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
Startups will have “we’re amazing” moments and they will also have “we’re crashing” moments. In order to weather those storms, you need high levels of trust.
Build Your Culture Like a Product — Lessons from Asana’s Head of People
Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.
If... See more
If... See more
Gena Gorlin • The Psychological Needs of the Extremely Ambitious
There are two types of founders.
Those who do lots of research, validate ideas, test many prototypes, and iteratively get to a product. This is a more technical and user-focused approach.
The other is where the product vision emerges fully-formed in the founder’s eye before it is brought to existence. Here, the founder zeroes in on their self... See more
Those who do lots of research, validate ideas, test many prototypes, and iteratively get to a product. This is a more technical and user-focused approach.
The other is where the product vision emerges fully-formed in the founder’s eye before it is brought to existence. Here, the founder zeroes in on their self... See more
sari azout • Things I'm Thinking About
Being a founder requires constant calibration between arrogance and humility, optimism and pessimism. You need the arrogance to believe that you have something important to say, but the humility to know most people won’t care. You need the optimism to convince yourself and others (employees, investors, customers) to believe in you. But you need... See more
sari azout • Things I'm Thinking About
the way that you execute ends up really mattering. That was the second learning. The third is just focus.
Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)
So why wouldn't all founders start by engaging with users individually? Because it's hard and demoralizing. Sales gives you a kind of harsh feedback that "marketing" doesn't. You try to convince someone to use what you've built, and they won't. These conversations are painful, but necessary. I suspect from my experience that founders who want to... See more
