Startup Advice

• How valuable is what I’m doing?


• What makes this hard for others to do?


• Could this get dramatically easier because of what others launch or how the industry evolves?


• If this does get easier, do I have a “Plan B” to create differentiated value?
  
  Note: An early version of this post appeared in my personal blog (still a work in progress). Decided to

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Inspiration is a productivity multiplier, but it’s perishable. Act quickly.

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

I even pretend that my client’s business isn’t a business at all. Instead, I pretend it’s a book.

Whether you realize it or not, your business is indeed a lot like a book.

Like a book, it has a main idea. It’s “about” something. That main idea may be sharp and distinct, or it may be broad and commoditized. It may be easy for people to talk about, or... 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

A few of your strongest customers can teach you more than many of your weaker ones. Your strongest customers are generally your most engaged users, deriving the most value from your product. If you use the Sean Ellis question, your strongest customers will be those with the highest scores. Try to learn: what characteristics make them a better fit... See more