The Problems With Startup Material

UNUSABLE LEVEL OF DETAIL

Where's The "How-To" Bit?

Inspirational fluff, endless anecdotes, and SEO-c**p, alongside bulls**t instructions like "Now do some marketing". Not ignoring the sound-bites of successful founders blinkered by survivorship bias. They may as well recommend you use Midas's middle finger.

YOU TOO CAN GET THE SAME RESULTS

If You Use My Secret Whatever... But You Won't

Great results have you got salivating. But you lack contextual appreciation so you'll blindly copy it without any innate understanding. When you do get the context, you realize similar results were never on the cards. But hey, you’re in their funnel. That’s a win-win in their book. Which you can purchase from their website.

STARTUPS FAIL FOR MANY REASONS

And Not Just No Market Need

No market need is only one reason, yet we have lop-sided product-based approaches. What about the other landmines? You’ll have to navigate past them as well.

FOUNDERS WEAR MANY HATS

Research Hat, Marketing Hat, Sales Hat, Jimmy Hat...

You know you have to make something people want. But you also have to make people want something. Each hat is a career in its own right, but you’ll have to wear them all.

FAIL FAST - LEARN SLOW

How Many Things Are You Attempting To Validate?

Attempting to validate the problem, the audience, the solution, the channel, the content on the channel, the targeting factors, taking into account buyer intent doesn’t exclusively mean early adopters. Then there is your landing page skills and copy-writing chops. Get those things right, then yes, you are attempting to validate market demand using a landing page and mock product.

SHIP EARLY AND MINIMUM

Oblivious To The Passage Of Time

Markets evolve, competitors multiply and audiences expect more. You can ship too early. Take into account the passage of time, and that minimum is a rising expectation we have to meet.

GETTING OUT OF THE BUILDING TOO SOON

Fishing Instead Of Experimenting

An open mind doesn’t mean an empty mind, otherwise, you won’t have the context nor level of knowledge to appreciate what you find. Some facts are undoubtedly outside the building, but you need to get to the right people, and probe in the right manner with a solid hypothesis. Furthermore, customer discovery when attempting to validate a problem? What customers?

BRILLIANT ACTIONABLE STUFF

But Narrow In Scope

Fantastic resources shared by brilliant minds that go deep, but are narrow in scope. So you’re putting a jigsaw puzzle together, not knowing if the parts contribute correctly to the targeted whole.

SCATTERGUN TACTICS & PROCESSES

Not Contained Within An Overall Strategy Nor System

A lack of congruency between macro and micro-goals can result in doing tasks that don’t lead to the desired objective, or even lead you astray. Like tactics oblivious to strategy, and orphaned processes not housed in a system.

Although upon closer inspection they are gateway collateral into an ecosystem of videos, courses, workshops, worksheets, etc, that enables a holistic approach. Collectively, you can call it a system. But your data is all over the place.

Scattered Tools - Scattered Validated Data

Online and offline drives, documents, spreadsheets, to-do apps, project management apps, wiki’s, the list is long. You may even be using multiple SaaS solutions, incompatible pieces monstrously stitched together, your FrankenSaaStein if you will. But your data is scattered, spread out, siloed.

You’re meant to learn in this stage, but the application of what you learn is diminished, plagued by inefficiencies, and riddled with confusion. The maximum value from your data is not being obtained, if indeed you even know of the other places it can be used.