> Ultimately, the reason that the startup died was because I did not do the due diligence in discerning whether this was a problem that I genuinely wanted to solve with my entire being. That's the bar for creating a successful startup, you need to find a problem that you're willing to dedicate yourself entirely to solving.
My own startup journey has led me to a contrary belief: At the earliest stages of building a business, being flexible and continuously re-evaluating your assumptions in order to find real market opportunities is more useful than having a lot of passion solving a single problem.
If anything, I've met many many founders who have had too much passion about a single problem, which hurts them gravely when they refuse to consider the possibility that the problem they are passionate about is not a problem at all and they need to pivot.
(1) "I want to solve this problem, I find it important, and I think I can make enough money while solving it to run a company, and live off it, maybe even get rich."
(2) "I want to run a company and make it big / get something self-sustaining so that I could forget about working for a salary; if solving this problem does not lead to that goal, I'll pivot to solving that problem, or another."
The only similarity between them is running a company that solves some customers' problem, which as generic as it gets. The motivations have little in common though.
And to reference the idea of flexibility- the ideal scenario in my mind is to love the problem, and possibly just as important, love the customer you're going to be serving for years, and be very dispassionate about the solution until you find a way to solve the problem in such a way that your ideal customers value it highly.
It's completely possible to simply be interested in finding a solvable problem with a good "market" and a clear path to making money, but I think really great companies typically reflect at least some level of passion for the problem space they are in (or were in as they became a success). If there are counter-examples, I am interested.
Don't get married to a position. That includes things you purchased to sell at a higher price, as well as things you created to sell at a higher price. So it doesn't matter to me that I printed shares on a sheet of paper, I don't treat it differently. If the position doesn't work, move on.
As far as the actual operation goes, I treat it like a precision drone strike. or perhaps an expedition. I don't need to be passionate about it, I just need to recognize the alpha and value extractable. We're going to sail to the New World, get the gold, and distribute the gold when we get back. The end! Pre-plan what is involved and do that thing, don't pursue things more complicated than that, just rule them out and wait for the next idea. Too many people covet an idea because they view it as their one opportunity ever. Its too bad if that's actually true for them.
IMO it still has to be something you’re okay with doing for, like, 10 years. Don’t fall so in love with an idea that you can’t give it up and pivot, but also don’t get stuck doing something you hate.
Here is a 1997 interview with Jeff Bezos that I like where he talks about why he created Amazon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM. He describes a purely logical explanation of seeing data about internet growth and identifying books as being a uniquely good product to sell on the internet.
Which is not to say he wasn't "willing to dedicate [himself] entirely to solving the problem", but I think it agrees with your take about finding market opportunities rather than following a passion.
> At the earliest stages of building a business, being flexible and continuously re-evaluating your assumptions in order to find real market opportunities is more useful than having a lot of passion solving a single problem.
This. I helped a friend develop the software for his start-up, and everything has been continuously growing for 10+ yrs now. When doing so, I have no special passion for it. The project gets my full attention when I am working on it as any other project would get. Of course, I am kind of proud of what I did. But this satisfaction comes more from the impression that I did a good job, not from the enthusiasam that I am following a big vision or whatever.
I feel the same about every project I've worked on: I love engaging with the work, but I am never passionate about the vision/mission of whatever I am doing.
I wonder if I haven't found a vision that I am passionate about yet or I simply don't have the entrepreneur mind.
I rather think, that an "entrepreneur mind" is neither necessary nor sufficient to start an innovative company. It just gives a better story for the media. Or it works like the No True Scotsman falacy: everything that does not fit into the narrative is droped as not being relevant.
In other words: I will not deny that there are many success stories in which entrepreneurial thinking plays a role, but there seem to be a large number of hidden champions in which it did not play a central role and a lot of other cases in which people with an overconfidence in their entrepreneurial thinking failed due to a lack of other skills. I myself have witnessed both in my immediate vicinity.
To your point on being flexible and checking assumptions, I advocate founders to “fall in love with the problem” and clearly articulate why they want to become become experts on this specific problem.
This is great advice - I'm not a founder but I consult and one of the tricks to keep me motivated for each project is to make myself passionate about each project and what I can do. This might seem like circular logic, but becoming passionate about things is a muscle you can develop and it makes things so much easier!
I think it would be harder to challenge deep assumptions once you fall in love with a problem. It seems like all of your questions and answers would resolve around the base assumption that the problem exists, rather than questioning what the world might look like if it didn't exist. Instead of adding something to solve the problem in the current world, a small shift could eliminate it completely... and thus make the company obsolete, but the world better.
I find the most motivation when I hate the problem and I want to eliminate it from my life. Then it's not, "how can I make this better", it's "how can I eliminate this so I never have to hear about it or think about it again".
I kinda question what the author is thinking of as the "problem". He says:
> unfortunately what we had built had only marginal improvements to what was being offered by other platforms
... Is it really a problem if there are already solutions?
As you say:
> I've met many many founders who have had too much passion about a single problem
I wonder if it might also be about the narrowness of the defined problem? That is, if you can define a problem in more abstract or general terms (such as "help people more easily do XYZ"), you can, assuming that still interests you, give yourself plenty of room to be flexible without needing to completely abandon the problem of interest.
I think this is a per-person issue. I personally am a “I need to care deeply about what I’m working on” kind of person; I’m not motivated by problem-solving for its own sake. Some people are. I suspect that there are many successful entrepreneurs in both categories, but the kinds of problems they solve and the kinds of companies they build are likely somewhat different.
I'm both. I need to deeply care in order to work on it at all and I also need to regularly pivot and re-evaluate. The two go hand-in-hand: the frequent pivoting is how I discover something that I both deeply care about and which I think there might actually be demand for. It's like an evolutionary exploration algorithm.
Like the parent wrote, I think "deeply care, but no viable business plan/market" is a very common failure mode. You need to kill your darlings. Caring deeply is a very necessary but very much not sufficient condition for me. Also, you'll end up caring about something even more if way more people care about it and are happy to have found your product/service. Like how you'll care about cooking even more if other people are happy to eat your food. It's a mutualistic cycle.
The main downside is this can lead to extreme indecisiveness and uncertainty and instability; but I've decided to accept this risk in the trade-off against the risk of building a ladder against the wrong wall.
I'm excited by this post because I think Jimmy deserves this success. I've never met him in person, but I owe him big time because:
1. His community was a big factor in my SaaS business getting traction among copywriters and content marketers.
2. I took a bike tour near his area and he saved me from trying to bike through a mudslide that had recently washed out part the route.
Biases aside, I've been a member of Superpath for awhile now and can say that he's put together a unique community that has a strong backbone of "givers" that can help the "takers". The vast majority of professional communities (especially free ones) devolve into places with endless questions with no one to answer them. Superpath isn't like that at all. Questions turn into threads with insightful answers and discussions.
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• RAPIDLY GROWING COMPANY - In the past year, the company has risen to become the 11th largest digital property in the U.S. (just under Viacom and Apple) and manages 175M monthly unique visitors.
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How are things in PR these days? I can't imagine what it must be like to deal with a pandemic while simultaneously trying to rebuild basic infrastructure.
Have you been able to get back to some semblance of normalcy yet?
Things are pretty alright over here! Most of the island has recovered since the 2017 hurricane, the remaining damage (at least in the metropolitan area) is road signage and some screwed up power lines here and there.
The virus has been under control as well. We’re slowly going back to normalcy. Case numbers are dropping and so are deaths. The vaccination campaign is working.
Not OP, but I lived in PR for 2 months, got back to NYC for a month and now back to PR. Things are getting back to normal here, vaccination rate has accelerated rapidly, and the island just ended its year-long curfew:
Infrastructure-wise, frankly... I don't see any construction work, whatsoever. Biden released 1bn funds for Puerto Rico 2 months ago, so I'd suppose that money is now being readied for spending.
Neutrogena's had crazy high amounts compare to the lower level ones-- hundreds of times more benzene, up to 6ppm. For reference, even 0.5ppm over a long period of time significantly increases cancer risks: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5946455/
I'm a big fan of this thread because it helps correct the preconceived notion that culture is on a 1 dimensional spectrum between "bad" and "great".
At our 30-person company, we did an experiment where we took a culture framework that was evaluated on 2 axes, and took internal surveys between two years to determine where on the spectrum employees felt our culture was currently at, and what their ideal culture would be.
For anyone in a position to explore these questions at an organizational level, I would highly recommend doing an exercise like this. It gives more agency to the employee to express what direction they think would be optimal and brings awareness to the fact that totally different cultures can both be considered "great".
Interesting, and thanks for the framework. As someone who leans heavily toward the right side of your framework, it's good to have a reminder there are "left-sided" companies that are successful.
It seems to me managers may prefer the right side, while many employees see the left as optimal. Did your data shed any light on this?
Boo to all of the people on this thread who are hating on what you've built. Why can't you build a business selling emails, or automatically posting to GitHub?
If you hate getting spam emails, hit "spam" and get that domain blacklisted, it creates a natural balance where the quality of cold outreach grows. And I doubt real hiring decisions are being made from git commit history badges.
Kudos for going out there and adding value to the people that are paying for your products.
Because "automatically posting to GitHub" is the exact kind of bullshit that a society driven by capitalism comes up with. Employees lying to employers lying to investors lying to customers, all so they can make themselves slightly richer. No value is being created, no progress is being made -- it's all just a house of cards.
Then there are people like you praising it, and just because the goal of capitalism -- to amass as much wealth as you can -- is being met. Even though it's a complete fucking waste of human potential.
Yes, with that kind of attitude life does seem pointless.
My opinion is that not everything we do in life needs to aimed towards the lofty self-actualization of mankind... or even the lofty self-actualization of one's self, which is the point being made later in the blog post.
Sometimes you wanna build something and see what happens. Hell yea I'll praise that.
Most human progress is made incrementally and in all directions, with many of the paths failing. The original versions of many extraordinary things seemed like meaningless branches of a capitalistic society.
There was a time when people played chess over telegraph, and considered telegraphy as a technology nothing more than a strange novelty.*
* For more, I highly recommend checking out the book "The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers"
We’re looking for senior engineers and a UX/UI designer to join our small 24-person team. We offer a competitive compensation package, and have a flexible remote work policy.
Over 5,000 brands use TINT to power their content marketing. We are proudly profitable, not dependent on investor funding. Every Friday we work on hack projects that we think will push the business forward. Our current stack is Backbone, Rails, MySQL, and AWS.
BENEFITS (besides the competitive salary and equity...)
• TEAM TRANSPARENCY - We calculate compensation based on a formula that we all agree on. Cap table is made available to all employees. Business financials are known by all teammates. Even cofounder meeting minutes are sent to the team.
• FLEXIBLE REMOTE WORK - We have a flexible remote work policy that allows employees based in San Francisco to work remotely for extended periods, and for engineers to join us remotely full-time.
• PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM - A monthly stipend and program designed for self-improvement. Every month, we individually choose goals to accomplish and are given a stipend to accomplish them.
We’re looking for engineers and a UX/UI designer to join our small 24-person team. We offer a competitive compensation package, and have a flexible remote work policy.
Over 5,000 brands use TINT to power their content marketing. We are proudly profitable, not dependent on investor funding. Every Friday we work on hack projects that we think will push the business forward. Our current stack is Backbone, Rails, MySQL, and AWS.
BENEFITS (besides the competitive salary and equity...)
• TEAM TRANSPARENCY - We calculate compensation based on a formula that we all agree on. Cap table is made available to all employees. Business financials are known by all teammates. Even cofounder meeting minutes are sent to the team.
• FLEXIBLE REMOTE WORK - We have a flexible remote work policy that allows employees based in San Francisco to work remotely for extended periods, and for engineers to join us remotely full-time.
• PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM - A monthly stipend and program designed for self-improvement. Every month, we individually choose goals to accomplish and are given a stipend to accomplish them.
My own startup journey has led me to a contrary belief: At the earliest stages of building a business, being flexible and continuously re-evaluating your assumptions in order to find real market opportunities is more useful than having a lot of passion solving a single problem.
If anything, I've met many many founders who have had too much passion about a single problem, which hurts them gravely when they refuse to consider the possibility that the problem they are passionate about is not a problem at all and they need to pivot.