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Startup skills & where to learn them

Status: list of pointers and misc musings; still baking

General great sources of advice

Meta thoughts on advice:

  • Startups are more “riding a bike” tacit knowledge, less “book” knowledge.
    • Relatedly: knowledge transfer happens by spending time with great people. Ideally, work directly with them. Otherwise: talk to them, read their writing, or study their trajectory.
  • Conversely: These sources above are 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.
    • Also useful to re-read!
  • Advice is very situation-dependent. Consider reversing all advice you hear. If we say 10 things, maybe 7 will be somewhat helpful, 2 will be net negative, 1 might kill your startup, you need to figure out which is which.
    • You should interpret a lot of things I say as “this was helpful for Austin”, but you might not be very much like Austin

What to make

  • Lean into what you’re really good at, what your unfair advantage might be, what feels mysteriously hard for other people
  • Easiest to build something for yourself, or people like you
    • I get a lot of motivation from working on a thing that makes people like me happy
  • “Ideas are easy, execution is everything”
  • How to Get Startup IdeasHow to Get Startup Ideas

Talking to users

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

Building your product

  • Move fast!!!!!!!
    • Fast = iterate, learn, improve quickly
      • Pick a ship date, commit to it, cut scope as necessary, focus
    • Fast = impressive to your partners (customers, investors, hires)
  • 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

Visual Design

Finances & pricing

  • Stripe Atlas Guides
  • 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
    • Esp important for charities to get this straight
  • aside: your project don’t necessarily want to over-optimize for money early on. should be willing to spend early on things that will compound, grow
    • learning & skills, connections, impressiveness, network. cf “What are you getting paid in”?
    • eg first Manifest lost $30k, second Manifest made $60k, third on track for $200k

Writing

Extremely leveraged meta-skill

  • Copywriting for websites, forms: cut words
  • Marketing, blogs, newsletter: List of internet writing advice
  • Cold emails/text messages
  • Internal docs, written culture
  • Send “investor” updates!

Marketing

Marketing: 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 virality
  • Your website, landing page
  • Focus on value delivered to them
  • “Socials” — X, Reddit/HN, Discords/GCs

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

Intros

  • [todo]

Working with people

eg cofounders, employees, contractors

Building up your team:

  • morale
  • mission alignment
  • incentive structures

Resource: “Peopleware”

Basic structure of running a team:

  • daily-ish standup
  • 1:1s w/ cofounders and employees
  • all-hands

Do retros after big things:

  • What went well
  • What could have gone better
  • Improvements for next time

Community

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

  • Can be a moat, flywheel. Manifold, LessWrong were good at this.
  • Have a place for your fans to talk (Discord, your product itself)
  • Elevate great people (moderators, volunteers ⇒ employees)

Events: Hosting events is a subskill, can sometimes be very useful. There’s

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

Mentorship, coaching

  • [todo]

Distractions

  • Legal stuff
    • Entity structuring
    • Worrying about downside risk
  • Parties, events, conferences
    • Maybe if you’re getting customers there
  • Virality for virality’s sake
    • Can be useful proof point; but key question is “how does it convert”
  • Advice (oops)