Condensed startup advice

I am a startup founder and worked in startups most of my career. Here’s the advice that helped me most so far, compressed into one post. This is mainly for first-time early-stage founders.

1. Startup = growth (read essay by Paul Graham with the same name). A business that has anything other than grow big fast as its primary goal is not a startup. It’s just a business, even if it’s a piece of software. Nothing wrong with that. But it’s not a startup. Only startups are attractive to venture capitalists. Non-startups aren’t. So if you need or will need funding then it’s growth and nothing else.
2. Startups are about the problem you’re solving, not about your idea. Your idea as it is today sucks no matter what it is. Just accept it. But your idea also has something in it, maybe 5%, that’s key to building a huge fast-growing business out of it. So focus on the problem and people who have it. Treat your idea as temporary and problem as permanent.
3. Startup survival rate is about 10%. There is no reason to think you are an exception; but your odds are somewhat better if you are solving a problem that you have yourself, or are deeply familiar with. Startup is a race against time until you run out of energy. This is the real cause of most startup deaths, running out of money is the consequence of that. So you need to move fast. Time is your most valuable resource, not money — even if you have no money. Despite the low survival rate, it’s still worth it because of how big those 10% succeed.
4. Sell first, build second. That’s the only way to move fast enough. Get people to pay for a rough approximation of what you think they’ll need as quickly as you can. Your objective should be to prove yourself wrong in the fastest way possible. Over and over again. You don’t have time to build it right. Not even to build it really. All you have time for is finding a small group of people who struggle so much that they are ready to pay for your crappy prototype. That’s what early-stage success looks like. For consumer-facing businesses replace “pay” with “spend a lot of time using”.
5. Be ultra-specific. If you are targeting “everyone” or “millennials” or “developers” or “doctors” that’s too broad. You don’t have time to make anything that would appeal to all of them. You need to define your initial target market so narrowly that there must be no more than a few hundred people in the entire world matching your criteria. So that you can go and talk to each in person.
6. Go and talk to them! About their problems, not about your product (read “The Mom Test”). That’s all you need to be doing — talk to your customers, go back and rebuild your product, repeat. Frequency is key. The shorter your iteration is, the more of them you can do until you run out of energy, the greater are your chances to create something that grows big fast.
7. Enjoy! You need to be a bit of a masochist though to keep enjoying it after a year or two when you still haven’t figured it out and nothing seems to be working. And truly enjoying the pain of repeated failures is the only battery that will get your far enough to have a chance of succeeding before running out of energy. So if you think startups are “cool”… No, they aren’t. You trade literally everything that is “cool” today for a remote possibility of 1000x cooler-than-cool in 10 years. That’s the deal, either sign it wholeheartedly or avoid startups.