Startups Paul Graham's "Startups in 13 sentences" summary |
- Paul Graham's "Startups in 13 sentences" summary
- Early team member is completely MIA, how to proceed?
- Anyone have any advice when it comes to reaching out to potential customers and doing some customer development calls?
- Reward my mobile app users with a token (blockchain)
- Acquihires: Founders like or no like?
- How to deal with a potential investor and if I should even get investment?
- Finding the right experts for complicated restructuring and leadership of small technology company?
- Question on equity percentage calculations
| Paul Graham's "Startups in 13 sentences" summary Posted: 28 Feb 2021 05:18 AM PST Paul Graham wrote an essay in 2009, "Startups in 13 sentences" Its filled with nuggets of startup wisdom like: "It's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy." A summary of an already short-essay: 1. Pick good cofounders.Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. 2. Launch fast.The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. 3. Let your idea evolve.This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate. It's a big mistake to treat a startup as if it were merely a matter of implementing some brilliant initial idea. As in an essay, most of the ideas appear in the implementing. 4. Understand your users.You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives. The second dimension is the one you have most control over. The growth in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. The hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. That's why so many successful startups make something the founders needed 5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It's easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it's harder to lie to yourself. If you think you're 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it's not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it's easy to know how many users you have. 6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.Customers are used to being maltreated. Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. Go out of your way to make people happy. They'll be overwhelmed; you'll see. In the earliest stages of a startup, it pays to offer customer service on a level that wouldn't scale, because it's a way of learning about your users. 7. You make what you measure.Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You'll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you'll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure. 8. Spend little.I can't emphasize enough how important it is for a startup to be cheap. Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly. 9. Get ramen profitable."Ramen profitable" means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. 10. Avoid distractions.Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects. The startup may have more long-term potential, but you'll always interrupt working on it to answer people paying you now. 11. Don't get demoralizedThough the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can't be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized 12. Don't give up.Even if you get demoralized, don't give up. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. This isn't true in all fields. There are a lot of people who couldn't become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. But startups aren't like that. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you keep morphing your idea. 13. Deals fall through.One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. We probably had 20 deals of various types fall through. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they get terminated. Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one. Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives. The hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that. Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That's the reason to launch early, to understand your users. Evolving your idea is the embodiment of understanding your users. Understanding your users well will tend to push you toward making something that makes a few people deeply happy. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it helps you understand your users. And understanding your users will even ensure your morale, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going. Read the full essay → http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html What would be your 1 startup advice? [link] [comments]  |
| Early team member is completely MIA, how to proceed? Posted: 28 Feb 2021 12:58 PM PST Sadly, one of our (very talented) UX designers has not been performing and completely unresponsive for the past 2 months. Not responsive to emails, slack or phone calls. team member has common stock with upcoming cliff date is end of March. What should we do to do the the things the right way? Notice of termination by email, mail? What do to do about issued stock options? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Feb 2021 06:35 AM PST Hey, so I've wanted to work on developing a startup for a few years now and I'm finally going to give it a try. So, one of the most important things is finding a worthy problem to solve before spending months building a product. I've been thinking about doing some customer development calls with my potential market (small b2b SaaS companies), but I've run into a few issues. Is it really possible to learn about a meaningful problem to solve without creating a wireframe first using something like "The Mom Test"? Also, if I reach out to b2b SaaS companies should they all serve the same customer or provide the same service? If I don't will I end up with a bunch of different problems? [link] [comments]  |
| Reward my mobile app users with a token (blockchain) Posted: 28 Feb 2021 02:32 AM PST Hi everyone! The reason I want to use blockchain is because I need a decentralised point system that cannot be changed. Points are always incremental based on tasks and cannot be forged. Thanks in advance for your help! [link] [comments]  |
| Acquihires: Founders like or no like? Posted: 28 Feb 2021 09:48 AM PST Hi wise people of startups, As the title says: As a founder, what's your take on your venture and team getting acquihired? My situation one time was I really respected the team I was part of, but try as we might, our product was a flop. So, instead of keep trying solo, we got ourselves acquired into a larger venture in a related space. Everyone kept their jobs, and overall did OK. ... but we still have s lingering "what if" feeling about it all. I am curious about your personal take on these issues a. Why would you get acqui-hired instead of just resigning and joining as an employee, chaqu'un pour soi, at different companies? Do you think financially an acquihire is a better option? b. Why would the acquirer consider an acquihire over traditional recruitment? I get that they get a readymade bundle of talent in 1 go, but what if not everyone is a perfect fit for open roles? c. Your own acquihire journeys, how did they come about? did you proactively seek an acquirer or did you get approached directly by the acquirer or through someone else? .. any interesting anecdotes, horror stories? :P SO. Getting acquihired. You likey or no likey your acquihire experience?:) [link] [comments]  |
| How to deal with a potential investor and if I should even get investment? Posted: 28 Feb 2021 07:46 AM PST I'm 18 years old and own a construction business. (Might not seem like a start up but trust me the way I'm doing things it is 😂) The brother of a client I am working for approached me yesterday and said he's impressed with my Business and the skills I have as an entrepreneur. He said he'd like to discuss investing in my company. I told him the amount I've been trying to save to take my business to the next level is £150,000 He said that amount of money wouldn't be a problem. Note: he did not say he wants to invest in my company, just that he'd like to discuss it further in the future. What I want to know is, should I accept investment even if I'm most likely going to have that money in the nearish future? It should take me a year or two to get that money the way my operations are now. And my second question is, if I decide to invest, how would I go about discussions etc. and what is the protocol? What could I do to make receiving the investment more likely if discussions are to occur shortly? Note: he does not know that I am 18, and I look around 23-24, so I don't know if that would affect anything in the future. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks for your reply. In advance. [link] [comments]  |
| Finding the right experts for complicated restructuring and leadership of small technology company? Posted: 27 Feb 2021 09:19 PM PST I am sure everyone is always hoping to find the right expertise to bring to the table, wondering where/how you find the good ones? In short, a complicated situation is leading to the (private) company changing control to less experienced family members of the controlling shareholders who would like to retain control of the company or at least facilitate a transition to the right management team and investors. The primary goal is to avoid liquidation of this company which has very viable technologies in development and has had success with some tech that reached the market. This situation may result due to a complicated dispute with majority shareholders and current management that may be brought under control soon, but without a team to takeover. Looking for the right kind of person(s) to work with a small technology company for compensation and/or equity to do this restructuring and hopefully be involved in leading the company in some manner (advisory, embedded, with equity, etc....), but without going to the vultures in big consultancy firms. Any ideas? [link] [comments]  |
| Question on equity percentage calculations Posted: 27 Feb 2021 07:43 PM PST Hi, I have a few offers from some tech startups and was hoping to get one of my questions clarified. When startups give you an offer with an equity percentage, are they generally based on outstanding shares, or fully-diluted shares? Is this something you should always clarify? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
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