TIP: Also describe the problem really tightly, don’t be too broad

Solution

TIP: Don’t start here

This is the product, service, experience that answers the user, ideally many users problems.

Pretty straightforward.

Insights

What are the unfair advantages you have when starting this company?

1. Founders — You need to by 1 in 10 in the world, 99% don’t have this!
2. Market — Natural boost when the market you’re growing in is growing super fast; 20% a year
3. Product — 10x compared to the competition
4. How do you get to $100 million a year?
5. Acquisition — Grow with zero money, find users really quickly
6. Monopoly — As you grow build a moat.

What makes your product 10X better?

• Price
• Faster
• Makes me more money
• Does task for me
• Quality

Beliefs

You should be really great at customer support!!

(I second this hard!!!)

Definitely a rough collection of notes, but the formula is simple. Rinse and Repeat.

Thanks Kevin for the workshop!