Startups & Miracles

A startup miracle is the key difficult thing you need to pull off for your startup to work. If your startup requires zero miracles to succeed, it probably isn't a defensible startup. If your startup requires multiple miracles, you are multiplying a low probability event to get even smaller expected outcomes.

Single Miracles Are Hard To Pull Off Getting liquidity in supply/demand for rooms & spaces was AirBnB's miracle. For Microsoft, it was the IBM OS deal. Most startups fail before they achieve their miracle.

Multiple Miracles Should Be Avoided Entrepreneurs fail often when they define their end goal and then create miracle-driven logic chains to reach it. For example, we want to replace Yelp. Step 1: Launch a mobile music app. Once we have millions of users, we can add local content, including businesses. As soon as we reach millions of users, we can a... See more