Building The 4 Hour Startup

It’s 2am and we can’t sleep, so what do we do?

Launch a startup!

In the wee hours of the This morning we started ZonkBox with the intention of creating a startup in less than 4 hours, not knowing anything about what idea we wanted to pursue or how we would get there.  While it’s still early days (hour #2), we are clearly well on our way towards success.  Outlined below is our plan to execute the 4 hour startup.  So far, so good!

Hour #1: Prepare for launch.

1. Stylate.com: Brand Identity (Logo) + Website Domain (time:10 minutes, cost: $250). Check out our sweet logo that came with the package embeded below.
2. Launchrock: Landing Page setup (time: 15 minutes, cost: free)
3. Google Apps: For email (time: 10 minutes, cost: free)
4. WordPress.com: Blog creation (time: 5 minutes, cost: free)

Hour #2: Validate the market and formalize the idea/hypothesis.

1. Google suggest: It’s amazing what people type in to the google search box.  Just by typing in ‘problem sleeping’ and other sleep related terms we were able to find out allot about possible pain points in the sleep arena that we could be tackling. Insomnia seemed to stand out as a common yet underserved pain point. (time: 5 minutes, cost: free)
2. Search Twitter to validate the market need: Once we had settled on an area of focus (insomnia), we put the power of twitter search to work for us, searching for “insomnia” it was clear that there was allot of passionate (and frustrated) insomniacs tweeting about their pain points (more on this later). (time: 15 minutes, cost: free)

So, what’s next on our 4 hour startup journey?

Hour #3: We will lay the groundwork for our marketing efforts by coming up with a list of compelling insomnia related content to tweet out to our followers, as well as try our follower base by retweeting fellow insomniacs. All of the work will be outsourced. (time: 1 hour, cost: tbd)

Hour #4: Launch time.  Now that we have some traffic flowing through our twitter account and to our Launchrock page and to our blog, we can start to measure both the effectiveness of our initial unformed idea, as well as try and capture users pain points with survey by having them answer “What do you want ZonkBox to do for you”.  The hope is that armed with this feedback we will be well on our way towards assessing and validating an unmet need in the market that ZonkBox will be able to satisfy.

So what exactly is ZonkBox you might ask?  Well, to that we’d say stay tuned!  We’re still trying to figure that out ourselves.

Oh, and don’t forget to follow us on twitter and Sign Up for ZonkBox!.