Startup Advice

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

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If... 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

The archives of human cleverness are filled with blunders. When read in a good mood, history is a blooper reel. But it should not be lost on us that history never repeats, and modern technology enables ever more leverage. The more technology you can harness to commit an idea, and the faster your idea can spread, the greater the magnitude of... See more

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