

Advice for first time founders - edmack
https://medium.com/@DavidMack/advice-for-first-time-founders-3834f02cd3b0

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brandonb
There are many truths here, but I keep seeing HN articles with variants on the
following piece of advice:

"As a founder your sole aim is growth. If you don’t have growth now, you are
failing."

That's only half-true.

To simplify a bit, there are two types of startups in the world: Twitter, and
the hoverboard.

Twitter is easy to build, but the question is: does somebody actually want it?
Twitter startups are all about _market risk._

Conversely, if you could build a hoverboard, then _of course_ people would buy
it. Hoverboards are awesome. The question is, can you actually build it?
Hoverboard startups are all about _technical risk_.

The advice to focus on nothing but growth applies to startups where market
risk is the dominant risk. You need to validate that there's actual demand for
your product. And that's where advice like "If you don’t have scale, you
probably don’t need (much) technology", "try no-tech," "[edit] static content
and embedding some forms" applies.

But if you're building Tesla, or a cure for cancer, or self-driving cars, or
most enterprise products, or any number of startups which require a technical
breakthrough, you literally _cannot_ focus on growth from the start. The
minimum viable product for these types of areas may take months or even years
to build. The experiments you should run for those types of startups should
validate technical assumptions: for example, can we make a battery energy-
dense enough to power an electric car? Or they should validate market demand
through customer development, which is actually quite useful in many areas
such as enterprise sales where achieving growth may take 6-18 months even in
the best case.

In general, when you hear startup advice, it's wise to remember whether the
author's startup comes from the world of technical risk or market risk. The
right things to do for each type of startup are often complete opposites, and
it's easy to get confused since most people give advice based on what worked
for them, but don't necessarily include the context which circumscribes where
the advice applies.

As always, Steve Blank said it first and better:
[http://steveblank.com/2009/05/28/vertical-
markets-2-customer...](http://steveblank.com/2009/05/28/vertical-
markets-2-customermarket-risk-versus-invention-risk/)

~~~
timr
_" The advice to focus on nothing but growth applies to startups where market
risk is the dominant risk."_

Yep. But there's also a class of startup that we might call the Secret
Hoverboard: it's the sort of problem that looks like a Twitter ( _" would
people want to get more stuff delivered if it only costs $5?"_), and when you
poke at it with the stick of "doing things that don't scale", you see strong
consumer demand -- market validation! Secretly, however, there's a hoverboard-
sized technical problem between manual labor and profitability (e.g. _" if we
can just get our fleet of bicycle messengers operating with X% efficiency we
can deliver anything by bicycle for a flat $5 surcharge, which will undercut
the business models of all existing delivery services!"_)

These are tricky, because people are so used to market risk being the dominant
factor that they can be fooled into believing that the strong consumer demand
means that the rest is easy. But really, it's telling you that people _love_
to get something for nothing, and the market got the solution right the first
time.

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confiscate
"Technology is bad. It distances you from users. It slows down iterations.
It’s expensive to build. It provides a worse experience than you could provide
in person or over email."

I don't quite agree with the saying that "technology is bad". Obviously like
anything else, if you mis-use it, it will not generate the benefits you
expect, but unilaterally claiming that "tech is something to avoid as much as
possible" seems like pretty bad advice.

That's kind of like a pure tech company claiming that "accounting is bad" and
"try to avoid accounting as much as possible". Every company needs good
accounting at some point. It's foolish to unilaterally assume it will be bad
to have it.

Good luck finding good engineers to work for your company. Or maybe, good
engineers are really not that important for the company / product you're
running / building, which is actually fine for a non-tech-oriented
product/company. Most companies aren't tech companies and don't need strong
engineering, or even any engineering at all in most cases. Just don't call
yourself a tech company, when the focus isn't on tech.

~~~
richardbrevig
You have a valid view. I interpreted the author to be re-stating the "do
things that don't scale" advice from Paul Graham.

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zkhalique
Hmm, we definitely have a different view.

[http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2011/04/business-
models/](http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2011/04/business-models/)

1\. People live lives. Companies create products.

2\. Make a business model that works

3\. Make it safe to fail over and over, so you can iterate

4\. Measure everything

5\. Nail your engagement metrics

6\. Take advantage of viral loops and optimize them

7\. Optimize engagement

8\. Optimize monetization

9\. Prepare onboarding process and system for future hires, including
Partnering Per Project agreements

10\. Attract great people by following 3 - 7

11\. Reinvest into the company.

Optional:

12\. Raise money from investors following 3 - 7

Repeat endlessly until mission accomplished.

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dmritard96
Many points DNA to hardware/software startups fyi.

