if you don’t have a very specific enemy in your sights, you’re no where close to finding product market fit or growth.
bootstrapped = enemy must be company.
funded = enemy must be idea.
if you don’t have a very specific enemy in your sights, you’re no where close to finding product market fit or growth. bootstrapped = enemy must be company. funded = enemy must be idea.
Entrepreneurial Strategy There are four things an entrepreneur needs: a good idea, a good team, a good product, and a good business model. Interviewing customers, assessing the market, building a MVP, and iterating are all tactics. In the long run, how do we dominate a significant market? In the short term, entrepreneurs tend to focus on a large ma... See more
Jerry Neumann • Disruption Is Not a Strategy
There is an all out war for search supremacy right now between two trillion dollar companies, with one having everything to win and the other everything to lose. In those circumstances a standard VC model of buying growth does not work even if you have a huge war chest, as you will be outspent no matter how big your investors are.
As a founder of a ... See more
As a founder of a ... See more
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Peter Hagen added
You can be the best product for small market, build a real company, and then from a position of strength, either stay there or attempt to expand to adjacent markets.
Or be undistictive in a huge market, out-advertised and invisible, never getting off the ground.
andrea and added
“At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was, in retrospect, a minute wasted... It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors — so rare that you can almost discount the possibility... Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more
... See moresari added
Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. So better a good idea with competitors than a bad one without.
Paul Graham • How to Get Startup Ideas
Ajinkya Wadhwa added
Two thoughts: The best startups are masters of asymmetric warfare -- they don't fight on the battlefield the incumbent selects. And, users often understand their problems well but are horrible at suggesting features to solve these problems.
sari added
Note: The prototypical startup advice of ignoring the competitive threat of Big Tech is overrated in my opinion. Unless that company is Google, the other Big Tech companies have shown their ability to ruthlessly copy and destroy startups over the last two decades. The era of Big Tech being unable to execute is over—they are hungry for blood and new... See more
Evan Armstrong • How Do You Compete with Free? Notion: the embattled artist
sari added
Startups often assume their better funded competitors are doing well, which leads to dogmatically chasing/copying #1 if you’re #2+
#2 tries to catch up to #1 by running the same way but faster. It’s often the case #1 is headed in the wrong direction, and now #2+ is too
Joey DeBruin and added