Britt Gage
@brittfgage
Founder, of All Trades. Building a new type of company for generalists and the founders we seek to serve.
Britt Gage
weofalltrades.com
Joining an early-stage startup means that resources are scarce, process is non-existent, and goals shift by the day. And tried-and-true playbooks will only go so far, as what works in a big company doesn’t always easily port over to a small startup setting.
How to Scale Yourself Down
In marketing and product I prefer people with less experience and a lot of talent so we can teach them how we do things. They don’t have to unlearn anything about how they already work. We teach them how we work. For developers it might be different because it takes a lot of time to be a really good developer, and it’s relatively easy moving from
... See moreGigi Levy-Weiss • The Systems of Elite CEOs: Setting the Stage for Billion-Dollar Growth
Navigating New Waters: 10 Tips for First-Time Founder Success
For people seeking to make a difference, it begins with helping other people make a difference.
Just looking
It’s hard to get a company to do a new thing, and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to change. Companies that are trying to change tend to require an equal and opposite force to overcome the inertia. Large enterprise sales teams are built around signing a single customer, while on the small business end of the market all you need is a few quick calls around an otherwise self-serve solution. When an executive wants their company to change, they often hire expensive, high-status consultants like McKinsey to make a plan that gets everyone on board.
If organizational inertia is one form of resistance that you might want to overcome, what are the business equivalents of simple machines that create mechanical advantage and multiply your input force into a much larger output force? And if they exist, do they have an equivalent trade-off of physical machines where you have to apply the force over a longer distance to gain leverage?
Maybe! Startups often hyper-focus on a small number of customers that share specific traits. This compresses all of the startup’s energy and force into a small space. It’s the opposite of being “spread thin.” The advantage of this approach is that you’re more likely to solve a problem, overcome inertia, and gain adoption by the customers you focus on. The trade-off is that it might be questionable how many more customers you’ll be able to find. I call this a market wedge, where you sacrifice scale for power.
Startups will have “we’re amazing” moments and they will also have “we’re crashing” moments. In order to weather those storms, you need high levels of trust.
Build Your Culture Like a Product — Lessons from Asana’s Head of People
But I will say, the thing I try to ask people to do is really take some time to introspect and just ask yourself, do you actually want to be here? If you could magically wave a magic wand and you were to start a new company right now, would it be this one? If it's not, there's no indentured servitude anymore. It's okay. It's okay to move on. And... See more
Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology)
And maybe that’s part of the problem, trying to be legible to everyone. The tug of war of wanting to water things down for mass adoption versus building something I want for myself and trusting the others will come.