The clearest sign of finding product-market fit is feeling "pull" from the market.

But what does "pull" look like?

👇 Read on 👇

How do you prioritize a roadmap?

First, take a step back and remember that a business is just a group of people solving problems for other people in exchange for money. Your job is to (1) figure out the problems, and (2) solve them in the most efficient way possible. Thread 👇

1/ Step 1: Figure out the problems -- get the ground truth:
* Talk to customers
* Talk to employees who talk to customers (CX, sales)
* Observe your customer's behavior, through data and user research
* Use the product yourself
* Look into what caused users to churn

2/ Step 2: Solve problems in the most efficient way possible -- least work for most impact:
* Develop hypotheses around what you believe will solve the problems
* Ideate solutions to these hypotheses (see link)
* Put these ideas into a spreadsheet

3/ Rate each idea from 1-5 across two attributes: (1) Impact: How impactful it'll be in solving the problem, and (2) Effort: How much work it'll take to execute. Guesstimate -- what matters most is relative differences.
* Sort the spreadsheet by ratio of Impact / Effort, discuss

4/ How do you estimate Impact?
Every decision is somewhere along this spectrum:
Gut <--------------------> Complete data
Knowing this, use all of the data at your disposal (quant, qual), plus your team's experience, to inform the estimate. You are smart people, trust yourselves.

I'm excited to share a new growth framework that @danhockenmaier and I have been developing (with help from the amazing @reforge crew)

I've been finding myself coming back to this framework often when talking to founders about growth.

Thread

1/ As a startup, it's essential that you, and your team, have a clear understanding of how your business is likely to grow. We call this building a Growth Model. With this, you'll know which growth investments to make right away, which to avoid, and which to double-down on.

2/ Our advice is to think about your business like a high-performance race car. The same four components that help a car drive faster also help your business grow:

1. ⚙️ The (Growth) Engine: Self-sustaining growth loops that drive most of your growth (e.g. virality, perf marketing, content, sales)

2. 💥 Turbo boosts: One-off events that accelerate growth temporarily but don’t last (e.g. PR, events, Super Bowl ads)

3. 💧 Lubricants: Optimizations that make the growth engine run more efficiently (e.g. improved conversion, a stronger brand, higher customer retention).

4. ⛽ Fuel: The input that your engine requires to run (e.g. capital, content, users).

Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap → Task

As taught to us by Oceans 11 👇

Mission: Rob the Bellagio, the Mirage, and the MGM Grand casinos, and get back at rival Terry Benedict.

Vision: Great wealth and revenge

Strategy: Get into the vault that all three casinos share
1. Get into casino cage
2. Get through doors w/ code that changes every 12h
3. Get into an elevator that requires fingerprints+vocal verification
4. Get past two guards with uzis
5. Break into

Goal: Walk out with

A thread about building a company from scratch:

Building a startup and then attempting to scale is like designing then building a car that will need to eventually fly, even become a rocket ship.

You need to spend time sketching the initial design of the vehicle. 1/n

Almost no one will give you money to sketch. YOU are the likely only investor at that stage.

You can move quicker by finding something similar and then modifying that template for time period, market size, geography, experience and skills.

Then you have an MVP to build

MVP isn’t only for tech companies. Any company can build an MVP version of itself to test and iterate.

Now your likely investors include your family, maybe a friend or two who believe in your vision and mission while sharing the same values.

That is fuel to move the car forward

No one will give you fuel if you don’t have a car because you don’t need it.

You also won’t get enough fuel for the entire journey. You have to be willing to take a risk and start the journey anyway believing that you will secure more fuel along the way.

As you proceed on the journey, you get feedback, adjust your route, circle a few times, hit a dead-end and back up, but you keep going towards your destination - your next goal.

Along the way you secure more fuel from friends and family who start to like your progress

1/ "Inflation is dead!"

"We can print as much money as we want!"

"Don’t worry about it, there will never be any inflation!"

Time to take a closer look. 👇

2/ First, a few definitions:

Inflation measures how much more expensive a basket of goods and services has become over a certain period, usually a year.

Looking at the US and Europe the numbers don’t look too bad.

But wait there is more ;)

3/ As Winston Churchill once said:

The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.”

Over the past decades the government changed the way how to measure inflation several times to give you the expression there is nothing to worry about.

4/ If we calculate inflation the same way as in the 80ies or 90ies, it is at least double the amount!

5/ But there is more....

The Chapwood Index reflects the true cost-of-living increase in America. It reports the unadjusted actual cost and price fluctuation of the top 500 items on which Americans spend their after-tax dollars in the 50 largest cities in the nation.

Building an #MVP is the first step in building a #startup. Whether a feature should be added or not, better to launch early with less or late with more are questions founders struggle with. Below 👇👇👇 is a #tweetstorm on @mwseibel's 'How to plan an MVP'

14 mental models that helped me build 10 startups and sell (a bunch of them) for millions.

1) Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM)

Everyone focuses on the Total Addressable Market (TAM), which gives an unrealistic expectation of your market size.

Instead SOM gives you a more practical estimate.

2) Viral Coefficient

Is the number of new users an average customer generates and a strong indicator of how highly your users like your product.

The higher your viral coefficient, the cheaper your acquisition costs.

3) Beta Testing

The process of exposing your users to different versions of the product/ messaging to determine the most effective one.

All top companies do this on a regular basis.

4) Conversion Funnel

The different stages that a buyer goes through before making a purchase.

Understanding what stage they're in helps you strategize your marketing accordingly.

10 reasons why I think now is the greatest time to launch a startup

You should probably consider starting something

Just listen to this:

You can start with the community

I’ve identified ~8000 communities that could be unbundled from Reddit

- They are thriving
- They could make you ~$1m/year of revenue
- You often need $400 max to build MVP to tap that untapped value
- It's fun

Sounds like a dream job to me

People in Silicon Valley don’t have an edge on you

SF held the monopoly on startups for decades. Now, being in SF doesn’t matter for 99% of businesses

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

The world is flat and is staying flat

Hell yeah. That feels good to say

You have 10x the amount of funding sources

You used to have to rely on VCs. Not anymore

To name a few:

- Fund via your community
- Fund via NFTs
- Fund via pre-sales
- Fund via tokens
- Fund via accelerators all over the world
- Etc

All of a sudden, you have 10x the options

Niche businesses can be worth billions

People used to laugh at niche. Why “go small” when you could “go big”?

The way to go big right now IS to go small

Large tech companies can’t be everything to everyone