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Startup skills & where to learn them

General great sources of advice

  • Paul Graham’s essays
  • How to start a startup sequence
  • Elad Gil’s High Growth Handbook
  • Stripe Atlas
  • The Great CEO Within
  • How to win friends & influence people

(IMO: worth reading in full instead of skimming or summarizing with ChatGPT. Books & writing are more than just their high-level takeaways; they’re ways to self-program, self-hypnotize. Still lots of alpha in books.)

Product

“Product” refers to the thing core thing you make

  • Coming up with ideas
    • Don’t pitch people your idea, instead learn who they are
    • “Talking to Humans”
    • “The Mom Test”
  • Improving your product
    • “Don’t Make Me Think” on user interviews
      • watch people and see what they do
  • Marketplaces
    • “Cold Start Problem” (…?)

Building

  • Field-specific, but get good taste, practice a lot, always be shipping (?)
    • Eg software: tech blogs in your field
    • Eg events: taco tuesday
  • Research your competitors, consider the tradeoffs they made, copy what’s good
  • Move fast!!!!!!!
    • Fast = iterate, learn, improve quickly
    • Fast = impressive to your partners (customers, investors, hires)

Finances & pricing

  • Stripe Atlas
  • Patio11 on pricing — “charge more”
  • Worry about the big picture
    • Usually, raising revenue >> lowering costs
      • Much more upside potential in revenue, you can only get costs down by a factor of 1x, but you could 10x or more on revenue
      • Easier to cut costs since you control your spending but not other’s spending
  • Fundraising ≠ revenue: funds raised are a promise, revenue is value delivered
  • aside, things to optimize for besides money: learning & skills, connections, impressiveness. cf “What are you getting paid in”?

Marketing

Marketing: how you broadcast what you provide & why it matters

  • Your “email” list, or generally where you broadcast things
    • Owning your channel can be super important, vs chasing Twitter/YT/HN trends
  • Your website, landing page
  • Focus on value to them

Writing

Extremely leveraged: writing is kinda like automating your ideas

  • List of internet writing advice
  • Copywriting for websites, forms: cut words
  • Emails
  • Internal docs, written culture

Sales

  • The art of the cold reach out, Manifest as a case study
    • Model your recipient, match their language, cite people & examples that matter to them
  • 1:1 reach outs with people
    • Take notes on the call imo
    • B2C sales: Manifest conference reach outs
    • B2B sales: Manifest sponsorships
  • Have a CRM!
    • Basic Airtable/Notion with name, contact, stage in pipeline

Working with people

  • Cofounders
  • Employees
  • Contractors

Building up your team:

  • morale
  • mission alignment
  • incentive structures

Basic structure: do standup, do 1:1s with people, do an all-hands

Do retros when you do a big thing

cf “Peopleware”

Community

Community is where people talk to each other, not to you.

  • Can be source of power, flywheel. Manifold, LessWrong were good at this
  • Place to talk (Discord, your product itself)
  • Elevate great examples (moderators)

Events

  • “The chairs are where the people go” — super underrated
  • “The art of gathering” — generally well regarded

Distractions

  • Legal stuff
  • Parties, events
  • Virality for virality’s sake
    • Can be useful proof point