Startup Advice

Learning is complicated.

While we’re doing it, it’s easy to imagine that those around us are completely sure of themselves, moving forward in a well-lit space.

In fact, if you visit a growing company, a useful school or anywhere that growth is happening, you’ll quickly see that everyone is stumbling forward in the shadows.

That’s part of the deal.

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

Say you have 100,000 DAUs and a retention rate of 80%, and for every five users, one of them tells a friend each day to download your app (and they do it). You get 20k new users per day just from word of mouth. In this equation, Xn is the number of DAUs today and Xn+1 is the number of DAUs tomorrow:

X n+1 = (X n * 80%) + (X n * (1⁄5))

If you start... See more

1. The 7 sources of power:
   
   
   1. Brand: Your unique brand identity attracts and retains a significant number of customers.
   
   
   2. Process power: You can produce something more efficiently than competitors, and the competitors can’t easily copy the method.
   
   
   3. Cornered resource: You have exclusive access to a vital resource, such as the only rights to a patent.
   
   

... See more