Advice from Founders

Introduction

”A favourite theory of mine is that no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often.”

• Mark Twain

We have all heard of the adage that “History Repeats itself”. If history has lessons to impart, they are found across multiple recurring patterns ¹. In the same vein, rather than trying to figure out everything by ourselves when starting a new business, take time to read what others who have been through the journey say about it.

By tapping into others’ experiences - failures and successes - we can fasten our learning curve while avoiding the obvious mistakes. This blog post is a collection of advice from startup founders across domains and growth stages.

Team Building

• Hiring Great Product Managers
  • See if they can lead with authority
  • Takes blame but gives credit away
  • Ability to make decisions with limited information
  • Intense preparation ability
  • Methodical on how to recover from mistakes or failures
  • Operates optimally under intense pressure

• Stop evaluating people based on potential. You have 2 possible growth trajectories for people

  • Super Star - Those who provide outstanding performance but not always reliable
  • RockStar - These provide you with stable and excellent performance
  • You need to match people according to the role

• Avoid working with risk-averse mentors. You need to work with those who have seen it all

• As a startup founder, focus your efforts on moving your team from generalists to team of specialists

  • Let people identify their area of interest and allow them to develop their speciality in the same
  • Provide freedom for the team to keep considering newer ideas outside their speciality always but you should be clear on what each member will be a specialist on
  • As a founder, focus your energies on what your organisation needs to be focused on and needs tech capability

• Identify the right COO.

  • Undertake the following self-evaluation
    • What am I drawn to and enjoy doing? Note them down and observe how you structure your day
    • What do I avoid or laze on doing? List down all areas that you don’t enjoy doing
    • What do I wish I knew? Identify areas you need to improve and currently lack. The COO needs to guide you in this area
  • COO needs to complement the CEO, so ensure that the person selected enjoys doing what you avoid and can train you in areas you want to improve. The COO is not supposed to be the CEO’s babysitter and lacks the CEO’s ego.

• Don’t hire data analysts who lack clear business context as they will tend to work in silos and provide theoretical solutions that won’t add any business value

Product Market Fit

• One of the most subtle forms of determination is your ability to get a grip on an idea or be persistent about it.

  • Focus on repeating what you do every week and remind yourself why you are doing the same.
  • Clearly define and explain your success metrics

• Demo your products to young, old and drunk

  • You can only then build products that are simple to use
  • Ask them what this is for to get a sense in the simplest sense

• Don’t fall into the trap of developing highly customisable solutions as this needs a lot of data, which we mostly don’t have access to. Too much personalisation leads to steep opportunity costs. Focus more on key problems to be solved rather than getting stuck in personalisation solutions

• To build features for users they need, you need to observe them in their daily job. You need to see for a long period to arrive at a clear pattern on your observations
  • Focus your efforts on seeing what’s being done manually by overqualified people for any task as this area is ripe for a new feature that saves time. You need to observe for multiple days to avoid building a narrow solutions that does not benefit the customer

• When dealing with multiple trade-offs to be made. Let everyone work on making the best possible outcome for the one feature or aspect they are responsible for. This way you are likely to end up making the best possible product -tradeoff*

Marketing

• Develop your go-to-market strategy by identifying if your product is bought or sold. You need to identify if Sales or Marketing is to lead it. You can use the following attributes to arrive at a bought or sold matrix for your product
  • Price: Large or Small economic Decision
  • Market Size: Self-served or needs education
  • Fit & Finish: After all designed & Shipped, does customer need to do more
  • Customer: Individuals or business
  • Relationship: Successful customer relationship by transactional nature or longevity
  • Touch: How much scope is there in building a relationship? Can your efforts compound or mostly one-off
• Be Consistent to legitimise your brand once your marketing plan is in place from day one.
  • Develop a document, which is shared with the team from Day One. The Documents need to Contain standard language and visuals
  • Colour: Palette of 3 to 4 Complementary colours
  • Fonts: Define Header, and body copy for all purposes
  • Logo: Show how it is used in Colour, B&W and dark mode
  • Top Line Verbiage: One Line company description, one paragraph description. 3-5 Adjectives that explain your brand attributes

Productivity

• Start every day from zero.
  • Reset your odometer to 0 at the start of each ride, as going from 0 to 50 is better than going from 510 to 560.
  • This helps improve focus, as you are starting from scratch and don’t feel complacent.
  • Push forward for progress, no matter how small, as it is better than none.
• Schedule solo clarity meetings to do focused intentional work. The agenda for such meetings needs to include
  • List down broader team or organisation top priorities
  • Check if personal priorities are aligned with organisational one
  • Check for Data/info that requires a shift in priorities
  • Check your time allocations, and meetings based on your priorities. Cancel if any don’t meet them for the week
  • Keep adjusting your work calendar based on priorities

Decision Making

• Decision evaluation: Always evaluate any decision amongst various options you make using the following attributes
  • Benefits
  • Costs
  • Mitigation: Focus most on this before arriving at a decision
• Develop a framework to take decisions quickly
• When in doubt about any big decisions, utilise hypothesis trees to arrive at it.
  • List down verifiable independent hypotheses or facts for the main hypothesis.
  • Allows you to focus on areas of debate and validate each hypothesis

Business Fundamentals

• Questions to help you grow faster and smarter

  • Have we documented our operating principles?
    • Describe clearly the core tenants, describing the how and why
  • What organisational structure will help us achieve our goals?
    • Decide on the structure upfront as it leads to clarity to all
  • Who has been successful at our company so far?
    • Ask who to understand what type of work work in your company
  • What is our 5-year plan for the company?
    • Keep it simple and within one page.
    • Describe the macro goals for the company
  • Do we have a way to measure employee experience?
    • Do people feel that the work they do results in company success?
  • Are we decentralising decision-making?
    • See one, do one and teach one

• Focus on developing operational metrics for your business rather than vanity metrics. The metrics you track need to make sense for your business and customers.

  • Tip for Product: Count the no of 5 min blocks your users spend with you in a day and look for clusters of action gaps in action in their behaviour
  • Understand your key business metrics as it can help to understand if any pivot is needed or not

• Starting with metrics rather than goals.

  • Be clear on what question you want to answer or hypothesis that you want to validate.
  • Define your success metrics accordingly that answer your question.
  • Ensure you are clear on what success looks like

• Focus on using simple tools or processes that give good results. Be clear that data quality matters most. Garbage In, Garbage Out

Networking

• How to build strong connections
  • Be genuine in your appreciation as people like you when they feel liked by you
  • Listen with intent
    • Show you have heard what was said by the other person
    • Encourage them to continue by asking follow-up questions
  • Acknowledge your fallibility and human imperfection as they go a long way towards making yourself relatable
• Be honest to the other person and base it on a way that makes sense to the other person
• You may not be able to provide a solution but brainstorming helps the other person a fresh perspective on the matter
• End every meeting on what you would like to talk about the next time you meet. Assume you can meet this person again and that they would like to chat with you and not just bear with you
• Don’t fake it. Be genuine and prepare diligently for your meeting