Real Founder Lessons
The best startup advice from experienced founders...one real-world lesson at a time.
Don't grow until you have product-market fit
(at minute 2:11)
Founder Lesson
A few days ago I ran across this blog post. It’s the announcement from Shyp that they are cutting headcount and closing expansion markets to focus on profitability. Too many similar outcomes come to mind recently…Sprig, HomeHero, Zirtual, Beepi, Good Eggs & Homejoy. And these are just the ones that immediately come to . . .
MVP lessons from a burger joint
(listen to the whole thing)
Founder Lesson
I’m really loving How I Built This, a new podcast from NPR. They say it’s "a podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.” The founders tend to be from large businesses that people know and the podcasts dive into their origin stories.
When I started . . .
Posted in: allbootstrappingbusiness model validationcounterintuitive thingscreativitycustomer discoveryengagementexecutionfirst principlesfocusfoundershow i built thislean startuplisten to entire podcastmicromanagementmvpmy favoritespodcastprocessproductproduct market fitpsychological frictionrisksolving a problemsuper fanstractionunique playbookvalue proposition
What's your unique insight?
(at minute 14:01)
Founder Lesson
The more time I spend around startups the more I value the origin story of the founding team. And I’m not alone here. Pay attention to the VCs that you most respect. When you listen to them interview startup founders and the founders immediately launch into a product demo or describing traction, you’ll often hear the . . .
Pivots can be executed very quickly
(at minute 19:29)
Founder Lesson
Every startup pivots.
If you are founder - particularly if it’s your first startup - this is an incredibly daunting statement. You are smart. You’ve had this problem for a long time. Your initial product solves your problem. Plus you’ve been thinking about and working on this idea for 6/12/18/24 months (or longer). . . .
The three B's of creativity
(at minute 1:002:56)
Founder Lesson
I spend most of my time working on startups for consumers. To people new to startups, the differences between startups that sell to consumers and those that sell to businesses might not seem big, but the playbook for validating, launching and growing B2C versus B2B startups is very different.
One (of many) . . .
Are you working on the right thing right now?
(at minute 19:48)
Founder Lesson
I left my last startup about two years ago. Ever since then the topic that has most fascinated me is how disruptive companies are launched from the earliest moment that the founder has a special insight...what I call the "idea stage."
In order to focus full-time on this problem, I joined a long-time . . .
Example of not having product-market fit
(at minute 6:20)
Founder Lesson
I’ve spent a decade of my life in the “local discovery” part of the startup universe. In 2009 I co-founded a company called Scoutmob, a very early entrant into the part of the local discovery space that Groupon kicked-off a year earlier. This was after working for two years on the same problem with a different startup . . .
