Real Founder Lessons
The best startup advice from experienced founders...one real-world lesson at a time.
Talk with competitors
(at minute 15:54)
Founder Lesson
It’s common knowledge that talking with users is the best way to understand a potential market for a new startup. Less known, but also valuable, is talking with investors who invest in the space. Maybe even less accepted is a third way…talking with competitors.
In this podcast an experienced founder describes why . . .
The only metric that really matters for an early startup
(at minute 7:05)
Founder Lesson
Momentum is oxygen for startups. This is something that I’ve experienced many times. Momentum can be anything that motivates you and your team. Getting selected for a big conference. Convincing a local angel to invest. Getting a good press story. All of these small victories keep the founders going and make the difficult . . .
It's really hard to get minimum viable product right
(at minute 24:01)
Founder Lesson
Since product-market fit is maybe the most important step in a new startup, deciding what to test and what initial product to create becomes pretty important. I find that most founders do the “kitchen sink” method of including everything. This methods takes too much time and money. Another group goes the Lean Startup route . . .
Who are your real competitors?
(at minute 21:54)
Founder Lesson
Over the years I’ve struggled with how to think about competition. There are obvious competitors in your industry that you can find with a simple Google search, but I’ve found that the best founders think more deeply about this topic.
The best founders fixate on their primary customer value proposition and who else . . .
A good startup education for anyone
For this post, I decided to switch things up a bit to give a little backstory on where I get most of the content for my blog.
I frequently have coffee meetings with first-time founders where they ask for advice on how to learn the basics of startups.
Here are the best four ways to learn about startups...
1) Best way . . .
Expect a new startup to take 18 months to find product-market fit
(at minute 8:25)
Common Founder Issue
I didn’t believe this when I started and this constantly surprises first-time founders, but a good general rule is that new startups will take about 18 months to find decent product-market fit. Sometimes it happens as quickly as 12 months and often (of course) it never happens, but 18 months is what I’d expect if I . . .
Just fu@%&ng launch already (what's most engaging)
(at minute 33:47)
Common Founder Issue
Anyone who’s ever launched the initial product for a startup knows the drill. The temptation is to add lots of features because you don’t know which will be most popular and your ultimate vision for the business is huge, so you might as well start on that big vision now.
The reality is that your small startup . . .
