Startup Advice
sari and
Startup Advice
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
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
Look At Your Business As If It Were a Book – LEVY INNOVATION
Someone else’s success isn’t your failure.
100 Simple Truths
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
On building “Flavored” startups
Enterprise software is (mostly) not flavor-based. Sure, there are enterprise fads like the metaverse, but generally speaking, large companies only sign contracts when it feels like there is an obvious commercial advantage to doing so.
Networks are (mostly) not flavor-based. If you’re using an app because of the content created by its other users, it’s not necessarily a guarantee for success, but at least if it fails it probably won’t be because it hit a flavor-based asymptote. For instance, BeReal leveraged a unique flavor of photo sharing to build a network, but people are still using it because they like the way it helps them stay in touch with their friends. If it were just a single-player utility, it would not have scaled in the same way. Another historical example is Instagram versus Hipstamatic. Both had a cool new flavor called “photo filters,” but one had a network and the other did not. Here’s a more recent example: the network is what sets Substack stands apart from its flavor-based competition.
Tech-enabled services are not flavor-based. If you act like a tech company but really do grocery delivery, banking, education, housing, healthcare, or any other real-world service, your competition is mostly not flavor-based because starting this type of business involves a lot of cost and complexity. (Also, some, like ride hailing and delivery, are networks.) The downside is that your cost structure is probably not as great as pure tech companies, but the upside is that you have less competition.
All of these types of products can involve some flavoring to help them get off the ground. The point is not that flavoring is bad. It’s good! But it has a very specific role. Flavor provides an initial product wedge. It’s helpful for standing out initially but doesn’t provide long-term differentiation or durable advantage.
Remember: you + your cofounder vs The Problem
“I encourage founding teams to do everything they possibly can to remember that their co-founders are on their side”
Amy Buechler, Founder Coach at YC
I was at Amzn early '00s when we lost 95% of our market cap. Later at FB I negotiated a down-round in '09, and then in '12 our stock dropped 50% post-IPO. I was on the board of a public company that went bankrupt (Borders) and a start-up that went under (Hello). Some lessons:
Dan Rosetwitter.comON SMALL TEAMS
Impressive things accomplished by small teams:
Impressive things accomplished by small teams:
- Instagram had 13 employees when they were acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. They had 30 millions users at the time.
- Mojang (the company behind Minecraft) had 37 employees when they were acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. At that time, Mojang had revenue of about $290 million
sari azout • the power of a good prompt, small teams, extreme questions to trigger ideas, working online/living offline
Engineer Wei Dai on reinventing yourself:
"Once you achieve high status, a part of your mind makes you lose interest in the thing that you achieved high status with in the first place. You might feel obligated to maintain an appearance of interest, and defend your position from time to time, but you no longer feel a burning need to know the truth.
One solution that might work (and I think has worked for me, although I didn't consciously choose it) is to periodically start over. Once you've achieved recognition in some area, and no longer have as much interest in it as you used to, go into a different community focused on a different topic, and start over from a low-status (or at least not very high status) position."