Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it

blog.bufferapp.com

46 points·ColinWright··9 comments

He refers to "November Startup Sprint" here on HN. I would love to see regular posts like that for launch & feedback.

The current convention seems to be "Show HN: my app" posts, but I'm worried about missing interesting posts and/or repetitive posts when an app is updated.

How about a monthly/weekly post for apps - similar to "Who's hiring..." - to show off apps/updates & get feedback?

(Also, the november discussions have a http://startupmonth.org/ site which seems to be down. Was there not enough traffic?)

We built http://21times.org to help the November Startup Sprint folks with info and tracking progress, and had about 1500 people signup. (This was an early proof of concept for our startup http://DailyPath.com)

This is great for motivation during a heads-down sprint.

What I'm looking for is slightly different: a place to show off when done and get/give feedback.

That's coming as part of DailyPath.

Registered! Not sure if it's what I was looking for, but it looks interesting for many things!

Back when you did the initial validation with the first two MVP's, did you measure clickthrough rate? If so, how did it compare with the 4% conversion in the real product? (we're looking at ways to design MVP's to predict actual market performance.)

Appreciate you sharing your missteps and successes. It's also awesome to see the lean startup process in action rather than just hear people talk about it. Congrats!

500 customers and a 4% conversion rate - so does that mean 20 paying customers total?

Hi, yep, at that time, when we had 500 users, that meant 20 paying customers. :)

Right now, we stand at over 25,000 and a similar conversion :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com