Thread by @mahadevanarj

1/ Startup lessons for Entrepreneurs

(Thread)

2/ If you can’t get to ramen profitability with a team of 2 – 4 within six months to a year, something’s wrong. (You can choose not to be profitable, but it must be your choice, not something forced on you by the market).

3/ Split the stock between the founding team evenly.

4/ Always have a vesting schedule.

5/ Make most decisions by consensus, but have a single CEO whose decisions are final. Make it clear from day one.

6/ Your authority as CEO is earned. You start with a non-zero baseline. It grows if you have victories and dwindles if you don’t. Don’t try to use authority you didn’t earn.

7/ Morale is very real and self-perpetuating. If you work too long without victories, your investors, employees, family, and you yourself will lose faith. Work like hell not to get yourself into this position.

8/ Pick the initial team very carefully. Everyone should be pleasant to work with, have at least one skill relevant to the business they’re spectacular at, be extremely effective and pragmatic.

9/ 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.

10/ Fire people that are difficult, unproductive, unreliable, have no product sense, or aren’t pragmatic. Do it quickly.

11/ Some friction is good. Too much friction is deadly. Fire people that cause too much friction. Good job + bad behavior == you’re fired.

12/ The best products don’t 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’s wrong.

13/ Work on a problem that has an immediately useful solution, but has enormous potential for growth. If it doesn’t augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way, it’s not worth doing.

14/ For example, Google touches billions of lives by filling a very concrete space in people’s daily routine. It changes the way people behave and perceive their immediate physical surroundings. Shoot for building a product of this magnitude.

15/ Starting with the right idea matters. Empirically, you can only pivot so far.

16/ Assume the market is efficient and valuable ideas will be discovered by multiple teams nearly instantaneously.

17/ Pick new ideas because they’ve 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.

18/ If there is an old idea that didn’t work before and there is no social or technological change that can plausibly make it work now, assume it will fail. (That’s the efficient market hypothesis again. If an idea could have been brought to fruition, it would have been)

19/ Educating a market that doesn’t 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.

20/ 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.

21/ Don’t build something that already exists. Customers won’t buy it just because it’s yours.

22/ Make sure you know why users will have no choice but to switch to your product, and why they won’t be able to switch back. Don’t trust yourself — test your assumptions as much as possible.

23/ Ask two questions for every product feature. Will people buy because of this feature? Will people not buy because of lack of this feature? No amount of the latter will make up for lack of the former. Don’t build features if the answer to both questions is “no”.

24/ 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.

25/ Beware of chicken and egg products. Make sure your product provides immediate utility.

26/ 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.

27/ Product comes first. If people love your product, the tiniest announcements will get attention. If people don’t love your product, no amount of marketing effort will help.

28/ 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

29/ Watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi, then do marketing that way. Pick a small set of tasks, do them consistently, and get better every day.

30/ Reevaluate effectiveness on a regular basis. Cut things that don’t work, double down on things that do.

31/ Don’t guess. Measure.

32/ for more , read at defmacro.org/2013/07/23/sta…

If you like this Thread

1) Like and Retweet the first tweet below:
2) Follow @mahadevanarj for everything about launching a US LLC from anywhere in the world

https://twitter.com/mahadevanarj/status/1417569458856636419?s=20