Two thoughts: The best startups are masters of asymmetric warfare -- they don't fight on the battlefield the incumbent selects. And, users often understand their problems well but are horrible at suggesting features to solve these problems.
On the risk of leaning too heavily into “best practices”
-1 to 0 is when you figure out what you want to work on. It’s when you decide where to allocate the next 5-10 years of your life.
This may sound simple, but it can be overwhelming and isolating in practice. That period before SPC was not my first -1 to 0 experience. I spent the year after leaving Facebook to start Cove feeling like I was banging my... See more
if the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) gains traction, then the company will likely receive funding and a growth period will occur. Invariably, that means more people will join the team and the vision from the initial engineer needs to be shared.
Early on, when the team is small (2–15 people), typically processes are loose as the overhead in aligning... See more
The success myth is a trap entrepreneurs fall into where they assume success will make their lives easier. But that’s not actually how success works in entrepreneurship. As you progress further into your entrepreneurial venture, the success and growth you achieve is going to lead to lots of challenges you weren’t expecting.
A simple rule of thumb for what makes an idea venture-scale is having a path to $100 million a year in revenue and hitting $1 billion+ valuation , in 10 years . Essentially, can you get big, fast? This is what VCs need to invest in in order to make their fund economics work. Very few ideas can hit this scale, and it’s important that you recognize... See more