{"id":80,"date":"2018-06-22T08:04:57","date_gmt":"2018-06-22T08:04:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box2043.temp.domains\/~naganine\/smemyanmar\/?p=80"},"modified":"2018-06-22T08:04:57","modified_gmt":"2018-06-22T08:04:57","slug":"startup-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/?p=80","title":{"rendered":"Startup Lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The original post <a href=\"http:\/\/www.defmacro.org\/2013\/07\/23\/startup-lessons.html\">here<\/a> contains 57 startup lessons with the following categories: people, fundraising, markets, products, marketing, sales, development, company administration, and personal well-being.\u00a0 Some selected lessons are shared below:<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"people\">People<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Split the stock between the founding team evenly.<\/li>\n<li>Make most decisions by consensus, but have a single\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">CEO<\/span>\u00a0whose decisions are final. Make it clear from day one.<\/li>\n<li>Your authority as\u00a0<span class=\"caps\">CEO<\/span>\u00a0is earned. You start with a non-zero baseline. It grows if you have victories and dwindles if you don\u2019t. Don\u2019t try to use authority you didn\u2019t earn.<\/li>\n<li>Pick the initial team\u00a0<strong>very<\/strong>\u00a0carefully. Everyone should be pleasant to work with, have at least one skill relevant to the business they\u2019re spectacular at, be extremely effective and pragmatic.<\/li>\n<li>The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. Pick a small set of non-negotiable rules that matter to you most and enforce them ruthlessly.<\/li>\n<li>Fire people that are difficult, unproductive, unreliable, have no product sense, or aren\u2019t pragmatic. Do it quickly.<\/li>\n<li>Some friction is good. Too much friction is deadly. Fire people that cause too much friction. Good job + bad behavior == you\u2019re fired.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 id=\"fundraising\">Fundraising<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>If you have to give away more than 15% of the company at any given fundraising round, your company didn\u2019t germinate correctly. It\u2019s salvageable but not ideal.<\/li>\n<li>If you haven\u2019t earned people\u2019s respect yet, fundraising on traction is an order of magnitude easier than fundraising on a story.<\/li>\n<li>Treat your fundraising pitch as a minimum viable product. Get it out, then iterate after every meeting.<\/li>\n<li>Most investor advice is very good for optimizing and scaling a working business. Listen to it.<\/li>\n<li>Most investor advice isn\u2019t very good for building a magical product. Nobody can help you build a magical product \u2014 that\u2019s your job.<\/li>\n<li>Don\u2019t fall in love with the fundraising process. Get it done and move on.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 id=\"markets\">Markets<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>The best products don\u2019t get built in a vacuum. They win because they reach the top of a field over all other products designed to fill the same niche. Find your field and be the best. If there is no field, something\u2019s wrong.<\/li>\n<li>Work on a problem that has an immediately useful solution, but has enormous potential for growth. If it doesn\u2019t augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way, it\u2019s not worth doing.<\/li>\n<li>Starting with the right idea matters. Empirically, you can only pivot so far.<\/li>\n<li>Assume the market is efficient and valuable ideas will be discovered by multiple teams nearly instantaneously.<\/li>\n<li>Pick new ideas because they\u2019ve been made possible by other social or technological change. Get on the train as early as possible, but make sure the technology is there to make the product be enough better that it matters.<\/li>\n<li>If there is an old idea that didn\u2019t work before and there is no social or technological change that can plausibly make it work now, assume it will fail. (That\u2019s the efficient market hypothesis again. If an idea could have been brought to fruition, it would have been. It\u2019s only worth trying again if something changed.)<\/li>\n<li>Educating a market that doesn\u2019t want your product is a losing battle. Stick to your ideals and vision, but respect trends. If you believe the world needs iambic pentameter poetry, sell hip hop, not sonnets.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 id=\"products\">Products<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Product sense is everything. Learn it as quickly as you can. Being good at engineering has nothing to do with being good at product management.<\/li>\n<li>Don\u2019t build something that already exists. Customers won\u2019t buy it just because it\u2019s yours.<\/li>\n<li>Make sure you know why users will have no choice but to switch to your product, and why they won\u2019t be able to switch back. Don\u2019t trust yourself \u2014 test your assumptions as much as possible.<\/li>\n<li>Ask two questions for every product feature. Will people buy because of this feature? Will people not buy because of lack of this feature? Don\u2019t build features if the answer to both questions is \u201cno\u201d.<\/li>\n<li>Build a product people want to buy in spite of rough edges, not because there are no rough edges. The former is pleasant and highly paid, the latter is unpleasant and takes forever.<\/li>\n<li>Beware of chicken and egg products. Make sure your product provides immediate utility.<\/li>\n<li>Learn the difference between people who might buy your product and people who are just commenting. Pay obsessive attention to the former. Ignore the latter.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 id=\"marketing\">Marketing<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Product comes first. If people love your product, the tiniest announcements will get attention. If people don\u2019t love your product, no amount of marketing effort will help.<\/li>\n<li>Try to have marketing built into the product. If possible, have the YouTube effect (your users can frequently send people a link to something interesting on your platform), and Facebook effect (if your users are on the product, their friends will need to get on the product too).<\/li>\n<li>Reevaluate effectiveness on a regular basis. Cut things that don\u2019t work, double down on things that do.<\/li>\n<li>Don\u2019t guess. Measure.<\/li>\n<li>Market to your users. Getting attention from people who won\u2019t buy your product is a waste of time and money.<\/li>\n<li>Don\u2019t say things if your competitors can\u2019t say the opposite. For example, your competitors can\u2019t say their product is slow, so saying yours is fast is sloppy marketing. On the other hand, your competitors\u00a0<strong>can<\/strong>\u00a0say their software is for Python programmers, so saying yours is for Ruby programmers is good marketing. Apple can get away with breaking this rule, you can\u2019t.<\/li>\n<li>Don\u2019t use supercilious tone towards your users or competitors. It won\u2019t help sell the product and will destroy good will.<\/li>\n<li>Don\u2019t be dismissive of criticism. Instead, use it to improve your product. Your most vocal critics will often turn into your biggest champions if you take their criticism seriously.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 id=\"sales\">Sales<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Sales fix everything. You can screw up everything else and get through it if your product sells well.<\/li>\n<li>Product comes first. Selling a product everyone wants is easy and rewarding. Selling a product no one wants is an unpleasant game of numbers.<\/li>\n<li>Be relentless about working the game of numbers while the product is between the two extremes above. Even if you don\u2019t sell anything, you\u2019ll learn invaluable lessons.<\/li>\n<li>Qualify ruthlessly. Spending time with a user who\u2019s unlikely to buy is equivalent to doing no work at all.<\/li>\n<li>Inbound is easier than outbound. If possible, build the product in a way where customers reach out to you and ask to pay.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 id=\"development\">Development<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Development speed is everything.<\/li>\n<li>Minimize complexity. The simpler the product, the more likely you are to actually ship it, and the more likely you are to fix problems quickly.<\/li>\n<li>Pick implementations that give 80% of the benefit with 20% of the work.<\/li>\n<li>Use off the shelf components whenever possible.<\/li>\n<li>Use development sprints. Make sure your sprints aren\u2019t longer than one or two weeks.<\/li>\n<li>Beware of long projects. If you can\u2019t fit it into a sprint, don\u2019t build it.<\/li>\n<li>Beware of long rewrites. If you can\u2019t fit it into a sprint, don\u2019t do it.<\/li>\n<li>If you must do something that doesn\u2019t fit into a sprint, put as much structure and peer review around it as possible.<\/li>\n<li>Working on the wrong thing for a month is equivalent to not showing up to work for a month at all.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 id=\"company-administration\">Company administration<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Don\u2019t waste time picking office buildings, accountants, bookkeepers, janitors, furniture, hosted tools, payroll companies, etc. Make sure it\u2019s good enough and move on.<\/li>\n<li>Take the time to find a good, inexpensive lawyer. It will make a difference.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 id=\"personal-well-being\">Personal well-being<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Do everything you can not to attach your self esteem to your startup (you\u2019ll fail, but try anyway). Do the best you can every day, then step back. Work in such a way that when the dust settles you can be proud of the choices you\u2019ve made, regardless of the outcome.<\/li>\n<li>Every once in a while, get away. Go hiking, visit family in another city, go dancing, play chess, tennis,\u00a0<strong>anything<\/strong>. It will make you more effective and make the people around you happier.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Read more at\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.defmacro.org\/2013\/07\/23\/startup-lessons.html\">http:\/\/www.defmacro.org\/2013\/07\/23\/startup-lessons.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"mh-excerpt\"><p>The original post here contains 57 startup lessons with the following categories: people, fundraising, markets, products, marketing, sales, development, company administration, and personal well-being.\u00a0 Some selected lessons are shared below: People Split the stock between <a class=\"mh-excerpt-more\" href=\"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/?p=80\" title=\"Startup Lessons\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":81,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[23,21],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-startup","tag-lessons","tag-startup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82,"href":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions\/82"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/81"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smemyanmar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}