EP59: Dan Norris and the 7 day startup

Product People

Dan Norris is the co-founder of WP Curve, and the author of The 7 Day Startup. He gave himself 1 year to build a profitable product. After spending a year on a product called Inform.ly, with no profits to show for it, he came up with the idea for WP Curve, and made it got his first paying customer in 4 days.

Notable quotes:

• “With my first business, I just wasn’t selling something people wanted.” – Dan Norris
• “We’ve launched 4 business in the last 12 months, and 3 of them failed. We started listening to customers and focused on the 1 business that was working.” – Dan Norris
• “Don’t make decisions based on assumption.” – Dan Norris
• “Launch the business in a week; and then don’t make any more assumptions. Make the decisions after you launch.” – Dan Norris
• “With WP Curve I knew right away that people would pay for it. With my first business, I had to build it for 6 months before I could figure out that people would pay for it.” – Dan Norris
• “The only two people who can give you real feedback about your product are people who just purchased it and people who just canceled.” – Jason Fried via Dan Shipper
• “When people cancel, we ask them a simple question: what did we do wrong?” – Dan Norris

Show notes

• WP Curve
• The 7 Day Startup
• Dan Norris on Twitter
• WP Curve co-founder Alex McClafferty

Cheers,
Justin Jackson
@mijustin

PS: By the way, I’m working on something new called Product People Club. Go to productpeople.club, and sign up for the waiting list. I’ll have something to announce shortly!

Music: Land of the Lost and Can’t Stop the Rush by Striker, visit them at striker-metal.com

Update from 2021: what am I working on these days?

A lot has happened since I recorded these episodes: I launched a podcast hosting company, Transistor.fm, with my friend Jon Buda! If you want to hear what I'm up to now go to transistor.fm/justin.