Startup Systems

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

The result is a meta-market: because founders know what playbook their competition is running, they end up positioning themselves against moves their competitors will make in three years. Let’s say I run a newsletter software company, similar to Substack or Beehiiv. Since each company has a unique starting point, we’ll each have relative strengths.... See more

Pick a customer instead of an idea: “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was that when you're starting a company, you often think you're picking an idea, but you're really picking a customer. It's actually pretty easy to change your idea, but it’s way harder to change the customer you're serving,” says Agrawal.

Customer math for a new business

How much does it cost to get a new customer?

How much do you make from every interaction with that customer?

How long does the customer stick around?

How many new customers will existing customers bring you over time?

According to self-determination theory, humans have three basic needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. One reason why nudges toward change often backfire is that they can feel like a violation of autonomy, leading someone to do the opposite as a way to regain a sense of freedom.

As a result, well-intended feedback can actually reinforce the... See more

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation—anchored in understanding customer’s needs, prototyping, and generating creative ideas—to transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organizations.

When using design thinking principles, you bring together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is... See more

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

I started this company in one of the recessions and had seen suppliers and customers go to the wall in droves. To me, getting more customers and more orders meant safety and security.

To the people who worked for me, growth meant change.

The demands of a startup are dizzying. To anchor yourself, you must schedule time to write things down.