Subtle real advantage nobody talks about: if founders can access deeper pools of capital early/quickly, they can get bigger faster without spawning lots of competitors.

If your startup is real, pitching Sand Hill is sometimes like giving away copies of your treasure map

Startup life can be summed up in three steps:

1. Find problem
2. Fix problem
3. Go back to step 1

Works for every thing you need to do in a startup.

Growth is determined by a combination of how fast you can go through the steps successfully and how long you can keep at it.

Finding the right problem to solve starts with understanding your customers.

Nobody says I wish I talked to less customers.

There aren’t any hacks or shortcuts to this.

Go talk to your customers.

Fixing problems in a startup isn’t usually straightforward.

You don’t have time, money or people to throw at the problem.

You have to go deep, dig for the details and think very creatively about solutions.

Then experiment like there is no tomorrow.

You can’t grow a startup without a fundamental understanding of how to problem solve really fast.

This skill comes from practicing jumping into the unknown.

You don’t usually get time to prepare for what’s coming next.

You’ll have to learn how to figure it out along the way.

Startup people have to become comfortable with the discomfort of uncertainty and the unknown.

This is why I say, nobody knows what they are doing.

We’re all just jumping from problem to problem expecting to figure things out.

Hopefully our past helps us not crash and burn.

🔥 I got 2000 new subscribers from my Product Hunt launch

THREAD...

Last week I launched Marketing Examples to Product Hunt.

✔️ 1,500+ upvotes
✔️ Product of the Week
✔️ Email list grew from 1,300 to 3,300

This is the step by step account of how I did it

Step 1 - Don't launch straight away

23rd May 2019 Marketing Examples v1.0 went live. The site had a few case studies, several bugs, and an email box which didn’t convert well.

The old version of me would have thrown it on Product Hunt straight away. But I decided to wait.

Why?

1) I didn’t want to waste my “turn” with the very first iteration of my site.

2) I didn’t want to launch in a vacuum. Product Hunt multiplies current momentum. Having a small following of “fans” on launch day goes a long way.

So I set myself a target.

✔️ 1000 email subscribers
✔️ 1000 twitter followers

And then I would launch. 70 days later I hit my target.

It was showtime.

Yesterday, I wrote about how easy it is to sell ice cream on a crowded beach: https://t.co/a9z2ZTixb7

Today, I’m at the local fair.

There are hundreds of vendors.

But there are also huge crowds who are hot and thirsty; lots of demand for cold drinks!

Go where the crowds are!

Again, this is just a metaphor!

But it’s a good reminder:

🍋 If you have a lemonade stand, it’s better to go somewhere hot, where there are a lot of thirsty people.

💻 If you want to make software, it’s better to go where there are a bunch of potential customers.

BTW - targeting a good market doesn’t mean you’ll automatically win!

There are a TON of factors that influence a business’ success (or failure).

But choosing a market that has a lot of demand (and good channels) is essential for future success.

In business, nothing is guaranteed.

You might be in a good market today, but tomorrow it could fall apart.

Markets are fickle.

Some days they want 🍦, other days they want 🥤.

The economy can go up, or it can crash.

A good competitor can come in and grab market share.

But this reinforces the point:

“Business is already hard, why make it harder?” – @asmartbear

Why try to enter a niche where there’s no demonstrable demand?

Why try to serve a total addressable market of 500, when you could go after 500,000 potential customers?

A couple months ago, I got an email out of the blue from someone I had never met or heard about.

Today, that person co-hosted a webinar with me that had over 470+ registered and 130+ live

👇 Quick lesson on how to successfully pitch partnerships and co-marketing opportunities

How did he get in contact with me?

He sent a cold email, but not just any email. It was clearly personal, relevant, and conversational.

Lesson: Notice the language he used and how he tied it back to previous webinars.

Not only was it well written, but I could also easily judge if he'd be a good fit based on the article he wrote and linked to.

It's SUPER well-written and proved that he knew what he was talking about.

Lesson: Make your "ask" as easy as possible to consider.

There were three things that made the webinar a big success:

1. Tyler sent the webinar to his email list and did a lot of promotion.

2. He prepared ahead of time and put a lot of work into the deck, even incorporating some Baremetrics assets and references.

3. He had fun

Super appreciate all the work @TylerHakes put into today's "SEO for SaaS"

If you missed it, here's the recording:

A potential danger to America I didn't consider till now. The Bay Area seems to be less attractive to founders. What if this makes America as a country less attractive to immigrant founders? What if instead of going to another US city, they don't go to the US at all?

I know founders don't feel the same need to move to the US that they used to. The question is how much of this is due to the change in their opinion of the Bay Area specifically, rather than e.g. greater optimism about remote work, or decreased interest in the US overall.