9 stages, from the first conversation to a business that repeats. 5 are key milestones: if you do not beat them, nothing else counts. Each stage says how to know it is done and what to do this week.
Goal: Knowing exactly who your product is for: a specific group of people with this problem who already try to solve it somehow, because that shows they care.
Where to start: Put up a simple page that explains in one sentence what you offer them, with a form to join a waiting list. Share it where that group hangs out: if people you do not know sign up, you are on the right track.
Goal: Having a version that someone outside the team can use without you there explaining it.
Where to start: Ask three people from your waiting list to try it and watch, without helping, where they get stuck.
Goal: Getting your first hundred users through a route you can repeat (a channel, a community, a type of content), not just through people you know.
Where to start: Pick one place where your audience is (a forum, a social network, a group) and post there consistently for two weeks. Measure how many sign up from it.
Goal: Getting someone you do not know to reach the part that solves their problem and come back without you asking.
Where to start: Decide which action shows a user got something useful (for example, finishing their first task) and measure how many do it on their first visit.
Goal: Getting part of each month’s users to keep using it the following month, instead of all of them disappearing.
Where to start: Group users by the week they signed up and check what share is still using it four weeks later.
Goal: Getting someone to pay for something they used to get for free.
Where to start: Put a specific price on the most used feature and offer it as a paid option to your most active users.
Goal: Getting the people who pay one month to keep paying the next.
Where to start: Write to everyone who cancels and ask why. Five answers will tell you what to fix first.
Goal: Knowing, from your own numbers, what it costs you to win a paying user and how much money they bring in while they stay.
Where to start: Add up what you spent last month on winning users and divide it by the number who started paying. Compare it with what an average user pays before leaving.
Goal: Having a channel that brings in more users when you put more money or time into it.
Where to start: Double what you put into your best channel for a month and see whether the users it brings double too.
Inside Madrid Ventures the path becomes your day: your AI CEO turns the stage you are at into missions for each person, and every proof you get raises your FounderSeal.