Some Great F**king Startup Advice

Recently I came across Jason’s Shen’s startup advice website. It seems like he’s either been burnt by a startup before or he’s sick of startups not listening to advice as he does swear just a tad…. Great F**king Startup Advice

Using one design template it randomly loads a new piece of advice either by clicking (JQuery) or swiping on your phone (TouchSwipe). He also uses a tweaked version of Animate.css FlipInX for the animation between each advice step.

I took a look at a few of the pieces of advice.

“Talk to some f**king users”

This one is gold for me because it’s straight to the point. You need to understand your target audience and understand how they will use your site. This isn’t something to do at the end of the project either, it needs to be done up front with the prototype AND THROUGHOUT.

“Don’t worry about f**king competitors”

This one I’m a bit on the fence about. I do agree that some startups spend too much time focusing on their competitors and they therefore ultimately end up making an exact replica of their site. There have been too many times that I’ve heard “I want it to be just like this site” or “make it like this but better”. Considerable time does still need to be spent reviewing competitor’s websites though to make sure that you can differentiate between the two and that your site has strengths where the others do not.

“Write f**king tests”

The chances are with a new startup, you’ll be making constant improvements to the site and creating new areas of functionality constantly. As it’s difficult to test every piece of functionality once new work is deployed, make sure that you have key tests written to help you out.

“Watch out for f**king scope creep”

As a Producer this would be my favourite. Make sure that ALL your requirements are discussed up front, so no sticky situations are run into at a later stage.

“Do f**king one on one’s”

You need to be aware of what every department in your company is working on. One on one's are the perfect time to set up goals and track progress.

“Buy more f**king post-it notes”

What I take from this one is planning and prioritisation. With post its or (Jira) you can document all thoughts in order to easily prioritise by importance and time.

“Start marketing before the f**king product is ready”

So your project has launched. What now? A great website is worth nothing if no-one knows about it. A strategic plan is also needed for how to get traffic to your site. Looking at lead aggregators or doing what you can to build a database prior to launch is essential.

“Measure your f**king metrics”

Once your site launches it’s important to know what works well and what needs more attention. A/B test and find out what improves conversion and what areas have the most drop off.

“Fix your f**king bugs”

Perfect what’s critical before you move on to the next round of work. This is something a client is more inclined to say though...

“Make something people f**king want”

I laughed at this. You’d be surprised how many startups fail because they didn’t actually make something that people really want or need. Rather than creating a site that notifies you every time one of your Facebook friends posts something with the word 'dog' in it, make it actually worthwhile. If you can’t answer the questions:

“When would you actually need this?”

“Why would you use this?”

Then there’s an issue.

So yeah….f**king listen to this advice.