Startup Systems
systems that power startups
Startup Systems
Product-market fit always starts with the customer. And Dan Olsen’s PMF framework starts from the bottom up.
Michael Houck • Resilient Founders Always Have A Move
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
Secular-to-secular swaps create marketplaces like Airbnb and Amazon. Money is exchanged for goods and services.
Secular-to-sacred swaps are most prominent via self-expression—everything from cosmetics in Fortnite to luxury goods from LVMH. Money is exchanged for subjective levels of social signaling.
Sacred-to-sacred swaps describe most... See more
Secular-to-sacred swaps are most prominent via self-expression—everything from cosmetics in Fortnite to luxury goods from LVMH. Money is exchanged for subjective levels of social signaling.
Sacred-to-sacred swaps describe most... See more
Chris Paik • Are You Selling the Secular or Sacred?
The demands of a startup are dizzying. To anchor yourself, you must schedule time to write things down.
The 100 Best Bits of Advice From 10 Years of First Round Review
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.
If you’ve ever worked at a fast-growing startup, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “technical debt.” Code is scrappily thrown together so that the product can function. It’s done with the understanding that this debt will accumulate and eventually cause things to break if not addressed down the line.
Something similar can also happen... See more
Something similar can also happen... See more
Jonny Miller • How to Pay Off Your Emotional Debt
Helping Entrepreneurs "Triple, Triple, Double, Double, Double" to a Billion-Dollar Company - Battery Ventures
battery.com
I believe there are seven key phases in SaaS companies’ go-to-market success. I’ve outlined each phase below and hope to elaborate on some of these in later posts and videos. Most of the phases center around a mantra I call “triple, triple, double, double, double”, (T2D3 for short), referring to a company’s annualized revenue growth. (
Burnout cultures exhaust us through the week and force us to recharge during our time off. Healthy cultures provide daily space to refuel. - Adam Grant
Angles that spread usually check the following boxes:
- Surprising — presents unexpected new information or theories
- True — we actually believe it
- Important — has an impact on our behavior
- Relevant — related to domains we care about
- Cool — we think we’ll look impressive for sharing it