Obvious Startup Advice

The Tie Goes To The Runner

In startup land, we like to tell ourselves a bedtime story that it’s all a meritocracy and we’re strictly about finding the best people. Hacker News is filled with comments like “who cares what race or gender they are; just pick the best people.” If only it were that easy, my little brogrammer.

Understand Your Customer’s Business As Well As They Do

As CEOs and product owners, we are effectively outsourced team members, contract force accelerators. Yet more often than not, we act like clueless employees, sleepwalking through the day, hoping that our actions align with our employer’s goals or, at worst, praying we don’t fuck up enough to be noticed.

The Work Is The Dream

“Those times when you get up early and you work hard, those times when you stay up late and you work hard, those times when you don’t feel like working, you’re too tired, you don’t want to push yourself, but you do it anyway. That is actually the dream.” – Kobe Bryant

The 1-10-100 Process

Investors are looking for a solid framework of how your company will grow and succeed, and they want to understand all of the assumptions underpinning that framework. It’s called The 1-10-100 Process, and it meets all the same criteria as a five-year projection, without the arbitrary time variable.

The #1 Killer Of Startups Is Solving Problems That Aren’t Problems Yet

Why the hell would you worry about your site’s scalability if you don’t know how to effectively acquire customers? Your site falling over someday MIGHT kill your company (probably not). Never growing past eight customers WILL kill your company. Instead of using your beautiful brain and precious funding to solve theoretical scaling issues, perhaps you should go run some customer acquisition experiments. Build a fucking landing page. Buy some AdWords.

Sell It Before You Build It

I’d say many people who build products do so in part because they want to AVOID dealing with other people, much less try to sell them anything. But eventually, you’ll have to talk to customers. The question is, do you do it before you build anything and validate they’ll pay for all the work you’re about to do, or do you do it after you’ve spent all your time, money and effort to create something, only to find out no one cares.

Features Don’t Sell Products

Customers aren’t looking for features. They are looking for solutions to a problem, and your entire product or service must solve that core problem. Features can, at best, solve a subsection of a problem, but once you start down the road of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” you’re no longer dealing with the big issue.