In the early stages, all we have are ideas which we are trying to validate. Ideally, one would rather not have to experiment as much like philosophers, mathematicians and scientists do, but it is sometimes required. In some cases, one may take multiple attempts, and others may strike gold the first time round. I suppose this depends on the evidence influencing initial assumptions, conviction borne from experience, and a degree of serendipity. Currently, I only have the first of the three, and I have often relied on intuition (and discernment) to decide on how to approach ideas and/or projects. More times than not, I have been only partially right.
As with many things, you learn as you go along. Everyone says ‘fail forward’, but failing forward sustainably involves identifying mistakes and not repeating them, not repeating them in order to learn. I went all-in on 2 projects this year, and I’m currently in the early stages of on my 3rd. [1] At their core, both projects did solve problems, but didn’t pan out for multiple reasons despite minor user validation. The most important thing has been not repeating the same mistakes: team bloat, door-to-door sales, high-trust/low-revenue markets, etc.
I realised the common trend amongst these was a tendency to initially choose complex approaches before simpler ones. The biggest benefit of working with (M)SMEs for a few months was building product empathy. In other words, centering our design, product, and customer acquisition around how the problems made them feel was pretty helpful. [2] I would have probably saved months had I implemented Occam’s Razor sooner, but it’s been especially helpful since. [3]
On simplicty, I recently began following Starter Story as a reminder of businesses building simple products generating significant revenue. [4] I regularly follow VC news and it’s easy to be fascinated by the headlines and fundraises from afar. However, I see any sort of funding and/or press not as the goal, but as a result of building a great product and achieving product-market-fit.
Common startup lore includes certain milestones ($100m ARR, unicorn status, etc) as not just desirable, but necessary. My first-time round, I definitely took that way too far and became more intrigued by the possibility of scaling instead of the route to achieving such a scale. In other words, thinking of user 1000 without closing user 1. In hindsight, this is definitely where the focus shifted from seeking investors as a route to non-existent users instead of chasing users to justify fundraising.
The choice to view things through a project lens ensures the focus remains on what matters. Contrary to conventional advice, I believe focusing on the fundamentals sometimes means disregarding the MVP approach. In many cases, the MVP approach may actually complicate things unnecessarily. At the end of day, discretion, intuition and discernment are the mechanisms which allow for high-conviction decision-making. [5]
I’m currently working on a plugin which is quite boring and very unsexy, but has had some promising waitlist activity in the 2 weeks since it went public. Hopefully, I’m able to share more very soon.
EDIT: I worked on Pubbler, a self-learning writing assistant specifically for Substack writers. We built on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 model due to its especially large context window. Despite very positive waitlist signalling, it didn’t feel right, and I decided not to launch.
[1] I refer to these as ‘projects’ because projects instead of ‘startups’ because projects have very low expectations and ensure all focus is directed on the fundamentals: users and cash-flow. It’s easy to call anything a ‘startup’ - and I have certainly done this before - but impressive metrics beat sounding ‘serious’ and looking impressive.
[2] In one case, we were building the OS for users in a very analogistic market. Instead of framing our tool as a solution, it was necessary to suggest it as an antithesis to the negative feelings caused by using outdated alternatives. None of this is groundbreaking, but it was especially new to me at the time.
[3] Occam’s Razor was one of the earliest philosophical concepts which I ever learnt. Ockham’s razor states that when faced with multiple (often competing) hypotheses, the simplest one is often correct.
[4] The initial version of this post was a case study on Tally. Tally is a great form-builder and had just crossed 6 figure MRR at the time – completely bootstrapped. Likewise, Linktree had recently crossed 50m users off just a link in bio product.
[5] The minimum viable product (MVP) is a development strategy which involves releasing a product with only the minimum features needed to satisfy early customers.