Early stage validation and the PMF spectrum

Small Efforts - with Sean Sun and Andrew Askins

In this episode, Andrew talks about the rapid audience growth he's seeing on Bluesky and the challenges he's running into finding Founding Users for MetaMonster. The guys talk about the idea of product market fit as a spectrum and validation as a way to uncover where you might be on that spectrum, but without ever getting to 100% certainty. Then Sean talks through trying to find his next side project idea.

Links:

• Andrew’s Twitter: @AndrewAskins
• Andrew's website: https://www.andrewaskins.com/
• MetaMonster: https://metamonster.ai/
• ChartJuice: https://www.chartjuice.com/
• Sean’s Twitter: @seanqsun
• Miscreants: http://miscreants.com/
• CopyWork: https://copy.work/
• Wordpress to Webflow-ready CSV: https://contentgobl.in/

For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:00.01

Sean

This is a full Andrew podcast with Sean does a support character today Mainly because I was late before this call

00:08.75

Andrew

Uh, I was also kind of late. I was chatting with a friend and it took me a while. Yeah. what's up, man? How are you?

00:17.09

Sean

I'm good. um I'm busy. um Yeah, I'm busy. A lot of things happening with miscreants, Q4, trying to get a lot of things wrapped up before the holidays and and just so much inbound.

00:31.44

Sean

So much inbound.

00:31.83

Andrew

That's great.

00:32.67

Sean

Yeah, it is. It's amazing. You know, partially

00:34.65

Andrew

you see You sound exhausted by it. but

00:36.91

Sean

I'm so tired. Yeah. Well, partially thanks to you for for doing some really good work as well. So I appreciate it.

00:43.48

Andrew

Cool. I'm glad it's been helping.

00:45.98

Sean

Yeah, absolutely. What's up with you? What's going on?

00:49.78

Andrew

So two things I want to talk about today, a small one and then a bigger one that I want to work out some thoughts with, with you and our, our 12 listeners.

01:01.03

Sean

Yeah.

01:02.70

Andrew

so the small one real quick blue sky is popping off right now. It is wild. I've been, I've had an account for like two weeks now and I'm up to 1200 followers.

01:16.59

Andrew

starter kits are this like magical growth hack, uh, where

01:16.28

Sean

he yeah

01:20.44

Sean

Are starter kits just lists but people can auto follow everyone in the list?

01:25.31

Andrew

Basically, yeah, yeah, a starter kit is basically like a Twitter list.

01:26.99

Sean

okay

01:30.65

Andrew

But so in Blue Sky, you have three concepts that that fulfill part of the responsibility of lists um in Twitter. So you have starter kits, which are a way to curate a list of people that you think others should follow most often around the topic. So like, I'm in a couple of like indie hacker, indie founder, bootstrap founder, starter kits. and you can, when you open a starter kit, you can follow individual people or you can just click follow all.

02:01.31

Andrew

and And so that's how I found people to follow. I'm following like 360 people. It's almost all from like a handful of starter kits. And then and it's a really great mechanism for people to very quickly build a little network.

02:18.09

Andrew

And it's if you get added to a couple of these, it's an awesome growth mechanism.

02:22.54

Sean

Hell

02:22.64

Andrew

So I'm up to 1,200 followers. very, very quickly, which is cool.

02:28.21

Sean

yeah.

02:29.29

Andrew

And we'll see how that correlates to engagement. wasn't seeing much engagement for the first like maybe 400 or 500 followers, but now I feel like I'm starting to see some pretty solid engagement.

02:41.50

Andrew

I think engagement is naturally going to lag behind followers on the platform while people are still building a habit of checking and using Blue Sky, because it's still like A lot of people are switching over right now or like signing up and trying it for the first time, and so they're not going to have that usage habit right away. But I'm now seeing more engagement there than I am on tweets, and I have like 2700 Twitter followers.

03:09.80

Andrew

So there's there's starter kits, then there's lists. they do have lists that work exactly like Twitter lists, which are like a non-algorithmic way to curate a list of people whose content you want to view without following them. And then they have feeds, which are custom algorithms that developers can write and publish.

03:31.61

Andrew

so there's like 50,000 feeds. So there's essentially 50,000 different algorithms you can choose to subscribe to and follow. So there's a default discover algorithm. There's a default like following algorithm, where it's just everyone you follow.

03:46.88

Andrew

then you can subscribe to lots of different feeds and customize your algorithm work the way you want to, which is a really cool idea.

03:59.56

Andrew

Yeah.

03:57.79

Sean

that is a really cool idea i wonder i wonder if there's like a secret like if your feed is used a lot you know how like you know plug-in like places that like have that you do upload plugins and stuff will pay out a certain amount if you have like a cool

04:13.36

Andrew

Maybe. Yeah. I don't think they've started doing revenue sharing on blue sky yet. and they very openly said they're going to try to stay away from advertising and sell premium features, which is interesting. sort of Also the blue sky team is only 20 people. There are 20 people on the team.

04:34.05

Sean

So you're saying Musk didn't fire enough people when he joined Twitter. That's what you're telling me.

04:39.64

Andrew

I'm saying it's really cool what they're doing. And they're they're being very open and like chatting with and interacting with the community. Overall, the vibes are just, it I think because it's new, like this won't last forever, but because it's new, people are looking for people to follow. They're looking for content to engage with. therere They're just more open and and curious than where people have more set patterns of behavior that they fall into.

05:11.07

Andrew

So the vibes are really good right ...