Some Harsh Truth on Startups by Paul Graham
Paul Graham thoughts on startups are by far one the best resources on entrepreneurship and building business. An aspiring entrepreneur looking forward to building a successful business can definitely learn a lot from the essays written by Paul Graham. On my journey, I have collected some of the snippets from those essays that can contribute to your mental model. I consider them as a thought exercise for a founder.
💡On Stealing Ideas: He clearly mentions that ideas are not something that can be stolen and build a business around it overnight even if the company is Google. There’s a reason, why I put up this one in the first place. Most of us while sharing our ideas for validation, feel insecure and hence refrain ourselves from taking validation from the market hence missing out on the initial traction of the users.
⚔️ Reasons why startup fails: There can be several reasons why a startup fail, but there are few principles where to such an extent you can reduce your chances of failure.
💪 Commitment for startups: Commitment is more than just being interested. Entrepreneurship requires hard work, patience, uncounted sacrifices, failures, and setbacks. It’s a wild ride. It’s more like a marathon where you have to be prepared for various paces at a time. You learn to adapt according to the situations and without true commitment to your craft, it becomes really hard and chances are more that you will give up.
🛤 Traction: Traction is a way you can get validations for your ideas. The only way you can sustain your startup is through your paying customers. Make sure you pitch them very early with your MVP, and as soon you make up the momentum, it’s a game you will love playing. Remember, word of mouth is the topmost marketing strategy ever. Even if you don’t get paid for your initial value you create, learn to leverage consumer surplus which shall help you spread your words across multiple channels.
🐾 Choosing Co-founder: Finding a cofounder that support your vision is very hard to find in real specially when you have a poor network effect. When you find a suitable person, spend time with them to learn about their objectives, ethics, nature, and character. I believe these are the few things that will somehow reflect on your startup a while later. Make sure you are building the culture really well.
💭 Follow your instinct: If you have well researched about the opportunity you are trying to tap in, and particularly understand the market well, then there is no chance you should pay heed to the naysayers. The catch is, you have to be very sure about the idea you are willing to work on and be very honest about it. According to Simon Senek, “The best ideas are the honest ones. Ones born out of personal experience. Ones that originated to help a few and ended up helping many.”
🎧 Facing Competitors: They say if you are authentic with the approach you are willing to solve the problem, you shouldn’t worry about your competition. There would be no Lyft if it was true enough. Find the problem, you are willing to solve and are ready to go all-in taking the calculated risk, then the game is all yours. Authenticity beats competitions.
☄️Simplicity: Everybody is trying to make their product simple to understand and easy to use for the people they are solving their problems for. As mentioned above, 95% of the people won’t probably get the vision behind it. You certainly do not have to prove them wrong, Just think enough of proving yourself right by focusing on execution better than anything else. Only Execution is the benchmark of all successful companies out there you see in the market.
There are probably more such insights by Paul Graham which cannot be compiled once in a go. I’d add up more on the way to my lifetime learning.
