When you’re an early stage startup, your most important job is to get clarity on what you’re building. When your product is buggy and low quality and the first mile of the product is ignored (the welcome/tour, the onboarding, the explanatory copy, the empty states), you won’t know if the poor retention numbers are due to a bad product or a bad... See more
Don’t confuse people rooting for you with market signal
On some level, all founders suffer from “happy ears”—the chronic confirmation bias pervading conversations with customers, partners, team members, and investors. We tend to have irrational levels of confidence anyway, but that gets compounded when we mistake support for market signal. Most... See more
If you are hyper-fixated on an ideal user, you will begin to think of your product as a single player game. You’ll develop tools that enable 1:1 interactions between that ideal user and your product.
But once you start thinking of your ICP as a node in a network – with a white hot center that enables you to spread to acquire new nodes of a network –... See more