Distribution. “First time founders think about product, second time founders think about distribution” “Distribution is essential to the design of the product. If you invent something but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business. Superior distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true” -Peter Thiel
Ideal founder. Paul graham wrote about the number 1 most important attribute for a founder - relentlessly resourceful. Some other qualities to look for (Julian Shapiro): Can you sell? Can you build? Do you have founder-market fit (B2C → strong user empathy, product intuition, B2B → ability to hustle on sales, outbound)? Are you premeditative (strategically think through decisions instead of impulsively going for it, examining history and gathering data first before deciding)? Do you think and communicate clearly?
“There’re a bunch of useful qualities in founders, but
I’ve narrowed it down to the 3 most important:
determination, domain expertise, and ability to sell.
At least one of you is going to have to sell.”
~Jessica Livingston
Cofounder of YC
Learn how to sell. It is said - learn to build, learn to sell, and you can do anything. Sales isn’t about convincing people to buy. Sales is about finding people with a problem worth solving, determining if your product can solve the problem, and demonstrating how your solution solves the problem. Don’t assume that your prospect has a problem and don’t assume that they care to solve it. Sales is a series of steps. The goal of your cold email isn’t to sell your product, it’s to book a meeting. The goal of your first meeting isn’t to sell your product, it’s to understand if there’s a problem worth solving. Most people skip steps and race towards the end — don’t. Technical founders have the ability to become brilliant salespeople. Prospects don’t want to be sold to — they want to hear your story. Don’t overthink it. Just tell your story, with passion. Every customer should lead to 2 more. Your customers will help you sell if you make them successful. Once you’ve over-delivered, ask your customer to introduce you to two people in their network. Do the work for them. Source the people you want to meet and write a forwardable intro email.
Startups = Growth, as Paul Graham puts it. Growth is the panacea to most startup ailments. Profitable startups pursue funding to set their own growth rate. Startups are acquired for their growth trajectory as much as their current success. If you are seed stage, set a goal for 5–7% growth weekly. If all possible startups were discretely arranged as a connected graph with a tiny subset of the nodes having the potential to become unicorns, then the optimal algorithm to finding a unicorn node would be to start on any highly connected node and traverse outward using growth as a local pathfinding heuristic. “Every successful startup is at least partly a product of the imagination of growth” — Paul Graham
Build something people need. Sequoia famously wrote about ‘finding customers who “have their hair on fire”’. These customers wouldn’t care if you handed them a bucket of water or a large stone, they’ll use your product due to their urgent need. Start small; it’s better to have 100 people who love your product, than 100,000 who kind of like it.
Talk to users. Don’t build solutions in isolation, don’t build solutions looking for a problem. Figure out your ICP (ideal customer profile), find where they hang out, and go talk to them. Follow 3 principles (from The Mom Test): — If you just avoid mentioning your idea, you automatically start asking better questions. — Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future. — Feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed
PMF is the only thing that matters until you reach it. Pre-PMF: resist scaling up hiring, paid marketing, negative unit economics, and prematurely optimizing your core product. You just need to get an 80/20 MVP in the hands of your users and validate your solution. Marc Andreessen explains product market fit best: https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html
Move quickly and boldly. Launch earlier than you want to, before the first version is done, warts and all. Launching early challenges and validates your assumptions, redefines the problem landscape by having your solution in the hands of real users, and allows you to iterate more quickly. You can launch multiple times, the “one big launch” with everything perfect is fool’s gold. “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late” -Reid Hoffman
Your product needs to be “10x” better than the norm to justify adoption. The bar for adoption is high, a product that is 20% better than the incumbents will struggle to overcome inertia.
Always look for the 80/20 solution. Diligently apply the 80/20 rule to almost everything you spend your time on as a founder, you can’t afford to waste time any other way. Don’t be a perfectionist.
Getting the right people matters. Don’t settle when hiring, and don’t justify settling because you feel the pressure to scale up your team. Hire slowly, fire quickly. Understand that under-performers have a massive blast radius — they not only fail to do their job, but they drain other people’s time as well. It’s not enough that everyone says yes to a candidate, you should be dying to work with the candidate.
Do things that don’t scale: send personal emails to day 1 users, seed your ghost platform with fake content, go to affinity locations (college campuses, subreddits, forums) and start posting. The story of AirBnb illustrates this well, as told by Paul Graham: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
Set up product analytics ASAP. Early analytics show what users are using, what needs to improve, and what is broken, and enables you to objectively measure product value. PostHog has a great article on this: https://posthog.com/founders/early-stage-analytics
Market > Team / Product. “The #1 killer of startups is lack of market” -Marc Andreessen “In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup” -Marc Andreessen https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html.
You should say no to most things. Shiny ideas, distractions (like conferences, or talking to VCs), non-exceptional talent, meetings, extraneous customer requests. “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” — Steve Jobs
For hiring: outbound > network > inbound. Inbound is broken by the simple fact that bad candidates vastly outnumber the good ones, which then vastly outnumber the excellent ones. You want the excellent ones so go to them and convince them to join you.
You probably don’t need a unique Go To Market strategy — meaning how you get your initial customers and how you charge them. Research, talk to early employees, and then copy the initial GTM strategy of successful companies similar to yours. The added benefit is that you will appear familiar to customers rather than foreign and radical.
Learn from other founders and startups, both successes and failures. Finding good problems to build a startup out of, pivoting, finding PMF, hiring, growth, raising money — these are all problems that other founders have failed, succeeded, and shared their stories with. Read VC blogs (YC and Sequoia have great ones), startup blogs (Gem, PostHog, Linear), Paul Graham. Read “Founders at Work” by Jessica Livingston, and follow founders who post insightful things online.
Don’t blindly fear competition — startups always die of suicide not murder. Unless you are in a truly winner-takes-all market, other startups working on your idea should give you some validation on the potential for product market fit. HubSpot built a 25BbusinessinthefaceofSalesforce’s250B one, amidst hundreds of others in the overcrowded SaaS landscape. “There’s room in every market for another great product with a different business strategy” — Posthog
Good ideas are cheap, execution is everything. “A good startup idea in someone’s brain is usually a 1mm head start at the beginning of a marathon.” — Garry Tan, CEO Y Combinator
A healthy, happy co-founder relationship matters a lot. Set aside time every few weeks to have a deep check-in with your cofounder, cultivate a transparent relationship that avoids piling up issues.