Startup Systems
systems that power startups
Startup Systems
Raising money is never an accomplishment in and of itself —it just raises the stakes for all the hard work you would have had to do anyway: actually building your business.
Some signs of cultural corrosion caused by raising too much money:
Some signs of cultural corrosion caused by raising too much money:
- Hiring too many people—slows everything down and makes it much harder for you to react and change. You are
Fictive Kin • Pmarchive · How much funding is too little? Too much?
It’s hard to get a company to do a new thing, and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to change. Companies that are trying to change tend to require an equal and opposite force to overcome the inertia. Large enterprise sales teams are built around signing a single customer, while on the small business end of the market all you need is a few quick calls around an otherwise self-serve solution. When an executive wants their company to change, they often hire expensive, high-status consultants like McKinsey to make a plan that gets everyone on board.
If organizational inertia is one form of resistance that you might want to overcome, what are the business equivalents of simple machines that create mechanical advantage and multiply your input force into a much larger output force? And if they exist, do they have an equivalent trade-off of physical machines where you have to apply the force over a longer distance to gain leverage?
Maybe! Startups often hyper-focus on a small number of customers that share specific traits. This compresses all of the startup’s energy and force into a small space. It’s the opposite of being “spread thin.” The advantage of this approach is that you’re more likely to solve a problem, overcome inertia, and gain adoption by the customers you focus on. The trade-off is that it might be questionable how many more customers you’ll be able to find. I call this a market wedge, where you sacrifice scale for power.
There are few companies that have successfully scaled taste better than MSCHF (pronounced “mischief”). Well, not exactly a company, as they explained to me when I visited their Brooklyn-based workshop set across the street from a skate park, but an “artist’s collective that happened to raise venture capital.” Or, according to their self-selected... See more
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
Think about how different an accounting software for tattoo shops would look compared to Quickbooks.
Or how you could integrate pool-party motifs into a CRM for pool cleaners.
All of which would set your brand apart from the get-go and take you from being one of many to being the one and only.
B2B SaaS doesn’t have to be boring and you can create an... See more
Or how you could integrate pool-party motifs into a CRM for pool cleaners.
All of which would set your brand apart from the get-go and take you from being one of many to being the one and only.
B2B SaaS doesn’t have to be boring and you can create an... See more
Superhuman
“Almost always, when I look at a team or project at a larger org trying to make a decision with differences in opinions, the root of those differences almost always starts with shared context,” Weiss says. “Or lack thereof.”
The first step to identifying if your team is lacking shared context is to ask yourself a series of questions, Weiss says.... See more
The first step to identifying if your team is lacking shared context is to ask yourself a series of questions, Weiss says.... See more
firstround.com • How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets — Lessons From Slack’s Chief Product Officer
The teams are currently structured by function (product, R&D, design, business, etc.), and different teams think about different layers of the company and stack. But all energy is directed toward improving the core product. We design objectives that translate to common top-level metrics and improve the user experience holistically. For example, all... See more
Lenny Rachitsky • How Perplexity builds product
Perplexity reporting
I like to say the devils and the details and the devils and how you execute. And so coming back to how do we execute just a little bit differently and some of the learnings there where I think the first time we started growth, we could have been more user-centric and been a lot more hypothesis driven. We were following a lot of best practices that... See more
Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)
Not all best practices fit for all orgs. Right-size and test when trying on your ops!
Unnecessary versus necessary chaos
In my 13 years working at startups, I’ve witnessed many examples of unnecessary chaos—here are a few.
A major release has been planned for months, but launch communications—new positioning, website copy, customer email, blog post—are reviewed at the last minute.
A manager reschedules 1:1s every week because of... See more
In my 13 years working at startups, I’ve witnessed many examples of unnecessary chaos—here are a few.
A major release has been planned for months, but launch communications—new positioning, website copy, customer email, blog post—are reviewed at the last minute.
A manager reschedules 1:1s every week because of... See more