Startup Advice
sari and
Startup Advice
The Jenga situation
seths.blog
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.
A better use of some of that capital is continued experimentation.
In a world with an emerging new class of startups, the Silicon Valley Small Business, thinking of investment capital specifically as a means to learn more about your users faster through experimentation is worth considering.
The more you learn, the more you’ll be able to iterate to... See more
In a world with an emerging new class of startups, the Silicon Valley Small Business, thinking of investment capital specifically as a means to learn more about your users faster through experimentation is worth considering.
The more you learn, the more you’ll be able to iterate to... See more
How Gamma Acquired 10 Million Users in 9 Months
Steve Jobs gave one of his best interviews about building products back in 1995.
Anyone who wants to craft amazing products should watch it.
Here are 9 quotes from Jobs that really resonated with me:
One of the best ways to introduce a sense of urgency is to create a series of forcing functions: deadlines, milestones and goals with clearly-defined objectives,” Palan writes in a Medium article about the experience. “TechCrunch Disrupt was just the forcing function we needed. It forced us to tackle many of the things we’d been postponing. We... See more
Productboard’s Path to Product-Market Fit
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