Startup Advice
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Startup Advice
Both True: “The customer is always right” and “The audience doesn’t know what they want”
No more building. Just talk to customers. “We decided we weren’t allowed to build anything at all. We had to just talk to people—and talk to them until we had a lot of confidence and a mental model of customers, their jobs, the problems they might have and how we might solve them.” (For more here, check out Cacioppo’s write-up on some of her... See more
Vanta's Path to Product-Market Fit — Solve the Customer’s Problem, Then Write Code
The early days are exciting. Customers are seen and heard and served. Variations are created and value is produced as problems are solved.
In the early days, the most celebrated employees are the ones who figure out what someone needs and then determines a way to fill that need.
Once the organization gains traction, it’s possible that a short-term profit maximizer will join the team. They push to treat the customers as replaceable flanges, almost identical, income opportunities to be processed. And the employees? They are expenses, not part of a team.
It can seem like the fastest way for a stable business to increase profits is simply to remove some sticks. Process more flanges with fewer expenses. Lower overhead, measure the easy stuff, do it faster.
We spend too much time dealing with shaky towers. The resilience of people connecting, of organizations evolving, of service and clarity and generative work is far too important to be threatened by a few hustlers who insist on measuring the wrong thing.
Building startups is not a particularly glamorous thing in spite of how the media makes it look. A lot of it is just doing sales or doing customer support hundreds of thousands of times over and over again and being really committed to becoming exceptional at it.
The Not So Cookie-Cutter Approach to Company Building — 8 Lessons from Zapier
Think about distribution from day one
If you’re going to build a product, you want people to use it. But far too often, founders get drawn to the building and tinkering side of the business, forgoing the go-to-market piece until they’re actually ready to get out and sell.
That’s a mistake, says Foster. “I think one of the biggest things that... See more
If you’re going to build a product, you want people to use it. But far too often, founders get drawn to the building and tinkering side of the business, forgoing the go-to-market piece until they’re actually ready to get out and sell.
That’s a mistake, says Foster. “I think one of the biggest things that... See more
The Not So Cookie-Cutter Approach to Company Building — 8 Lessons from Zapier
Simply put, an ICP must be a single market segment :a group of people for whom the value of solving a problem is roughly the same, and who can be reached in roughly the same way. “People who use Excel” is not a market segment, because it says nothing about either the value of their problem or how to reach them. “Marketers who use Excel to build... See more