The Ultimate Startup Checklist

Trust me you want to make sure you own the trademark for the domain name and business name. People can get very salty when someone succeeds

What are the general terms of your product use, make sure you nail everything down. This will prevent a world of pain down the road

Use cheap services, apps or use your own skillset to register your business

Have a lawyer write down your privacy policy that covers your data handling. Or use a tool like Iubenda

Ensure you follow all the GDPR and data compliance policies listed under GDPR regulations. Mainly around customer anonimity and the option to allow the customer to delete their data

What quality about your product are you proud of. e.g "ease of use" What is the benefit e.g "no learning curve" Value proposition e.g "Design like a pro without going to design college" Ref: Julian.com

The goal of the header is to quickly tell me what your app does (its hard I know), your subheader needs to tell the user why they should care. e.g Header: RemoteWorkly cuts meeting times in half Subheader: So you can focus on getting work done without spending late hours

Address who and what you're replacing e.g "Replace your Google Docs, Notes, Emails, Reminder tools with one app"

If you're comfortable, share a demo about how your product works. A video will really help people understand what you're exactly about and they'll get to see the app in use vs just conceptual words.

WIIFM - Whats In It For Me (customer) - always use messaging around you, whenever you find yourself saying "we, I, us" a lot, try to fix it. Talk TO the customer not AT

A great little tool to make sure your sentence structures are simple

Make sure you ask your customer to try your app out multiple times across the page

Street performers put the first $10 seed fund so other people see and donate. People take actions based on trust, no one wants to be the first. Build social proof and make sure the social proof explains how the app made their life better

Use this page to share values of your product in depth

If you're product targets multiple personas, ensure you have persona specific pages - this helps boost conversion. This also gives you a chance to real nail down specific pains a user faces

"Share meeting notes to slack in 1 click" vs "Don't waste time copy pasting notes"

Build out your homepage with your main value proposition, outcome based features and share the story about the product and how it will make your users life better and make them achieve what they want

Share all the specifics of your business and popular pages in the footer. Socials, About page, Ts and Cs

The FAQ page is the sales objection page. During the validation period, find out every reason why someone would not use this app, and the questions they asked you. These are objections, resolve those

Offer a very friendly cancellation and refund policy

What quality about your product are you proud of. e.g "ease of use" What is the benefit e.g "no learning curve" Value proposition e.g "Design like a pro without going to design college" Ref: Julian.com

- Shortlist, starting a raise, putting it in your radar - This is where we’re at with company and traction - Will reach out soon Make sure you CRM all of this

The goal of the header is to quickly tell me what your app does (its hard I know), your subheader needs to tell the user why they should care. e.g Header: RemoteWorkly cuts meeting times in half Subheader: So you can focus on getting work done without spending late hours

Kanban board of people to talk to Backlog, who said yes to closing the round Good understanding who is keen and isn’t This helped https://wemoney.com.au raise a $2M round mid pandemic

- CPM | Cost per 1000 impressions (what you pay to Facebook) - CTR | Click-through rate. What’s the percentage of people clicking on your ad?

- CPC | Cost per click - CR | The conversion rate of your website.

Address who and what you're replacing e.g "Replace your Google Docs, Notes, Emails, Reminder tools with one app"

Track all your customer support tickets without losing sight of whats important

People trust recommendations from people they know, thats how humans operate. Build a great product that encourages people to share the value you've given them to others similar to your customers

Knowing where users search for solutions will help you optimise your advertising spend

This is not to do with frequency, this question helps understand what series of events or under what environment does your customer face this problem. This helps build the persona and work out at which exact moment during a customers day do they face this problem. Helps with marketing. "Are you not looking forward to writing meeting minutes again?"

Understand what you're replacing. Are you replacing 50 steps with 1, are you replacing someone expensive like a consultant. Understand fully what you're replacing (every product is brining convenience to a problem) so you can solve exactly for the customers current inadequacy

What is your unique insight as a founder, this unique insight will soon enough become your IP

If you're comfortable, share a demo about how your product works. A video will really help people understand what you're exactly about and they'll get to see the app in use vs just conceptual words.

Use tools like viral loops or vyper to set up a viral referral waitlist system. This was popularised by robinhood

Don't build things from scratch. Use firebase for OAuth, use Hasura for your entire CRUD system etc etc

Make sure users test your application and you identify UX and messaging flaws. Do not interrupt the person or explain the app to them when they're using the app - you're not going to be there when every user signs up

WIIFM - Whats In It For Me (customer) - always use messaging around you, whenever you find yourself saying "we, I, us" a lot, try to fix it. Talk TO the customer not AT

Version control is the only way code should be developed in 2020. Helps you create different versions and timestamp "save" versions of your code

Build for pace, use your favourite and comfortable tech stack.

A great little tool to make sure your sentence structures are simple

Get your close mates to upvote all your posts across every network

Have user persona specific landing pages so you can really hone into the pain customers experience

Be honest and transparent. During the whole process. You’ll feel good about yourself and form life long connections.

Send out event based triggers driven on user behaviour. Ask users to complete a task (Udemy sends emails to complete courses) or ask users to comeback or ask why they haven't used the app in a while

Trust me you want to make sure you own the trademark for the domain name and business name. People can get very salty when someone succeeds

You don't need to test everything, i.e unit tests, you can perform e2e tests to a certain safety factor

The one person who will for sure reject you. Work out all the places that they said no, because their agenda will be shoot you down - they will find all the holes for you, for free! If you can impress them, then you've basically won

What are the general terms of your product use, make sure you nail everything down. This will prevent a world of pain down the road

Use your defined customer personas to find respective targetings. Country or Interests. You can use FBs insight manager to get key insights into what people like, follow or do. Find people commenting on your competitions ads (FB ads library), then click into their account, click on the "more button" and then click on "interests" - you will now see the interests of your idea audience. You can also use the ads manager when creating a custom audience to find "related" targeting groups.

Do NOT spam, build a reputation in all these groups you'll soon start promoting. Appreciate the temperment of people's reaction to self promoters. Instead of linking to your site, create images you can share educating people on content pieces and @yourcompany or watermark at the bottom. Follow a 9-1 rule with groups, contribute, interact and provide value nine times for every simple ask you have. This is a great way to quickly build trust and authority with a high targeted group of people. Here's two opensourced airtables with 160 places to post your product => https://airtable.com/shrmyNNiIAIpCkizv/tblFWgjx0wLg9Z24t & https://airtable.com/shrsG3GG7miGLCdtY/tblaDcz5n90uioSdn

Make sure you ask your customer to try your app out multiple times across the page

This is covered before but its important to mention again, make sure you have specific landing pages for each customer type

Set up a dropdown asking people where they heard of you, this is important. Its immediate data on which marketing channels are working great so you can look at budgeting that better

Make it easy for people to share your product or content with native and web based social sharing. Prefil the written content so all they need to do is click share

After user testing, identify points of resistance. Before the user experiences this stage display social proof to validate their decision. Remember people buy with emotion and justify with logic. Make them convert with emotion, and as a result they will get value from your app which will help with logical jusification e.g Asking to integrate their bank details.

Street performers put the first $10 seed fund so other people see and donate. People take actions based on trust, no one wants to be the first. Build social proof and make sure the social proof explains how the app made their life better

Run a small campaign across social media networks to get some warm traffic to your launch

Make communicating with your customer easy. Integrate your Drift and Slack so whenever a customer messages you can respond to them directly from slack

A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them.

Let your customers know you're working hard and listening to their feedback. Make your customers aware of new features you've launched so they appreciate that their money is being put to use

People love success stories. Share your journey on Twitter or Linkedin etc. It becomes an incredible compounding cycle as you share more stories you acquire more customers and rinse and repeat

Use Sentry or LogRocket to track bugs and errors so you can address them before your customers complain

A pixel is a piece of code that follows users interactions when they've visited your site and lets you retarget ads to them to get them back to your website

Customers will need changes and you'll need to deploy them fast. Ensure you've got a strong CI/CD pipeline setup

Ask and you shall receive. People are nicer than you think. Reach out to your best customers and ask them to jump on a call, try understand why they like your product. Also try sit down with customers who look like the right audience but are poor users, understand why they're leaving because you need to fix those leaks

If you've got a SPA, Google has announced that it will render JS so you don't need to worry about it, but incase you're pedantic you can set up server side rendering to make sure when content is fed to google it's fed with all the text assets pre-rendered.

You'd want your server to overload, but you want to be prepared. Set up appropriate signalling triggers or auto-scale systems for your servers to adjust to new load

Financials, Good structure to pitch deck (Sequoia deck is the golden standard)

Use tools like wiza.co or phantombuster to scrape user emails from linkedin and reach out to them

Its getting easier to sell your product. More people are hearing about your solution and people are willing to pay faster

A robots. txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can't request from your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests; it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google.

You need to be active on all the feedback websites. Personally respond to every good and bad comment, they need to know you're a human and they need to fall in love with your story

Use cheap services, apps or use your own skillset to register your business

Referral schemes are great to attract new customers. You need to create two way incentive both for people signing up as well as the distributors

Drive scarcity in referrals, give the first 100 users on launch day a certain discount for sharing your app

Use Semrush and Quora filters to find the top (first page) positioned quora answers to the topics of your niche. Answer these questions. You wont get any SEO juice but you'll get strong compounding referral traffic. Also it sits on the internet forever and its a great long term strategy

If possible look into creating habit forming loops from a variety of patterns that trigger dopamine surges. Variable rewards for e.g or gamifications

Use this page to share values of your product in depth

Ensure you have consistent messaging, no typos and the branding of the product is at par with what you're solving e.g Flames and skulls won't work for kids clothes

Use a product like frill, canny or getbeamer to collect important feature and roadmap feedback from your customers. It's an excellent way to communicate with your customer base

Have a lawyer write down your privacy policy that covers your data handling. Or use a tool like Iubenda

Subtly influencing how the user will respond by activating associations before a user performs another task. Checkout growth.design/psychology. If you're building a travel app, show sunny photos of beaches as the user onboards

Make everything look pretty and easy to digest. Graphs , numbers and pressos. This helped www.gospringo.com raise their seed round in a couple months

Make sure the subscription agreement/raise docs have been double-checked by a lawyer. What will happen if things go sour ?

Use Phantombuster to scrape emails, twitter accounts or insta accounts. You can then manually message or auto message people to share some articles, build 4 layers of trust and then share your product as well

Create different onboarding flows specific to the persona of the customer onboarding

If you're product targets multiple personas, ensure you have persona specific pages - this helps boost conversion. This also gives you a chance to real nail down specific pains a user faces

Who are you solving the problem for and why are you solving it for them. Most importantly how are you solving it from them. Explain why their current process is mundane and how you fix it

Segment your customers based on activity, identify bad users to good ones. Use this to then set up different email, activation or user feedback sessions

Don't let everyone access your app in the early days. Resistive onboarding is good, it means only people who really want your product have access to it. So your early group are high intent users. Also this gives you a chance to set up a call with the customer and demo the product, more importantly understand the pain points they're facing and looking to have solved

People buy from people who they trust (refer to word of mouth) - sell your product via influencers and you'll automatically get validation and a huge reach. Circle.so did this with Sahil Lavingya and the founder mentioned their first 100 or 1000 customers came just from one tweet

Google LOVES fast pages. Improve your page speed through delaying heavy asset load like images or videos. Make user of CDNs and static sites to ensure TTL (time to load) is fast

"Share meeting notes to slack in 1 click" vs "Don't waste time copy pasting notes"

Don't get a lazy eye, keep improving your adsets and ads based on your ad performance every 2-3 days

Once the user is into the app, give them a checklist of tasks to complete that walks them through the minimum steps required to get to the "Wow" factor. This is important to improve paid conversion

These are meta tags or snippets of code that control the way URLs are displayed when you share your website across the internet. They're part of the FB open graph protocol

Its 2020, use Drag and drop tools to build a basic no code tool to share with early customers. Try see if people will find value in this basic version, if they do - they you're onto something big as you can scale the features when you build it using code

Negotiate on the equity split / valuation. Don’t just settle because you want to raise. Negotiate.

51.53% of traffic these days is mobile, optimise your website for mobile traffic and page load speed

Make the onboarding UX extremely easy, only collect what is needed to get the user to experience value immediately. Similar to "Easy onboarding above"

Google likes websites that are well structured with defined H1, H2 and p tags as well as usage of table of contents as well as images with references

Create loyalty programs based on actions or duration. Offer discounts for customers who've been with you for more than 6 months. Product hunt lets you submit your own product only after you've logged onto the app for three consecutive days and upvoted a certain product

Long tail keyword search helps you when you're trying to rank in a competitive space. Long-tail keywords are keywords that are much more specific – and ...well longer – than more commonly searched for keywords. They receive a lot less traffic per se, but they receive very targeted high converting traffic

Build a Look A Like audience from the eBooks you should have created during the pre-marketing phase. This is a high intent audience and it'll help FB find people for your product straight out the bat

Manual linkedin outreach to your ideal customers. You can share promotional and educational information on your linkedin about certain topics of your business. G from lemlist did a great job where he'd share cold emailing tips and people would love it, thats probably where they generated most of their traffic

To the point above, lazy load heavy assets as Google loves FAST sites

Launch on existing communities. This also builds up your domain authority

Pace is everything in Startups. Measure what you can build in 3 weeks, use this time as a stretch to see which features you can give up. PS This can't be done for all apps

Join specific FB groups, sub-reddits, slack/discord groups where people share what they've worked on. And use launch pads like producthunt, indiehackers and hackernews to bolster to the top. Remember with PH the first 1 makes it or breaks it, you need to get people to upvote and comment, people who have karma on PH help with your rating.

Commitment is the best form of validation. Set up pre-order pages to get customers to buy heavy discounted versions of your product

Use Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Moz or Semrush to find keywords to rank for. Get inspiration from what people are searching for, what your competition is ranking for as well as specific keyword combinations based on location

Join communities like OnDeck to build a bond a relationship with people raising or VCs/famous/powerful people The cold outreach process has a fairly low conversion rate. More on this in another point

Total Addressable Market will define how big your market is so you know the business has strong legs and gives you options for creating a niche wide enough

Collecting money is a problem for everyone running a small business. Can you niche it to just restaurants or freelancers etc

This is picking up these days where people are sharing interactive blogs via checklists (lol) or slidebars to improve the time people spend on a page, indicating value to google

Reach out to any integrations you've got going and mention if you can guest blog on their side with a backlink to your website about how the integration works. Most won't say no as its helping them, the more investment users make into other tools that depend on third party tool, the more users are stuck to those popular tools

Users tend to stick to products they've invested time into. Build your product up so users have built an investment into your app, this can be via social status (following on linkedin) or through assets and configurations they've created via your app. That investment will prevent people from churning and have them comeback to your app

Reward positive behaviours, in this case positive is someone who shares content. When they do ask them to screen shot and send it across and give them a reward

A MUST - make your product work for you. Build growth into the product so product and marketing are working together and not fighting. Network effects, Branded User Generated Content (TikTok), Visible products (eg. powered by), Make shareability extremely simple (e.g Tiktok has web version for people to view when shared via mobile app). More covered here if you're interested

Use tools like viral loops or vyper to set up a viral referral waitlist system. This was popularised by robinhood

Make sure users test your application and you identify UX and messaging flaws. Do not interrupt the person or explain the app to them when they're using the app - you're not going to be there when every user signs up

Have user persona specific landing pages so you can really hone into the pain customers experience

Ensure you have consistent messaging, no typos and the branding of the product is at par with what you're solving e.g Flames and skulls won't work for kids clothes

Don't let everyone access your app in the early days. Resistive onboarding is good, it means only people who really want your product have access to it. So your early group are high intent users. Also this gives you a chance to set up a call with the customer and demo the product, more importantly understand the pain points they're facing and looking to have solved

Its 2020, use Drag and drop tools to build a basic no code tool to share with early customers. Try see if people will find value in this basic version, if they do - they you're onto something big as you can scale the features when you build it using code

Pace is everything in Startups. Measure what you can build in 3 weeks, use this time as a stretch to see which features you can give up. PS This can't be done for all apps

Commitment is the best form of validation. Set up pre-order pages to get customers to buy heavy discounted versions of your product

A MUST - make your product work for you. Build growth into the product so product and marketing are working together and not fighting. Network effects, Branded User Generated Content (TikTok), Visible products (eg. powered by), Make shareability extremely simple (e.g Tiktok has web version for people to view when shared via mobile app). More covered here if you're interested

Sean Ellis' Impact, Confidence, Ease solution. Create a table and a score out of 10 for each feature across the features impact to your north star, how sure you are you'll achieve your north star with this feature and how easy is it to build this feature

No point building an app without seeing where customers are experiencing pain. Make it extremely easy for customers to get in touch with you. Build a relationship with them

These are great free tools to create wireframes to verify UX directions for the product you're building. This will make it easier for you to explain what you're building to customers

What is the core metric of success. e.g Sign ups, someone creating a design in your app, someone adding their profile details ? What is the core success metric for the problem you're solving. RemoteWorkly's success metric is measured by the number of reduced impromptu meetings customers have as a result of using our app.

Create hype around your product. Find and build an audience around your problem, this way you don't even need to do customer research, simply put out a question and your community will tell you what they want or not

Ensure your app is secure, environment variables are locked, admin passwords are secure. Ensure there's no backdoors open to your AWS/Cloud service provider. Hash your customer passwords

Share your journey and product build across all your social platforms. In the early days, people buy the product for the problem you're solving AS WELL as the the reason the person behind the business is building it for

Don't build things from scratch. Use firebase for OAuth, use Hasura for your entire CRUD system etc etc

Version control is the only way code should be developed in 2020. Helps you create different versions and timestamp "save" versions of your code

Build for pace, use your favourite and comfortable tech stack.

You don't need to test everything, i.e unit tests, you can perform e2e tests to a certain safety factor

Use Sentry or LogRocket to track bugs and errors so you can address them before your customers complain

Customers will need changes and you'll need to deploy them fast. Ensure you've got a strong CI/CD pipeline setup

Ensure you've integrated reaction based email sequences. Onboarding emails, emails for forgotten password, or if a user has become inactive. This will be part of your activation and retention strategy

Build a design system for consistency, pace and ease of development. This will save you days when you're building for pace

Instead of launching on AWS, use something as simple as heroku and netlify to build and deploy your application in seconds

If you have non-tech founders, ensure you have an admin panel set up for the team to access the data and analyse information. Metabase does this and is free to use

After user testing, identify points of resistance. Before the user experiences this stage display social proof to validate their decision. Remember people buy with emotion and justify with logic. Make them convert with emotion, and as a result they will get value from your app which will help with logical jusification e.g Asking to integrate their bank details.

Subtly influencing how the user will respond by activating associations before a user performs another task. Checkout growth.design/psychology. If you're building a travel app, show sunny photos of beaches as the user onboards

Once the user is into the app, give them a checklist of tasks to complete that walks them through the minimum steps required to get to the "Wow" factor. This is important to improve paid conversion

Make the onboarding UX extremely easy, only collect what is needed to get the user to experience value immediately. Similar to "Easy onboarding above"

Trigger email for people dropped off half way through the onboarding experience to welcome them back to the app

Make sure you've built your code deployment in a way that makes it very easy to A/B test your onboarding process

Welcome and demo video when the user signs into the app for the first time go a long way

Improve conversion following the investment principle. Offer customer a balance between investments and rewards. If you want a user to convert give them delayed gratification, ask them for just enough info, then award them with something "Free account, a progress bar - congrats etc". Think of onboarding like a netflix show, each step needs to be a cliff hanger to the next step. Keep onboarding to less than 4 clicks as a usual rule. Carrd lets me build my entire website and only asks me to sign up once i'm ready to deploy. Resistance < Investment.

Your user needs to reach the wow factor ASAP. Work towards helping your user achieve that to improve retention. e.g if you're an email SaaS app, make it super easy to send the first email. If you're a no code website builder, make it very easy for them to launch their website

Be very deliberate about what problem you're solving for your customer and where your product positions itself (privacy, pace etc)

Segment your customers based on activity, identify bad users to good ones. Use this to then set up different email, activation or user feedback sessions

Hotjar makes it feel like you're looking at the user actually use the app, without revealing sensitive data and Sentry helps with error logging. This setup will prevent you from asking the user for "steps to recreate bug"

Set up goal tracking in amplitude to work out how many users are performing a desired task. e.g I want a user to click on the "Create now" button on the "Activities page", So I will set a goal tracking from sign in to landing on activities to create now and measure where is the optimal place to put the button for higher conversions

The FB pixel will help with retargeting users based on their interaction with your app to re-engage with them or find people similar to your best users

Send out event based triggers driven on user behaviour. Ask users to complete a task (Udemy sends emails to complete courses) or ask users to comeback or ask why they haven't used the app in a while

Let your customers know you're working hard and listening to their feedback. Make your customers aware of new features you've launched so they appreciate that their money is being put to use

If possible look into creating habit forming loops from a variety of patterns that trigger dopamine surges. Variable rewards for e.g or gamifications

Create different onboarding flows specific to the persona of the customer onboarding

Create loyalty programs based on actions or duration. Offer discounts for customers who've been with you for more than 6 months. Product hunt lets you submit your own product only after you've logged onto the app for three consecutive days and upvoted a certain product

Users tend to stick to products they've invested time into. Build your product up so users have built an investment into your app, this can be via social status (following on linkedin) or through assets and configurations they've created via your app. That investment will prevent people from churning and have them comeback to your app

Subtle and timed in-app notifications are great external triggers in the hooked model to get users to re-engage with your app

If customers churn, set up exit interviews to understand why they left so you can help your existing customers by fixing those issues

Flows with the previous point, send out advice to customers on how to achieve their goals better with your app on educational campaigns. Even if users don't use your app they will learn from you and you'll become an authority in their mind

Educate, always educate. Educate your customer on how they can get better at achieving their goals. Don't be too pushy, but share useful tips. Lemlist does a great job, I would subscribe just to learn about cold emailing even if I didn't use the app

Great customer experience goes a REALLY long way. Use chatbots, customer calls or emails to build dialog and make sure they are happy with the app

Set up a dropdown asking people where they heard of you, this is important. Its immediate data on which marketing channels are working great so you can look at budgeting that better

Make it easy for people to share your product or content with native and web based social sharing. Prefil the written content so all they need to do is click share

Referral schemes are great to attract new customers. You need to create two way incentive both for people signing up as well as the distributors

Reward positive behaviours, in this case positive is someone who shares content. When they do ask them to screen shot and send it across and give them a reward

Its getting easier to sell your product. More people are hearing about your solution and people are willing to pay faster

When your value is no longer pegged to your product price you know you're doing something right

People share what makes them look good. If people are recommending your product without provocation it means they really appreciate your solution. Word of mouth is deadly

People innately want to use your product vs being externally triggered to use your app. You are top of mind everytime they face a problem and almost become a synonym. "Lets uber it"

Use customer feedback interviews to figure out how often customers are using your product, any resistances to upgrade plan, if they're actively recommending the solution to others.

Sean Ellis's mathematical strategy, ask your customers how they would feel if your product didn't exist tomorrow, and if 40% of your user base say very dissapointed you can assume you've reached mathematical PMF

This is covered before but its important to mention again, make sure you have specific landing pages for each customer type

Who are you solving the problem for and why are you solving it for them. Most importantly how are you solving it from them. Explain why their current process is mundane and how you fix it

If you're addressing different persona's make sure you offer them custom flows. This way each flow is unique and the customer feels like the solution is geared specific for them

Track all your customer support tickets without losing sight of whats important

Make communicating with your customer easy. Integrate your Drift and Slack so whenever a customer messages you can respond to them directly from slack

Use a product like frill, canny or getbeamer to collect important feature and roadmap feedback from your customers. It's an excellent way to communicate with your customer base

Klaviyo is popular for eComm,but there are other tools you can use that you give DB access to and then set up triggers based on events in your DB

Learn to add some common FAQ questions answered in your chat bot so you don't need to address the same questions again and again

A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them.

If you've got a SPA, Google has announced that it will render JS so you don't need to worry about it, but incase you're pedantic you can set up server side rendering to make sure when content is fed to google it's fed with all the text assets pre-rendered.

A robots. txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can't request from your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests; it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google.

Google LOVES fast pages. Improve your page speed through delaying heavy asset load like images or videos. Make user of CDNs and static sites to ensure TTL (time to load) is fast

These are meta tags or snippets of code that control the way URLs are displayed when you share your website across the internet. They're part of the FB open graph protocol

51.53% of traffic these days is mobile, optimise your website for mobile traffic and page load speed

Google likes websites that are well structured with defined H1, H2 and p tags as well as usage of table of contents as well as images with references

Long tail keyword search helps you when you're trying to rank in a competitive space. Long-tail keywords are keywords that are much more specific – and ...well longer – than more commonly searched for keywords. They receive a lot less traffic per se, but they receive very targeted high converting traffic

To the point above, lazy load heavy assets as Google loves FAST sites

Use Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Moz or Semrush to find keywords to rank for. Get inspiration from what people are searching for, what your competition is ranking for as well as specific keyword combinations based on location

This is picking up these days where people are sharing interactive blogs via checklists (lol) or slidebars to improve the time people spend on a page, indicating value to google

Set up to monitor and maintain your google search results. Also use it to confirm that google can find and craw your site and request for re-indexing of new/updated content

Interlink between blogs by referencing content of one from the other. It will show Google that you've built an internal web and backed your own theories with further content within your domain

Use the hundred 3rd party tools out there to help you identify and fix any broken links across your site

Use tools like answer the public to find what questions people often ask with respect to a topic and write a blog addressing EXACTLY that question

People trust recommendations from people they know, thats how humans operate. Build a great product that encourages people to share the value you've given them to others similar to your customers

Do NOT spam, build a reputation in all these groups you'll soon start promoting. Appreciate the temperment of people's reaction to self promoters. Instead of linking to your site, create images you can share educating people on content pieces and @yourcompany or watermark at the bottom. Follow a 9-1 rule with groups, contribute, interact and provide value nine times for every simple ask you have. This is a great way to quickly build trust and authority with a high targeted group of people. Here's two opensourced airtables with 160 places to post your product => https://airtable.com/shrmyNNiIAIpCkizv/tblFWgjx0wLg9Z24t & https://airtable.com/shrsG3GG7miGLCdtY/tblaDcz5n90uioSdn

Use Semrush and Quora filters to find the top (first page) positioned quora answers to the topics of your niche. Answer these questions. You wont get any SEO juice but you'll get strong compounding referral traffic. Also it sits on the internet forever and its a great long term strategy

Use Phantombuster to scrape emails, twitter accounts or insta accounts. You can then manually message or auto message people to share some articles, build 4 layers of trust and then share your product as well

Manual linkedin outreach to your ideal customers. You can share promotional and educational information on your linkedin about certain topics of your business. G from lemlist did a great job where he'd share cold emailing tips and people would love it, thats probably where they generated most of their traffic

Join specific FB groups, sub-reddits, slack/discord groups where people share what they've worked on. And use launch pads like producthunt, indiehackers and hackernews to bolster to the top. Remember with PH the first 1 makes it or breaks it, you need to get people to upvote and comment, people who have karma on PH help with your rating.

Reach out to any integrations you've got going and mention if you can guest blog on their side with a backlink to your website about how the integration works. Most won't say no as its helping them, the more investment users make into other tools that depend on third party tool, the more users are stuck to those popular tools

Said it 20 times by now, educational content will make it huge for you. You can always outeducate your competition. It builds trust, familiarity and authority. Also it builds guilt - which leads to conversion. People feel guilty for learning so much from you and will try your product to ease the guilt. Similar sentiment with trust applies

Its hard work, but if done right can blow up your business. Know your audience, and where they hang out. Insta is an example, can be Twitter, Newsletters or even Tiktok. Constantly and continuously share value and education.

Don't just blog on your private domain, blog there AND also copy the same content to existing communities such as MakerPad, Dev.to, Medium, DesignerNews, Almanac, Indiehackers. You NEED to be consistent and share an honest journey every few days about what you did, whats happening and your progress. You'll build a very healthy community that will actively give you feedback on your direction

- CPM | Cost per 1000 impressions (what you pay to Facebook) - CTR | Click-through rate. What’s the percentage of people clicking on your ad?

- CPC | Cost per click - CR | The conversion rate of your website.

Use your defined customer personas to find respective targetings. Country or Interests. You can use FBs insight manager to get key insights into what people like, follow or do. Find people commenting on your competitions ads (FB ads library), then click into their account, click on the "more button" and then click on "interests" - you will now see the interests of your idea audience. You can also use the ads manager when creating a custom audience to find "related" targeting groups.

A pixel is a piece of code that follows users interactions when they've visited your site and lets you retarget ads to them to get them back to your website

Don't get a lazy eye, keep improving your adsets and ads based on your ad performance every 2-3 days

Build a Look A Like audience from the eBooks you should have created during the pre-marketing phase. This is a high intent audience and it'll help FB find people for your product straight out the bat

Customer testimonials are great ad creatives as you're basically sharing someone elses love for you. When you're hitting someone cold with a sell, it helps ease that with someone else hyping you up and not just you

What is the customer life time value for your product. This number helps you navigate your Customer acquisition cost beyond just a one month subscription fee

Set up a daily budget you're comfortable with. You will lose money in the initial days but it is the cost of buying data

What is the average revenue per user across different plans. This will help define your actual Monthly Recurring Revenue

Build ad creatives such as images or videos. An ad should not look like an ad. Show immediate value to the user, and if you're doing video ads, show people using your product and direct result they get from it.

Get your close mates to upvote all your posts across every network

Run a small campaign across social media networks to get some warm traffic to your launch

You'd want your server to overload, but you want to be prepared. Set up appropriate signalling triggers or auto-scale systems for your servers to adjust to new load

Drive scarcity in referrals, give the first 100 users on launch day a certain discount for sharing your app

People buy from people who they trust (refer to word of mouth) - sell your product via influencers and you'll automatically get validation and a huge reach. Circle.so did this with Sahil Lavingya and the founder mentioned their first 100 or 1000 customers came just from one tweet

Launch on existing communities. This also builds up your domain authority

Launch multiple times here and don't be spamming. ShowHN works well sometimes. If you rank in the top page of HN you're looking at atleast 30-40k hits in a day

Share your app with all your mates, friends and family

Reach out to your existing audience who already love your product

You've hopefully got a newsletter audience who trust your word from your weekly education. Send out a blast email to them (not isolated email) - your usual weekly letter but also mention you've launched a product. They just got free education from you, they will feel guilt to owing you something

Launching on directories like G2, Capterra, GetApp, Stackshare, Siftery, AlternativeTo, Betalist, Betapage helps with SEO and early user acquisition.

Confirm that your app onboarding is working perfectly before you launch

Reach out to popular bloggers with a content spin that will help them get clicks to their site. Write down most of the blog, the clickbaity title, the spin and share the images when you cold outreach - make their job easy

Post your product on these sites and get customers to give reviews. They're very high ranked and people go to them to validate their trust in you

People love success stories. Share your journey on Twitter or Linkedin etc. It becomes an incredible compounding cycle as you share more stories you acquire more customers and rinse and repeat

Ask and you shall receive. People are nicer than you think. Reach out to your best customers and ask them to jump on a call, try understand why they like your product. Also try sit down with customers who look like the right audience but are poor users, understand why they're leaving because you need to fix those leaks

You need to be active on all the feedback websites. Personally respond to every good and bad comment, they need to know you're a human and they need to fall in love with your story

People really appreciate a great experience, when your app scales you will face lag issues both on a server and UX level, make sure you work on these

You would have identified your "ideal" users and your non-ideal, collect emails of the best cohort, upload to FBs LLA system and let FB find similar customers for you

Talk and then listen listen listen. Learn from your early customers on whats working and whats not. What they would like and what they hate. These are your early champions treat them like kings and queens

Build your content and blog engine very strategically. Utilize pre-build distribution channels like YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram to capture an existing audience. Connect with your customers through content with your social presence. Building content is a very important part of a founders job. Get very good at distributing your content across the internet. Understand that different platforms will absorb content differently. YouTube likes 18 minute videos, LinkedIn likes <60s videos

Use hotjar, amplitude and goal setting to understand exactly where customers are dropping off. Maybe a button is unclear, the copy is confusing or there's too many CTAs in one page. This is crucial in improving customer experience

Focus on the 20% of actions that result in the 80% of results for you

Use tools like wiza.co or phantombuster to scrape user emails from linkedin and reach out to them

Create high value content pieces. Record video showing how long content piece is with catchy title "How to convert 10X leads 5X faster". Then ask people to comment "Interested" if they're keen. This drives interaction to the post and FB will think its popular and promote it to more people in the group. Manually reach out to everyone who's commented. You would have reached out when they asked YOU for something, i.e now they'll be in a position where they naturally owe you. So share the link and follow up to see if they're open to a demo or sign up to your app

If you just opened an email and start mass emailing people you'll end up in spam. You need to build up your IP address and domain warmth. There are manual ways to do it where you set up a network of emails and send messages through to each other. Else you can automate it using tools like lemlist with a warmup feature. They send natural emails between a network of users and automatically "open", "move from spam", and "mark as important" so your email deliverability is on fleek

Be VERY clear about your offer, your discount and why they should care about what you've built for them

Ensure you've got calendly integrated into any drip sequence or cold outreach, to minimise number of front and backs. Also set up auto-reminder for calendly to remind your potential customer about your call so they show up

80% of the job is in the subject line, build your subject line then your content. Make sure you don't look like an ad, you need to sound like a friend so they open it. Get to the point and offer immediate value

- Shortlist, starting a raise, putting it in your radar - This is where we’re at with company and traction - Will reach out soon Make sure you CRM all of this

Kanban board of people to talk to Backlog, who said yes to closing the round Good understanding who is keen and isn’t This helped https://wemoney.com.au raise a $2M round mid pandemic

Be honest and transparent. During the whole process. You’ll feel good about yourself and form life long connections.

The one person who will for sure reject you. Work out all the places that they said no, because their agenda will be shoot you down - they will find all the holes for you, for free! If you can impress them, then you've basically won

Financials, Good structure to pitch deck (Sequoia deck is the golden standard)

Make everything look pretty and easy to digest. Graphs , numbers and pressos. This helped www.gospringo.com raise their seed round in a couple months

Make sure the subscription agreement/raise docs have been double-checked by a lawyer. What will happen if things go sour ?

Negotiate on the equity split / valuation. Don’t just settle because you want to raise. Negotiate.

Join communities like OnDeck to build a bond a relationship with people raising or VCs/famous/powerful people The cold outreach process has a fairly low conversion rate. More on this in another point

Have a look at your constitution. You get a generic one on starting but have a look at your responsibilities as a director as now you have someone else’s money / will have.

Short answers build trust. Know your stuff

When it comes to a business plan - really estimate all costs. Like what are all the costs you’ll actually spend on. People tend to not include everything. It’s best to include. Best to let investors know you’ve overestimated rather by under (not by too much)

Ensure your company structure is set-up for a raise or at least understand what the cap table will look like and how you’ll get there. E.g with 100 shares on offer but you may want an even 3-way split.

For your own sanity prepare for a best-case and a worst-case scenario. Then you expect it all and disconnect emotionally (or at least try to).