Startup Advice

Amazon: How do we keep experimenting in superfast delivery? September 19, 2013

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

Projects rarely unfold in a linear fashion; they require frequent course correction. Most trainees should spend more time on a project’s decision tree than they currently do. Once you get into a project, you will have learned from your initial experiments, new papers will have been published, and technology will have advanced. As a result, at any... See more

Instead of doing broad but thin market research (e.g., customer surveys), focus on one person (or a small group) and go as deep as you can, learning everything about how your product fits into their broader lives. Or become your customer—spend a day, a month, or even a few years in the role you're trying to sell to before attempting to build a... See more

The result of this garage-centered approach to entrepreneurship was a business paradigm that looks liked this:

In the above model, notice how the product is at the center of the company, and all the work and effort of building the actual business is focused on marketing the product.

It can help to reverse the polarity of our relationship with new ideas. We often treat them with reverence; before long, confirmation bias sets in and we begin looking for reasons why they will succeed and ignoring evidence suggesting they might fail. A common failure mode is to jump on the first idea and get started—this is probably the worst... See more