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
"A startup is a permissionless way to improve society"
At a big company, you're trained to get it right and get it out. You can’t risk experimenting on your customer base. When you're at a small company, you don't have any product-market fit, so you have to get it out, then get it right.
How to Scale Yourself Down
To actually engage in deep work, they not only have to create the time on their calendar, but also have to experience the anxiety and uncertainty that comes with being offline. Getting more precision around what you find aversive is the first step in learning more effective ways to deal with the emotions that come up.
Casey Rosengren • Hack Your Focus With Body Doubling
“Most product and marketing teams are built to create or expand the core value provided to customers. Growth is connecting more people to the existing value.” —Casey Winters (ex Eventbrite, Pinterest)
Superhuman
Product-market fit progresses in levels . It’s not a binary state where you have it and you’re golden, or you don’t and you’re not on the path. But it’s also not a vague spectrum or fuzzy sliding scale, where you can’t be sure where you’re at.
The 4 Levels of PMF
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.
The 4 Levels of PMF
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.
