Mo Shafieeha

Step4: Plan Your Company Strategy. You must understand the broader context in which your product will live as a startup founder. Customers usually envision hiring a services firm to come and fix their problems completely as their "ideal solution." As a startup, you should develop a compelling, generalizable solution.

3. Incumbent Strengths & Weaknesses Facebook is likely to let you scale a video product really, really, quickly if you figure out how to do it. Platforms cannot allow outsiders to grow enormously large in their ecosystem without paying the appropriate tax or benefit to them. A perfect competitor would be one that is unable to respond because of The... See more

The most attractive startups are those that have counterintuitive behavior plus traction. These ideas often develop at the seam between "natives" and "immigrants". Instagram-natives are likely to see a new retail space or ecomm brand differently than those who aren't exposed to the same thousands of pictures.

The cloud developer environment is expensive and heavy and cannot be used offline. It is severely affected by latency. The obvious answer is to move web development to the web, as Google Docs and Figma did for knowledge workers. As a result of WebAssembly's increasing maturity and new browser capabilities, the browser-as-operating-system continues... See more

Taking an idea from concept to business means moving through a series of gates. In the Silicon Valley model, the gates look something like this:

1. Develop an initial product concept and launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).


2. Iterate on MVP to reach product/market fit.


3. Scale up.


4. Cash-out.

Rule 4: Reasoning by Analogy is … OK!

It is important to recognize that your customers perceive the value of your product differently. You can create packages that appeal to different customers by identifying where they feel emotionally compelled to pay. But beware: you'll need to support the different options going forward or explain why customers need to switch.