Startup Systems
systems that power startups
Startup Systems
Eight marketing maxims
- Trust is worth more than attention.
- Helping people get to where they seek to go is more effective than hustling people to persuade them to go where you’re going.
- Choose your customers, choose your future.
- Tell ten people. If they don’t tell the others, make a better product.
- Creating the conditions for the word to spread is the
Eight marketing maxims
Founders are striving to do something more innovative, uncertain, and psychologically demanding than most of us ever try to do—many with potentially large impacts on the world—and yet their distinct psychological needs have gone largely unstudied and unaddressed. And despite the many headlines signaling a “mental health crisis in startups,” with... See more
Gena Gorlin • The Psychological Needs of the Extremely Ambitious
70-20-10 Rule
But how is that reflected in resource allocation? The Horizons Framework suggests that the majority of your team members should be working on the Horizon One product, says Behrens Wu. “So you have, let's say, 70% doing Horizon One, 20% doing Horizon Two and then 10% playing around with Horizon Three.”
But how is that reflected in resource allocation? The Horizons Framework suggests that the majority of your team members should be working on the Horizon One product, says Behrens Wu. “So you have, let's say, 70% doing Horizon One, 20% doing Horizon Two and then 10% playing around with Horizon Three.”
Shippo’s Path to Product-Market Fit
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.
There isn’t nearly enough emphasis on repeatability . As you move your way up through the different levels of product-market fit, what you’re really unlocking is repeatability — across demand generation, product development, customer satisfaction and unit economics. A startup hasn’t reached the upper levels of product-market fit until it has... See more
The 4 Levels of PMF
If you allow your ICP to fray, you’ll lose
From the beginning, we knew we needed to define a good ideal customer profile (ICP). There are manyapproaches to defining a good ICP, but a quality we underestimated is specificity . Simply put, an ICP must be a single market segment :a group of people for whom the value of solving a problem is roughly the... See more
From the beginning, we knew we needed to define a good ideal customer profile (ICP). There are manyapproaches to defining a good ICP, but a quality we underestimated is specificity . Simply put, an ICP must be a single market segment :a group of people for whom the value of solving a problem is roughly the... See more
Lenny Rachitsky • Lessons learned from a startup that didn’t make it
A startup’s biggest competition isn’t an established player, it’s inertia.
The 100 Best Bits of Advice From 10 Years of First Round Review
There are a few dimensions of PMF that are in tension with each other, requiring deliberate tradeoffs at each level . There isn’t just one element to emphasize above all else. And importantly, there are different times in a company’s lifespan where founders need to intentionally prioritize one over another.