 🎀 Highlights
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Success in the startup world is not simply awarded to the hardest workers. It is awarded to those who develop and use their Unfair Advantages.
meritocracy – the idea that hard work and ability alone will lead to success.
the pressure of the idea that anyone can be anything if they just try hard enough imbues us all with too much guilt for not achieving what they have.
This second mindset (fate and luck) is also valuable if you want to avoid worshipping the statistical outliers who have had massive success ‒ the Buffetts, Winfreys and Zuckerbergs of the world ‒ and avoid believing that people who haven’t done well in life are simply losers who deserve everything they got. It helps us to have compassion and to resist arrogance and a smug feeling of superiority when we do have success, and it also helps us to resist having an inferiority complex and experiencing envy when we see people with more than us.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
An Unfair Advantage is a condition, asset or circumstance that puts you in a favourable business position.
Your Unfair Advantages can’t easily be copied or bought. Your set of Unfair Advantages is unique to you.
For any early-stage startup, the Unfair Advantage of that startup is the sum of the individual Unfair Advantages of the founders.
Always partner up with somebody with unfair advantages that balance out yours.
Investors and venture capitalists (VCs) expect you to be able to articulate what they call ‘your personal edge’, or your unfair advantage. If you aren’t able to do so, you may have a tough time getting the investments you want.
It is those who are successful … who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.
the more unfair advantages you have, the more you are likely to accrue. The key is to start identifying and developing your own unfair advantages as soon as possible, no matter your age.
In a world where market giants and big funded startups can make one decision and crush fifteen budding startups, speed is absolutely critical to survival.
‘Before dreaming about the future or making plans, you have to articulate what you already have going for you ‒ as entrepreneurs do.’ These are the words of Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn,
However, in our research and first-hand experience mentoring entrepreneurs, we’ve found that entrepreneurs rarely if ever carry out this kind of ‘audit’, let alone the kind that we are recommending.
The MILES Framework is a powerful tool to help you identify your unfair advantages. It will tell you whether you should be focusing on leveraging your location, whether your education sets you apart or whether your true strength lies in your status.
five categories of unfair advantages, which comprise the MILES Framework. They are: Money Intelligence and Insight Location and Luck Education and Expertise Status Money is the capital you have, or that you can easily raise. Intelligence and Insight includes ‘book smarts’, social and emotional intelligence, as well as creativity. Location and Luck is all about being in the right place at the right time. Education and Expertise is both your formal schooling and also your self-learning, which gives you intellectual and technical know-how. Status is your social status, including your network and connections. It’s your ‘personal brand’ ‒ in other words, how you’re perceived. It also includes your inner status, which is your confidence and self-esteem.
The best strategy is to partner up with people who have unfair advantages that complement yours.
Due to the arbitrary and unequal distribution of unfair advantages, your ‘why’ is particularly important in terms of how you define success for yourself. Ideally, your ‘why’ must come from you alone, because if it is driven by other people’s expectations, or a need for approval from others, suffering will be the outcome even if you succeed.
The trait that’s probably the most unsuited to entrepreneurship is high neuroticism. If you’re very high on neuroticism, entrepreneurship is not likely to be something you’d enjoy, as it is very stressful and filled with uncertainty. You will need a healthy dose of emotional stability because of the incredibly high highs and low lows in starting and running a business. It may be worth considering doing something with less risk to help manage your mental health.
Before we get on to the pillars of the MILES Framework, it is critical to address the foundation. Without this foundation, you could stack every unfair advantage in the world and still find yourself unhappy and unsuccessful. That foundation is your Mindset.
one amazing ‘mindset hack’ is gratitude. Focusing on what you’re grateful for in life can make you feel happier, less stressed and more focused, all without having to change your external circumstances at all. This then allows you to work better and feel better about the work you’ve done. All of which shows how your mindset can affect both the quality and outcomes of your life.
people with a fixed mindset believe they are born naturally gifted at doing some things, but incapable of others. This black-and-white way of thinking often obstructs their development. Failure is a disaster to a person with fixed mindset. When it happens, they will bury their heads in the sand or blame others. The opposite of this fixed mindset is a growth mindset. This is when a person believes that all of life is fluid. Yes, you can be bad at something, but it is only because you have not taken the time or attention to get better at it. The growth mindset is perfectly encapsulated in one word: ‘yet’. ‘I can’t write code … yet.’ ‘I can’t write a business plan … yet.’ ‘I can’t find a co-founder … yet.’ This three-letter word opens up a whole realm of possibilities.
A reality-growth mindset is the ability to accept the hard limits of the way things are (like the physical laws of the universe) and also to believe that anything is possible (the metaphysical way of looking at the universe). It acknowledges that there are limitations, but that those limitations are more malleable than some people may think.
Reality-growth mindset is the balance between self-awareness and self-belief. Self-awareness says, ‘I understand I will probably never win a Nobel Prize, or cure cancer, or become president or prime minister, or become the world’s richest person.’ Self-belief, says ‘I am going to succeed in my own way, and even if my goal feels like a stretch, I can step up to the challenge, and probably have a lot more impact than I can even imagine.’
This precise duality of thinking is necessary. Lean too far towards the unfairness of life, and you become a victim. Lean too far into the ‘fully-in-control master and architect of your future’ side, and you become disillusioned when your millionaire status doesn’t appear after a couple of years of hustle.
Without the right mindset, you can’t get very far. After all, there are rich kids with tons of unfair advantages who have amounted to nothing. All the world lay at their feet, yet they never took action.
‘An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.’
Ash has successfully exited a few startups and has started several others which never got off the ground.
Lifelong learning is probably needed more now than at any other point in history. Perhaps, in years past, you could get a degree and it would serve you for life. This is no longer the case. The progress curve of technology keeps getting steeper, and acceleration is the result.
Rich people own assets, which create more money just by sitting there. For example, if you own a property which you are renting out, you are probably going to be making money every month.
three forms of capital: economic capital (money), social capital (our network of friends and allies) and cultural capital, which is essentially everything else that can get you respect or prestige (for example, knowledge, qualifications, titles, occupation, how you talk, your accent, how you dress, your
In the strange world of startups, the time you have until your startup runs out of money and is forced to close down is called your runway time.
Your ‘burn rate’ is how much money your startup is losing every month.
startup businesses can take anything from a few months to a few years before they become profitable. This is especially true for hyper-growth startups which don’t aim to be profitable but rather aim to get as much growth (as many users or customers) as possible, and then eventually start making a profit. For example, it may surprise many people to know that, as of 2019, Uber still wasn’t profitable. They’ve just been burning money at an incredible rate this whole time, and the reason they can do that is because they are able to keep raising more and more money from investors. These investors are patient and confident that eventually the company will become profitable.
Usually these very successful people are actually outliers. If we were to plot them on a scatter diagram it would clearly show how we focus too much on outliers and too little on the reality of those who could really help us achieve success, those who are five to ten years ahead of us rather than the billionaires.
A good general rule of thumb is that you need at least 6 to 18 months of runway time if you’re going to quit a full-time job and focus on a startup.
The main thing to consider if you don’t have the unfair advantage of Money is to build a business that doesn’t have a high startup cost, and doesn’t need to burn much money before it becomes profitable.
The main thing to consider if you don’t have the unfair advantage of Money is to build a business that doesn’t have a high startup cost, and doesn’t need to burn much money before it becomes profitable. In other words, get paying customers fast. Let that be your first priority. This can be thought of as a ‘lifestyle startup’. These are startups that don’t need to burn much money, and are profitable much sooner than ‘hyper-growth startups’, which are Silicon Valley-style startups aiming to become worth over $1 billion. Their strategy to get there is through hyper-growth,
The main thing to consider if you don’t have the unfair advantage of Money is to build a business that doesn’t have a high startup cost, and doesn’t need to burn much money before it becomes profitable. In other words, get paying customers fast. Let that be your first priority. This can be thought of as a ‘lifestyle startup’. These are startups that don’t need to burn much money, and are profitable much sooner than ‘hyper-growth startups’, which are Silicon Valley-style startups aiming to become worth over $1 billion. Their strategy to get there is through hyper-growth, without much focus on profitability.
The only exception to this is if you have the ability and credibility to raise funding from just the idea stage. This is quite rare ‒ usually you need good traction and momentum in your startup to be able to raise funding. You have to have a lot of the other unfair advantages in the MILES Framework – ideally a previous successful startup – to be able to pull it off. But it’s totally possible.
Learn marketing and sales If you study and apply marketing and sales, you will acquire a skill that is perpetually monetisable – there are always plenty of business owners whom you can help get more customers. You’ll be creating value, and will be recompensed accordingly.
Raise funding By learning to pitch and having a good team and idea (a powerful insight into a problem and a strong solution), you can raise funding from investors. This is the least desirable option in some cases, because investors often become like your boss, and they take big chunks of your business, but for some people with the right hyper-growth startup idea and the right Expertise and Status, it’s a fantastic way to go. Virtually all the big success stories got there through funding.
Freelance By learning an in-demand skill, whether that be sales and marketing or coding, as we already mentioned, or anything like UX design, content writing or social media management, you’ll be able to make money in your spare time to supplement your full-time job or even as a career in and of itself. As you freelance your way to building your capital, your startup will be your side-hustle – until, one day, you can focus full time on your startup.
many intelligent people are now advocating for a universal basic income (UBI) to keep people out of this situation – a situation and mindset of scarcity.
If you can read, understand and affect people’s emotions positively, you can influence and persuade them. That’s how you attract co-founders, mentors, investors and employees to join you in your startup. That’s how you negotiate a pay rise. That’s how you connect with customers. Emotional intelligence is key.
Creativity is largely about training your mind to connect things you learn in one domain to situations that seem completely unrelated. This is known as intersectional or interdisciplinary thinking.
One way to improve creativity is to increase your interdisciplinary knowledge: learn from areas and fields of knowledge, and other industries, that are completely different to what you already know. You will learn a lot and develop mental models that are more diverse and that will allow you to think more laterally.
Creativity is already becoming more and more important, as machines and artificial intelligence can’t match the human mind when it comes to creativity. This means it will continue to be a very strong unfair advantage into the future, both for entrepreneurship and for people’s careers in general.
By insight we mean being able to see below the surface of things and to understand elements of a situation that others might not. You might have insight into a particular market, because of your own background, or have insight into an upcoming trend because you’ve been researching similar products for a while and can see where it’s going.
Having an insight means finding a need. Finding a gap in the market. Seeing an inconvenience that can be solved. Figuring out the inadequacies or inefficiencies of existing products and services on the market. In other words, finding a real problem to solve.
The main way for you to get insight is by talking to potential customers. It’s that simple.
it can be quite a good idea to get a job within an industry. Only by gaining that level of insight from working can you get really valuable insights about pain points and inefficiencies which can be solved through a better product or process. This is why domain expertise in a certain industry can be so valuable.
In summary, location can give you access to capital (investors and venture capital firms tend to cluster in startup hubs) and to highly skilled talent, and so much more.
Amazon – find the place that has it all Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in Seattle back in 1994, even though he was working on Wall Street in New York. He had three main reasons for choosing Seattle. First, he wanted access to engineering talent. Seattle was home to the tech behemoth of the time, Microsoft, so anyone looking to defect from Microsoft to join his startup wouldn’t have to move. Second, taxes. He took advantage of a loophole to pay less sales tax by moving there. Third, distribution. Jeff started selling books only at first, and didn’t have his own warehouse, so he wanted to be close to the largest book distribution warehouses to make faster deliveries.
I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often. Brian Tracy, Canadian motivational
I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often. Brian Tracy, Canadian motivational speaker
While you can’t change the timing of your birth, you can at least have a little bit of control over the timing of your startup. Timing in founding a startup is all about trying to ride the big waves (not short-term trends or hype) that we are being carried on by societal and technological shifts. It’s all about the macro-trends.
Being too early or the first to market is bad because you have to educate your potential users and customers about the benefits. Educating the market is a very costly marketing exercise, which makes it very challenging.
Being too early or the first to market is bad because you have to educate your potential users and customers about the benefits. Educating the market is a very costly marketing exercise, which makes it very challenging. Too late, on the other hand, is the case of a startup that’s entering a market already too full with competitors ‒ a market that has seen explosive growth in the past.
The ideal situation is to target a small but growing market.
The ideal situation is to target a small but growing market. This means you’ve stepped into an industry at exactly the right time.
In his book The Luck Factor, Wiseman identifies four basic principles that lucky people use to create good fortune in their lives:
1. Maximise your chance opportunities
2. Trust your intuition and gut feeling, especially when you’ve had some experience
3. Expect to be lucky
You’ll be more likely to notice opportunities if you try to, and expect to, notice them.
4. Turn even the bad luck into good luck
You can make your good luck by focusing your attention on what you’re grateful for, instead of what you don’t have. In other words, having a mindset of gratitude and making the most of a situation that you’re in. Looking on the bright side.
Do more things. Meet more people. Go to more events. Blog about your startup. Produce things and publish them. Get feedback. Put more stuff out into the world. This is a very powerful way of increasing your luck, because it’s like trying to roll a double six on a pair of dice, and you can roll as many times as you like. Obviously, you’d just keep rolling the dice until you got a double six. That’s increasing your chances, because nobody is counting your number of attempts in life.
A ‘bad’ location, like a smaller city without much of a startup ecosystem, can actually be an advantage. You might see problems and unmet needs here that those in the heart of a metropolis might never find, or where there might be too much competition. With lower costs of living, your startup can survive for much longer before you turn a profit.
There can also be a downside to too much early luck. When luck strikes too soon in a business, such as with very early success, you might never develop the thick skin required to take rejection, or the humility to take feedback. You might assume you are a better manager and leader than you really are.
As entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs, to some extent or another, our ‘why’ or motivation for starting is usually tied to increasing our status. Not always the most mentally healthy of motivations, but the reality is that most of us strive for success to achieve some kind of significance, to feel important.
The truth is, if you look and sound like a middle- to upper-class young, white, nerdy hacker guy, and then they find out you’ve dropped out of Harvard, you’re more likely to get investment for your startup idea. You’ve got a higher chance of success in raising funds. You’ve got a higher chance of success in finding a co-founder. You have a higher chance of success in attracting a strong team.
Status is also a double-edged sword, just like every other unfair advantage. This is the same reason why diversity and inclusion are starting to be recognised as valuable in terms of a company’s bottom line, because having a variety of perspectives and people from different societal subcultures helps.
By having the status of being some type of minority, whether that’s an ethnic minority, like Tristan Walker, or coming from a white working-class background with a strong regional accent, or even being a woman (which obviously isn’t a minority at all in the population, but still is as a startup founder), you can actually work things in your favour.
Maybe you need more traction to raise funding from investors if you don’t fit the typical mould of who they invest in – that’s not always a bad thing. Maybe you’ll end up making a bootstrapped startup that makes profit early on. These are all possibilities.
If you wore formal business attire to your meeting with the bank to get a bank loan, it might increase your chances of getting one. If you wore the same clothes in Silicon Valley, you’d probably be less likely to get investment. Similarly, being only 20 years old is going to decrease your chances at the bank, and increase your chances in the Valley.
Building your network is all about your proactiveness in forming and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships.
With a large and strong network, you gain more powerful relationships, which can always allow you to get more opportunities, more relevant information and insights, find a co-founder, an investor, or get introduced to people who can help you to start, grow and even exit a startup if that’s what you wish to do.
If you like and value yourself, you will have high self-esteem. You’ll come across as confident, competent, likeable, trustworthy and engaging.
If you feel you’re unlovable for some sin or vice or some other reason, just love yourself for being self-aware about it and then being willing to change it.
‘I’m out of my depth.’ ‘I don’t belong here.’ ‘I’m gonna be found out.’ Have these thoughts ever run through your head? To some extent, we all experience this. It’s a phenomenon known as imposter syndrome. You may feel as if you’re an imposter, or a fraud, and that the position, achievements or praise you got were completely unearned.
You can’t see into other people’s heads, only into your own. This gives you the impression that everybody else knows what they’re doing and you’re the only one that doesn’t.
If you do have a form of status, be sure to highlight it when necessary. This means that if you have an impressive university or job at a famous company in your history, make sure it’s there on your pitchdeck, LinkedIn or CV. Don’t downplay those kinds of achievements.
If you do have a form of status, be sure to highlight it when necessary. This means that if you have an impressive university or job at a famous company in your history, make sure it’s there on your pitchdeck, LinkedIn or CV. Don’t downplay those kinds of achievements. But if you want to stay likeable and keep your friends, you should probably refrain from highlighting or trying to big up your status too often. Bragging is one way to immediately lower your status.
networking is better for the commercial co-founder, and Expertise more important for the technical partner. But both partners need self-confidence to succeed. Then combined you will make a strong management team – what all investors are looking for.
Success for the approval of others is inevitably hollow.
That’s why you need to define success for yourself. If you do not, Hollywood, the media, friends, family, colleagues, not to mention social media, will define it for you. You will see what looks like success, and you’ll chase it. Then, the goalposts will keep moving and you’ll never feel that you’re happy. If you can define success for yourself, and make that definition less focused on external measures (like getting to a certain net worth, or being able to afford to fly first class everywhere you go) but more on internal and higher-level needs (helping others, putting a ‘ding’ in the universe with your impact ‒ like Steve Jobs), then that’s something you will have the power to achieve. Make your criteria for success process-based rather than outcome-based.
That’s why you need to define success for yourself. If you do not, Hollywood, the media, friends, family, colleagues, not to mention social media, will define it for you. You will see what looks like success, and you’ll chase it. Then, the goalposts will keep moving and you’ll never feel that you’re happy. If you can define success for yourself, and make that definition less focused on external measures (like getting to a certain net worth, or being able to afford to fly first class everywhere you go) but more on internal and higher-level needs (helping others, putting a ‘ding’ in the universe with your impact ‒ like Steve Jobs), then that’s something you will have the power to achieve. Make your criteria for success process-based rather than outcome-based. You can’t control the outcome, because luck always plays a role, but you can control your own actions and processes to do the right thing in alignment with your values and goals.
Lifestyle startups (or lifestyle businesses) are so called because they are designed to sustain a certain lifestyle. That could be a certain income, a certain work schedule, or it could be that there’s a constraint placed on their growth ‒ whether by the founders’ design or by the local or niche nature of their market. Lifestyle startups usually don’t need external investors.
The term ‘lifestyle business’ is often used pejoratively by people in the startup world, and you can invariably sense a certain level of condescension. This is because investors are not interested in investing in lifestyle businesses; they make their money from the big, bold ‘moonshot’ ideas ‒ the ones which aim to disrupt a whole industry and become a unicorn (worth over $1 billion) like Airbnb, Just Eat and Revolut, a UK financial technology company.
binary nature of hyper-growth startups ‒ it’s either succeed big or fail completely.
Lifestyle startups, by contrast, are not binary and are more conventional.
You can succeed, make a profit, but you can also make less money than if you were still an employee, for example. Or you can have a £10-million-a-year business and do very well for yourself.
many digital and technology startups are actually lifestyle businesses. Here are a few examples:   Mobile app development agency   Social media marketing agency   Search engine marketing consultancy   YouTube comedy channel   Online news media publication   Niche software and app startups   Online T-shirt business   Online affiliate marketing and drop-shipping
Hyper-growth startups have their roots in software-based or algorithmic innovation. They are built with the expertise of software engineers, designers and product managers. But, to begin with, it’s just the founders themselves, though preferably at least one of the founders will have the technical know-how to build and iterate a digital product based on the needs of users and therefore have the Insight to figure out how to do this.
Hyper-growth startups are better if you’re very strong on unfair advantages. Lifestyle startups are better if your unfair advantages are not so developed.
Every investor that you have on board is added pressure on you. They don’t invest in you out of the goodness of their hearts ‒ they want to make a ridiculous amount of money out of your startup. They need their returns on investment. That’s their job. So they will sometimes feel like a boss that’s breathing down your neck.
First of all, ideas are overrated. Yes they’re important, but there are countless people all over the world having the same genius ideas at the same time, and the overall conversion rate from idea to successful startup is close to zero.
Most startups are either a twist on an idea that already exists, or the implementation of the same idea but in a new market or industry.
Dropbox wasn’t the first cloud storage. In the dotcom bubble era, there was a cloud storage startup that failed because it was started a decade too early, when internet connections were still too slow.
Consider that it may actually be worse for you to be the first in any industry. All these businesses learned from the failures of first-movers in their respective fields. As Amory Lovins, physicist, scientist and writer, puts it: ‘The pioneers take the arrows, the settlers take the land.’
especially now, in the internet age, when a lot of the barriers to launching a startup have come down, going first can be a disadvantage. The giants can simply rip off your idea and implement it as a feature.
This comes about because he has trained his mind to be highly attuned to seeking out inconveniences, issues, time-wasting processes, underwhelming products and gaps in markets. By noticing them, his mind subconsciously tries to come up with solutions to end the inconvenience, or a product that will respond to an unmet need.
hard work can beat talent when talent doesn’t work hard.
The biggest mistake is having a ‘solution’, a product, then looking for a problem for it to solve. This is more common than you think, as some people are good at creating a product (whether that be a website, an application, or even an invention) but less good at thinking about who’s going to actually part with their cash to buy that product.
If you don’t have some kind of unfair advantage in the industry in which you intend to do business, then that particular startup idea and target market might not be the right fit for you. Startup success isn’t just about choosing the right idea; it’s about choosing the right idea for you.
If you don’t have some kind of unfair advantage in the industry in which you intend to do business, then that particular startup idea and target market might not be the right fit for you. Startup success isn’t just about choosing the right idea; it’s about choosing the right idea for you. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have worked in that industry. A fresh perspective can be very powerful as well, as long as you get that industry perspective in some other way, whether through a co-founder or early employee that you hire.
we’d strongly discourage you from attempting a startup all by yourself. Most human endeavours, business included, are achieved in teams. The emotional toll of being a solo founder can be enough to drive you crazy and call it quits. It can be very stressful. This is especially true for hyper-growth startups.
For a lifestyle startup, being a solo founder is definitely more doable simply due to the slower growth rate.
Ultimately, you will be much better off pooling your strengths and unfair advantages with business partners. This is because it is rare to be good at both developing a product, and selling and communicating that product. Usually you’ll be better at one than the other.
Often it’s a team of two, one commercial and one technical, with one of the two also taking on the visionary role as well.
You can always outsource the technical parts of your business, but if the technical side is the core of your business, such as in a technology startup that is relying on software, then outsourcing it is not a great idea. This is because you won’t be able to easily change, iterate, tweak and evolve your product if you’ve outsourced it. It’ll cost you money every time.
Conflict between startup founders is probably the leading cause of startup death. Be very careful who you go into business with. It helps to have worked on projects with them before, so you can get a sense of how well you work together.
There are two ingredients needed to develop your network: 1.  An authentic desire to add value to people you meet 2.  Increasing your Status so that people perceive more value from you
The strength of your network increases the more you add value to it. You can add more value to your network by proactively reaching out to people periodically, and not just when you want something from them.
The strength of your network increases the more you add value to it. You can add more value to your network by proactively reaching out to people periodically, and not just when you want something from them. You can literally set up a daily habit of reaching out to one relevant person from your network simply to add value, even if in a small way, such as by asking how they are, or forwarding them an article, or commenting on a status they’ve put on a social media network.
I met Ash at a business dinner, and even though I knew that he had recently been part of a large IPO and was incredibly successful as an entrepreneur and growth hacker, I asked him how I could help him.
Whether you want to build a Lifestyle startup or a Hyper-Growth startup, you need to start small – take small risks by running small tests to see if your idea has legs. That means not risking significant sums of money on it straight away.
With the world of digital, the barriers to starting a business have been reduced. For example, if you wanted to start a business selling your own brand of makeup, you could simply start with an Instagram page and a Shopify website. You could even get white label (sometimes called private label) companies to take care of the whole product side of it for you, and another company to handle your payments and delivery, and logistics. That’s what Kylie Jenner did.
Rather than looking for fundraising from the start, then, the course of action we’d recommend is to bootstrap your startup. Bootstrapping comes from the idea of ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’. In other words, you did it by yourself. No outside help in the sense that you had no external investors. It usually implies that you fund your startup a little from your own savings, and then use the cash flow from the money you make from customers to fund further growth.
meals with an app. Often
Often your idea simply won’t work. You may have created a solution for a problem that doesn’t really exist, or for a problem the customers don’t perceive as a problem, or for a small problem that the customer is not motivated to solve.
Hasan really struggled with the scourge of perfectionism when starting out, and it took him an extra nine months before he could launch, simply because of that fear and perfectionism.
‘If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.’ Mind
Over-perfectionism is so much more common, which is why LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman says, ‘If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.’ Mind
Over-perfectionism is so much more common, which is why LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman says, ‘If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.’
Before growth hacking, you’ve got to do growth scrapping. What does this mean? It means that, before you think about doing big scalable marketing campaigns using Google and Facebook ads, you need to creatively find each of your early customers/users manually.
Before growth hacking, you’ve got to do growth scrapping. What does this mean? It means that, before you think about doing big scalable marketing campaigns using Google and Facebook ads, you need to creatively find each of your early customers/users manually. In this early stage, before you’ve reached the stage of product–market fit (which is when word of mouth helps you grow virally), you need to really ‘hustle’. You need to manually, one by one, get your first set of customers or clients.
Before growth hacking, you’ve got to do growth scrapping. What does this mean? It means that, before you think about doing big scalable marketing campaigns using Google and Facebook ads, you need to creatively find each of your early customers/users manually. In this early stage, before you’ve reached the stage of product–market fit (which is when word of mouth helps you grow virally), you need to really ‘hustle’. You need to manually, one by one, get your first set of customers or clients. Preferably you do this face to face, or at least directly through personalised messages and outreach
Before growth hacking, you’ve got to do growth scrapping. What does this mean? It means that, before you think about doing big scalable marketing campaigns using Google and Facebook ads, you need to creatively find each of your early customers/users manually. In this early stage, before you’ve reached the stage of product–market fit (which is when word of mouth helps you grow virally), you need to really ‘hustle’. You need to manually, one by one, get your first set of customers or clients. Preferably you do this face to face, or at least directly through personalised messages and outreach using social media and email.
Hustle in a clever way by doing your homework on each person. Realise that you’re going to get a lot of rejections and that you’ll need to develop a thick skin. This is called marketing, sales and business development.
Paul Graham of Y Combinator perfectly describes what you need to do at this stage when he says, ‘Do things that don’t scale.’ That means, don’t try to use technology to make your job easier, but instead do it in a more time-consuming, person-to-person kind of way. For example, rather than trying to spam out an email to hundreds of people, do it manually one by one, crafting and personalising each email to match each person.
Vanity metrics are numbers that may be growing, but which don’t represent the most important thing for you to measure. For example, social media followers, or the number of likes you get. For most startups, high numbers of social media followers in the early days isn’t going to amount to much. Instead you need to focus on getting sales or downloads of your app.
Growth hacking is after there is solid product–market fit, which means your product is so attuned to what customers want that it’s starting to spread by word of mouth. Your customers really love it.
Growth hacking is after there is solid product–market fit, which means your product is so attuned to what customers want that it’s starting to spread by word of mouth. Your customers really love it. It usually takes time to get to that stage and that’s why we talk about ‘growth scrapping’ first.
Often, good ‘hackers’ have a multi-disciplinary skillset and are good at understanding data.
raising money for an idea is usually the domain of a founder who’s done a successful startup already. So serial founders have a huge leg-up here, because they’ve proven that they can do it before, so investors are likely to believe they can do it again. Without that track record, you’ll either have to have a lot of unfair advantages going for you, or you have to rely on getting enough traction first.
Funding a hyper-growth startup often follows this sequence as the startup grows: 1.  Savings – Often a hyper-growth startup begins with self-funding from the founders’ savings. Some founders use credit cards as well, but we wouldn’t recommend this, as it’s very risky. 2.  Bootstrapping – This is usually the next stage and means that you are using the revenue you generate from customers to fund the startup, as you start making sales. 3.  The Three Fs: family, friends and fools – These are the people who believe in you the most. (‘Fools’ is a half-joke nod to how often startups fail. But you better not believe they’re fools; hopefully you’ve fully bought into your own startup idea!). Not everyone has rich family and friends who can afford to take the risk on a startup, and that’s why this represents the Unfair Advantage of Status. In exchange, these people get equity (shares in your startup).
4.  Grants and competitions – Government grants, social impact funds, crowdfunding, startup competitions, hackathons, etc. These are all ways you can raise funding, and you can see in the case study of Canva below that their government grant really helped them. This is not usually in exchange for equity (except in the case of crowdfunding where some platforms do it on an equity basis).
4.  Grants and competitions – Government grants, social impact funds, crowdfunding, startup competitions, hackathons, etc. These are all ways you can raise funding, and you can see in the case study of Canva below that their government grant really helped them. This is not usually in exchange for equity (except in the case of crowdfunding where some platforms do it on an equity basis). 5.  Private angel investors – These are essentially rich individuals who invest in startups, usually as a sideline. They’re often successful startup founders themselves, like Ash, for instance. They are usually the first outside investors, i.e. not friends or family. They are often easier to approach and pitch to than VCs, and they have to like your vision and you, the market, and sometimes even the social impact. 6.  Venture capital – These are institutions that invest professionally. They are more rigorous than friends and family and invest larger sums of money and at a later stage. They look at your team, traction, growth and total addressable market (TAM). 7.  Private equity – Like VCs, but for more mature companies. 8.  IPO or acquisition – Floating on the public stock market or being acquired by a larger company.
The key difference between angels and VCs is that angel investors expect less traction, and therefore their investment is based even more on their confidence in the co-founders.
The key difference between angels and VCs is that angel investors expect less traction, and therefore their investment is based even more on their confidence in the co-founders. To
The key difference between angels and VCs is that angel investors expect less traction, and therefore their investment is based even more on their confidence in the co-founders. To raise funding, especially VC funding, it is imperative to first know that you really want to raise money and go big. Your intentions really matter at this stage. As we discussed, it can definitely still be very lucrative just being a lifestyle startup if you want to stay local, or artisan, or have a small team, so ensure your mind is completely made up before considering raising funds from VCs. If a VC invests, you’ll be accountable to outside shareholders in very significant way. The first order
The key difference between angels and VCs is that angel investors expect less traction, and therefore their investment is based even more on their confidence in the co-founders. To raise funding, especially VC funding, it is imperative to first know that you really want to raise money and go big. Your intentions really matter at this stage. As we discussed, it can definitely still be very lucrative just being a lifestyle startup if you want to stay local, or artisan, or have a small team, so ensure your mind is completely made up before considering raising funds from VCs. If a VC invests, you’ll be accountable to outside shareholders in very significant way.