The Pirate Launch Plan

Key Takeaways

What would I do exactly if I only had 48 hours to completely build and launch a startup for example at our upcoming hackathons? What would I do in which order? And that from the perspective as a vibe coder who doesn't have a technical background who really needs my tool stack to be very AI native meaning that everything can be controlled by an agent. uh I don't want to be surprised by securityities incidents and I want to have the freedom to scale this afterwards. So that was my requirement that led me into the pirate launch plan which is my document that I will keep up to date and share it with you how I would go about it if I just had 48 hours. Now I came to this from the perspective of someone who was very religious about testing their ideas. I was full hyped on the Steven Blank and Eric Reese lean startup thing. I took it even a level meta not just on a single idea. I went out and talked to people but with my last funded startup we actually generated hundreds of ideas. built 150 landing pages, had a rule, no line of code. Before we had 1,000 subscribers, we built six apps over two years. Two of them had over a million users. My playbook told me, build a landing page, drive a survey, put paid ads in front of that, see what people actually like, what they don't like. Yeah, that was not bad and can still be done. But these days due to VIP coding it's actually faster to build the MVP than to set up the whole uh survey thing. Yeah. So we observed this in real life. For example, at Y Combinator, like the world's most famous accelerator, only a year ago, 25% of the people in the batch said, "We are using AI to do 95% of our coding." And that should just tell us a lot like I'm sure it's going to be at an higher level uh this year. But this completely changed the game in that you can now come with your idea and build a prototype that already has the magic interaction that you have in your head. You can you can build this within hours and then you can go out get your first feedback from your first contacts then build out a full MVP with a database and off and payment then rejoin and grow. um and really like launch it maybe on product hunt and where you like and then repeat this build and grow cycle again and again and that's what I want to share with you today. These six stages I would go through if I were you at the beginning of the weekend or at the beginning of a hackathon. Now, stage one, it's very important these days that you get super clear on your idea because if you can't communicate it like to your teammate, even if you're a solo, you now need to communicate it uh to the AI. At least get three things really solid. The problem, the audience, and the solution. Be super picky about the problem that you choose. Yeah, you need to be more in love with the problem than the solution later on. Yeah, you will make compromises there, but you're going to figure out a problem of a specific audience and solve that. And it cannot be a nice to have thing. It it is a must-have. I need to solve this now problem. Then be again super picky when thinking about the audience. It's it needs to be the case that they have the problem and that it feels urgent to them. You need to narrow it down until that is true. Uh the biggest uh saying like from the vice world is from Paul Graham. Build something people want. Yeah. But people needs to be very concrete and you can be over precise in the beginning. Make something that a small audience really loves and expand later. It's very hard if you go too broad. Same goes for your solution. The solution should be a very specific take on how you want to solve that problem for these people. And we are all currently in the mindset shift of how can we build new AI first agentic solutions for problems that already have old school SAS solutions. And that allows us to think about a huge marketplace. Yeah. that is available to us that is pre verified but that we can take to the new level faster than those old companies can change because they have become very slow in their efforts because they have many people they have to convince to now jump on this new bandwagon we are just one to three people yeah and we can do whatever the hell we like so problem audience solution have that clear have a good discussion about this that it's it's precise and then start building that idea. If you want guidance on this, we have this in our builder codeex on level 1.1 where we give the the prompts that guide you through this three-step process. Do this. And here on the article, if you are reading this, you can actually mark these points off that you said, okay, I've written the problem statement. I have chosen a pri precise target audience and I have written the solution. Now you're done with stage one idea. Yay. And now it's time to build your prototype. This is stage two. This is really building that magic interaction you have in your mind. And this is the biggest difference to what I did before where I had like landing page and survey results. No, I'm I'm building something where real users will say, "Oh [ __ ] this is different. I would be interested in in seeing how that is." And I don't know if you remember, I took the screenshot from how chat GBT looked like in on December 15th, 2020 uh two. And it was just a simple chat interface that those researchers put on the web. It had huge limitations. It it clearly defined like limited capabilities. But people went nuts. There was something very different when I could talk into this machine and this machine would talk back to me in a natural language way. And back then it was super bad and the traction was still extremely obvious. So what you want to do is get out of the way of the users. Let them let them truly feel what is special about this experience that that you have in mind. And ideally don't have yet any payment log in or anything at this point. Just build the very basic demo of it that they can interact with. If it's too dodgy to build like a real interactive thing, then at least show it to them with mock data. Or if that is even not possible, like you can use your internal tools, record a video of how special this feels. Dropbox did this as well back in the day. And and then let people experience that. But you want you want them to react in a way that they say like, "Oh, this is solving my real problem." They they're going to ask you like, "Can I keep it? Can I have it? Could you also build this and that that that what you want to build?" And in terms of the text stack, we talked about this at length in the VIP coding stack article. I've I've linked to you here. My default these days, use a code editor like cursor cloud code. Tell it you want to use Nex.js and host that on Versel. That gives you a URL super fast. All of the prompts for that are linked here in the level one and two of the the builder codeex that is completely free. Let me give you one warning. It is very tempting to stay pretty long on this stage two. And my call to action for you is get to this magic interaction, push it live, and get this URL and continue. Do not stay stuck here. You do not want to have all of the scaffolding uh done here. Your database doesn't need to work. It can be all stored locally like nobody needs to sign up. Nobody needs to pay yet. Get out. Show it to people who might be interested. And this is also again three steps. you can mark off define the magic interaction. Second, build it and deploy to a live URL and then think about what is the behavior from the user that you want to observe to say like they got some value out of that. And this is what we want to keep track of. Yeah. Nothing else, nothing fancy, no fancy tracking setup. That leads us to the next stage. Stage three is make first contact. This is not about creating like a full marketing plan, go to market strategy and whatnot. You got this URL now with your magic interaction on it. And I want you to think about what are maybe 10 places or people you could reach out to on LinkedIn in communities you participate in like WhatsApp or so and where you can get in touch and say like dude I think this is for you. Can you take a look? Can you give me some feedback? If you want to talk, here's my kel.com scheduling link and start talking about it. We see this example from our community where somebody said like, I can't wait to test this new GitHub repo with this new app that Leon built and he's getting feedback from this WhatsApp community. And you can you can get that too. If you have trouble like thinking about like what is the first message that I should write, how do I phrase that, then go to this lesson in the uh growth codeex called why we do this full story framework that helps you really get the sauce out of your idea and for formulate that in a great way that even convince you more than before uh that this idea that you have is great. And if it's turns out not to be great, it's fine. at least you did a good bit of marketing. So reach out to people and look if these people show that behavioral signal of perceiving value in that magic interaction that you have and and this is a wonderful stage if you don't have just a weekend. It's it's a beautiful place to be in. It's the only time when you can do things that don't scale later when you're bigger. Uh then you have to always think about like oh okay do I need to create a process for this? Does it scale really? Is it worth investing in that? At the beginning you can go complete and unscalable routes. Talk to people. invite them to coffee and try to at least have conversations with five of those people you reached out to and and really talk to them. No off needed, no payment. You don't yet need to build the core feature, just just the sauce. There's another analogy uh about hot dogs. You can have the bread and the stuff on top of it and the sauce, but what a hot dog is about at this at the essence is is the sausage. And that is what all you need to care about right now here in that stage. And that is all you need to talk about. If people don't like that, if they don't get excited, you either haven't found the right people or what you have is not exciting enough. you can go back to stage one, refine your idea, build that magic experience and refine that and then see and come back what the next batch of people say. So the three steps here are first list like about 10 places or people you can reach out to. Then write your first connection message and then send it to all 10 places or people. That's all you need to do here. like on a hackathon I would expect this to that to be your Friday evening or Saturday before lunchtime. This all thing above should maybe take you at a maximum half a day. Don't take too long for this. That leads us to the next key stage. This is where we take this uh project a lot more serious. We're going to build the MVP. We have some people who are interacting uh with this magic experience and now we need to build all of the scaffolding around it. This today takes longer than building like the core experience of of your app. Often you have to think about how do people sign up, where do I store the data, how do I handle payment. And here is also the part where as a VIP coder you really need to think about how do I build it in the way that I don't have any security surprises. Use tools that have very established patterns like clerk that you can use for authentication that makes all of the sign up password handling multiffactor authentification like a breeze. Then you can use superbase to store your data. They have a beautiful connection between each other. Um and it ensures that only people who have signed into their account get access to their own data. And then Stripe payment. You don't want to store any payment provider data um or credit card information for your users. You want to have this handled by a payment provider like Stripe. And those three Clerk, Superbase, Stripe, they are almost like fully integrated into each other. a very good starting point that avoids a lot of nasty surprises and allows you to scale as high as you like. But there are many options that we also discussed uh in the vibe coding stack article that I linked here. So after this you want to have your landing page in the core functionality that you built before but add a beautiful uncomplicated signup flow to it. first name, last name, email, that's good. Or a social login like Google, GitHub, LinkedIn. Then have a little onboarding so people understand what the magic is about. Like the three little steps you have to take before you get the real app. That is something you can put in the way of your audience because it will explain what it does and you don't have to have a super polished experience afterwards. Then ensure that you have a good full database set up. The sooner you have the basic structure of your database and data gets stored, the faster you can scale this up. And then go for your Stripe integration or any other payment provider uh that you like. So people can check out at least in US dollars with a credit card. Nothing more fancy than that right now. That is the stack I would recommend uh to you right now. You're going to be vibe coding fast and you want to get things done. And there's a great guy called Eddie from Google who has this saying first do it then do it right then do it better. For us that means we just want to make it work in the beginning. It doesn't have to be built right yet. Just make it work. Once you have understood how to make it work at all, you can improve your implementation later and then you can optimize it for scale. So don't go straight to the perfect implementation. Just make it work for now. It can be totally sketchy. Also, do not fret out about your stack. This guy Peter Levelvels, one of the most prolific like solo founders who's making like about 250k per month from his SAS tools, uses an old school PHP stack. If you click on his uh Twitter profile here, then you can see transparently all of his projects. Just get good at one stack. I recommended something. If it doesn't vibe with you, throw it away. Do your thing. Just get good at it. So what does it take to complete stage four? You set up your database. You create a signup with a good onboarding experience and you integrate with a payment provider. So can you can now start h hunting your first customer. That is exactly what stage five is about. It's about growing. Yeah. The stage before was building more intensely. Now we go back to growing and then we will repeat that. This is about going from users who maybe looked at you at at the first interaction to paying customers and to get to those fa first paying customers is incredibly important for your confidence and for validity that you're hunting something that is relevant. You can even do this during the hackathon. You don't you don't have to do this, but on the last hackathon, we didn't get a paying customer, but we get over 50 people on on a list who tried the app. Um, but it didn't turn out uh that they wanted it enough to to pay, which is totally fine. Don't worry about that. But the goal is to try and optimize for this outcome to happen. And I would say there are three key ways uh in the beginning where you should just pick one channel to really attract those customers. Organic, paid or outreach. What does it mean? Organic means that you start setting up your social media profiles. You think about a basic content strategy. maybe using your personal profiles as a founder and you start talking about it online on platforms where your customers already are. That's best if you have more time than money. This takes the longest to work by far, but if that is what you can do, that is a good baseline. Then paid, what does that mean? Paid means using someone else's attention, paying some money for it in form of ads and getting that attention directed to your project. That means you can start on a small budget, do some meta ads or Google ads and send people to your landing page, offer them the access to the free trial or some other goodie or even try to go straight to the paid version of the app. even though that is very unlikely to work in the beginning. We talked about this in detail in the traffic generation part of the growth codeex. So and if you want to have input on the content plan here there is an article linked to that as well. Then the third way which is in the very beginning even I think the most salient way to get feedback is outreach. Outreach means that you are contacting specific people on LinkedIn, through email, on Slack channels, on WhatsApp groups that you're in. And this is best for B2B or highly targeted audiences where it's unrealistic that you just do some posts and people will come or you do some ads and you can't see how that's working. Outreach is going to work for you in that case. if you have something that they want. So it works simply like you look for a simple for a specific job title or something that you define in the audience section of stage one and you find a platform like LinkedIn where you can search for a specific job title. You connect uh to them, send them a message, tell them what you are building, ask for feedback, uh book them into a demo and then sell them your product. We talk about this in detail in the funnel building overview on the growth codeex. All three linked internal pirate skills resources here. Those are the three ways. You do not need to do all three. Just do one and do not worry about big numbers. We we love the R framework which stands for like acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue. Focus on activation and retention. Meaning, do people that you send a message to that click on your ads or on your content actually get value from your product the first time? Yeah. Uh just once experiencing the key magic interaction that is activation. And then do do they keep on using it? Yeah. Can you still see them uh next week, tomorrow or next month? then then maybe focus on revenue and then on acquisition. You don't need hundreds of users. You don't need hundreds of paying customers. You maybe need one paying customer and then the first 10. Yeah. So order of importance, activation, retention, revenue before acquisition tells you the most hardcore marketing guy. Yeah. So the way to pass this stage five is to choose one primary channel setting up your first campaign. It doesn't matter if it's organic, paid or outreach, and then go hunt that first paying customer. That is such a gamecher when you have that experience because suddenly you're so motivated to make that app experience right. you start being so much more careful about how you mess with your database, how you mess with security relevant things. Everything gets more serious after you have one paying customers and 10 is a good number to shoot for. Not maybe like just during the hackathon but in general in this phase and that is the main thing you should focus on in stage five. What comes next is realizing that you are in a continuous growth loop. Now you have your idea, you prototyped it, you made first contact. That can happen during the hackathon and you can go already into the stages build and grow. But you need to keep repeating these two steps, building and growing. You probably know the concept of product market fit. That is when you notice that people truly want what you have built. But the good people at first round have really clarified that they are that there are lots of level of product market fit. They started with nason then developing strong and even extreme product market fit for large scale companies. You do not need to worry about that. Just focus on proving that you got something at all. Nent product market fit. And the main thing that matters at this level is satisfaction. Are people happy with what you provided to them? Obsess about that and and nothing else in the beginning. Yeah, you can you can ask them like how disappointed would you be if you could no longer use this? And you can have them rate that on a scale um and then measure how that develops over time and how that works for different target groups that you have in mind. But this is a repeating cycle. And what you want to observe is where is friction in this process? Where do people uh get lost? Do I not get the attention? Do I not get them to click? Do I not get them to sign up for my service? Do I not get them to experience that? Do I not get them to to return or pay money for it? You identify your key bottleneck. And the tool number one that I use for that is post hog. A very generous free tiered analytics tool uh that you can implement easily with the help of AI that tells you what your customers are doing and where they are getting stuck. So that is number one like getting clear on where is your current bottleneck. Number two is continue focusing on the growth side and keep on experimenting. Each channel that you have chosen you can do a lot of different things in. You can write different messages, choose different audiences, follow up differently, have different ad campaigns on different platforms. Play with that. This is still we have no [ __ ] idea what we are doing stage and you need to find out what works. Do not be one of the founders who stop here. Yeah, you build something, maybe set up a social media profile and then you stop. You need to keep shipping on a weekly basis and sharing that with your audience with is which is your best growth strategy. So the three steps that just keep on giving are first identify your biggest bottleneck and focus on that the most. Build what your paying customers want, not just what anyone wants and tells you to do, but ideally what your paying customers want. And then number three, keep on experimenting with your growth channels. Follow the attention, follow the money, and you will find the right people that love your product. If you keep that cycle up, you'll be good, and you will find something, yeah, that solves the problem for your audience. That is it. Now it's your turn. It's your turn to run this. You can use this plan whenever you like. Whenever you create a new project and just go down top to bottom from it. And remember that the order that we set this matters. Yeah, it's based on a lot of experience and watching a lot of founders do this and overindex either on the growth or on the build side. Try to keep it balanced. You will find your strength in the future, but in the beginning, it's key to build, grow, and repeat. You do not need to make your first idea work. You can keep running the cycle. Try multiple ideas, grow horizontally, or you can go really vertically deep into one idea and loop into that. You do this until something real emerges. That is it. Now go out and run it. To make it easy for you, I created this checklist that syncs with the article at the top, but you can always go down here if you do this a second time. And this is where you can check off each stage in the pirate launch plan. You can share it with your friends. It's freely available. And all you need to do in order to make those check boxes is sign up and join the free uh pirate skills community. Each step here is well thought out and established and grounded in experience. Have fun with this and and build something people want. If you want to go even deeper, every month we have a free builder lab focused on the building part, VIP coding, and then a growth lab that is focused on the growth part, which is VIP marketing. Yeah. If you want even more hands-on support from me, we launch every quarter a forge which is about six weeks program of VIP coding and then six weeks program of uh VIP marketing. If you're interested in that, check out those links that I have listed below the article. That's it from my end. I hope to see you at one of our hackathons or free events. Would love to meet you personally. See you then. Bye-bye.