Deconstructing startup success and breaking down Checkers Sixty60 success.

If you’re serious about building something unique, this week’s podcast is for you. We take the concept of learning from the successes and failures of other founders, introduced in our earlier letter on deconstructing startup success a little further.

All in a quick 30-minute podcast that shows you exactly how it’s done and what the benefits are…

The Juicy Bits

1. Speed up your “school fees” by studying other startups
   Few things school a founder faster than building a new product. You have to constantly learn and adapt to make it stick and work. But you can fast-track it even more by studying the models of successful and failed startups.
   
   “Go and unpack what they've already done because there are lessons inside there.” But don’t just copy-paste, try to understand why something was built in a certain way.
   
   "Understanding the 'why' really sparks ideas of how you could do stuff in your own product.” Get all the insights here.
   
2. Utilising customer interviews & behaviours
   Something we didn’t touch on so much in our post is the idea of deconstructing customer experiences. If you can get in front of a potential customer and ask them about instances when they needed a solution and couldn't find one, you can probe about their decision-making process directly afterwards. This helps identify gaps and opportunities for what the market needs and how you can potentially position an offering.
3. This exercise is also useful for refining an existing product. Ideas like actually looking at other apps your customer would typically use before you interview them can give you a real edge – get more ideas here.
   
4. Marrying Tech with Ops to create your moat
5. Going back to our previous post on Checkers Sixty60, which was kind of a deconstruction in itself, if you think about how Checkers managed to leverage their tech in tandem with in-store operations (unlike others, who keep store and online separate), that’s actually what enabled them to create such a unique offering. This makes it hard for others to compete in the space – it’s their “moat” if you will.
   
   So there’s definite room for founders to go and deconstruct their competitors now (or perhaps even other parts of Checkers itself) to find the gaps and build products that help solve for growth at a corporate with deep pockets – get the inside track here.

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