Secrets to building consumer products 🌈 Roger Dickey, cofounder at Gigster

Roger Dickey built a company that, in the beginning, launched a new app every three or four days: 18 failed attempts in a row, and the nineteenth one took off. It was a Facebook game called Dope Wars, where your friends trafficked virtual “drugs” and played at being cartel bosses. The result? Six to seven thousand dollars a day, with no investors and no incorporated company, all from a $500-a-month apartment in Austin, fueled by ramen noodles and sleepless nights. From there, the leap to Zynga was almost inevitable: Dickey didn't want to sell, but after three increasingly high offers, loneliness, servers crashing, and his co-founder quitting, he gave in. And here comes the twist: from the outside, it looks like those who build successful products start with a brilliant idea, but Dickey starts with the process, which he calls the search lab. You don't need a big idea; you need a structure to test lots of them. Here's how it works: You take a small team—often people who are so entrepreneurial that you almost have to convince them not to quit and start their own company—and, using almost scientific methods, you test dozens, if not hundreds, of ideas. With Gigster, Dickey and his team used the “matrix” – combining verticals (finance, education, health, etc.) and technologies (AI, mobile, marketplace, etc.) – to generate nearly a thousand ideas in three months, and only one made the cut: a premium developer marketplace. In 48 hours, with a landing page posted on Product Hunt and Hacker News, they garnered $3 million in requests. The secret? Find the point where your intuition intersects with a real question that you can answer right away. The team stays small and hungry until you've found the thing that really ignites you—and here Dickey is ruthless: if you only have a vague idea, that's not an obstacle; on the contrary, it's the starting point. The key is to have a rigorous process: brainstorming, research, prototyping, launch, and validation. Each stage weeds out 90% of what looks good on paper. And the golden rule? Find the first 100 people who want your product like they want air: if they don’t love you, no one else will. But beware, there is a risk of being too “minimal”: Dickey admits to having rejected five ideas that, if they had actually been developed, would have become billion-dollar businesses—Instacart is one of them. And what looks like a short-term failure is sometimes just an MVP that is too limited. From a human perspective, the real wealth lies in your network: after Zynga, Dickey could have 30 coffees a week with anyone in Silicon Valley, and when you need a contact, a reference, or advice, that network is the real asset. When you decide to leave, the company doesn't die: after he left, Gigster continued to grow, and he remained on the board. Another aspect that no one tells you about: entering regulated markets? You can buy a small bank to obtain a license, or bring on board advisors who know the regulators to lower the barrier to entry. What about the valuation of your startup? If you don’t have a clear idea, you have to rely on experience, team, product, and traction—but sometimes you just have to pick a number higher than you think is reasonable and see who’s willing to go along with it. Essentially, the only real barrier to building consumer products is not a lack of ideas, but a lack of method and hunger. The takeaway: You don't need to start with a great idea; you need to start with great discipline in your research. If you've listened to this story and recognized yourself in it, you can press “I'm In” on Lara Notes—it's your way of saying that this mindset is now yours, too. And when you tell someone the story of Dope Wars, or of the search lab that throws out a thousand ideas to find one, on Lara Notes you can mark that conversation with Shared Offline: it's your way of saying that certain ideas also change beyond the screen. This content comes from Startupfood and has saved you almost an hour of listening time.