second-hand startup advice

It’s tempting to fill our days with work. To update our TikTok, LinkedIn, and Facebook pages, then shift to Instagram and then back to our email. To work through an endless list of tasks and check off all the boxes. And to serve every customer, every constituent, and every colleague, even when we might be more generous to simply send them somewhere else. If we’re competing with everyone, in every venue, it’s no wonder we’re not getting much done.

— 📖 This Is Strategy

— BHT Startup Bootcamp

— 📀 Linkedin for Consultants Part 1

— 📰 Finding the Right Money-Making Ideas (That Anyone Can Do) (deleted)

Here’s the good news: when you find an ad approach that works, you can scale it. You can scale it quickly and precisely. And you’ve probably guessed the bad news: it’s not easy to find an ad approach that works.

— This is Marketing

— BHT Startup Bootcamp

Many things which purport to make particular business processes easier are not in fact solving a problem, because the existing process is Good Enough. If you can't find any book written about it, any competing software, any much-maligned downloadable Excel spreadsheets... consider that it might not be an important enough problem.

— 📰 Validating Product Ideas Before Building Them

“It’s not for you” We’re not supposed to say that. We’re certainly not supposed to want to say that. But we must. “It’s not for you” shows the ability to respect someone enough that you’re not going to waste their time, pander to them, or insist that they change their beliefs. It shows respect for those you seek to serve, to say to them, “I made this for you. Not for the other folks, but for you.”

— Seth Godin

I have coined the term “niche slap” to remind entrepreneurs in my communities to commit once they pick.

— 📖 $100M Offers

So you've launched your product. You've been on all the big sites, you got major press to write about you. But it's now been 2 weeks since launch day and you're (naturally) seeing traffic and usage drop off. What's going on?

Well, it's one thing to launch a product successfully. It's a whole different challenge to keep that momentum going and make your product grow in the future.

— 📖 Make

job of the marketer is to make something so remarkable that this tiny group of adopters can’t stop telling their peers.

— 📖 This Is Strategy

— 📖 The Embedded Entrepreneur

The Packard Foundation, a Silicon Valley institution created by one of the founders of the Hewlett-Packard Company, provided a large grant to protect the Mount Hamilton Wilderness. Other environmental groups in the Bay Area started campaigning to preserve the area. Sweeney says, “We’re always laughing now, because we see other people’s documents and they’re talking about the Mount Hamilton Wilderness. We say, ‘You know we made that up.’”

People who live in cities tend to name and define their neighborhoods: “the Castro,” “SoHo,” “Lincoln Park,” and so forth. These names come to define an area and its traits. Neighborhoods have personalities. The Nature Conservancy created the same effect with its landscapes. The Mount Hamilton Wilderness is not a set of acres; it’s an eco-celebrity.

This is not a story about land; it’s a story about abstraction.

— Made to Stick

— Made to Stick

Customers should already know they have the problem you think they have, and be attempting to solve it. If they don't know they have the problem, this suggests that you're a) going to have to engage in a very ambitious marketing campaign to suggest to them that a portion of the life they are living is, in fact, wrong or, more likely, b) you're delusional.

— 📰 Validating Product Ideas Before Building Them

— 📖 Expert Secrets

If you want to observe the power of control up close in the workplace, look toward companies embracing a radical new philosophy called Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short)

— Cal Newport

— HN﹕Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer

It asked people to visualize the feeling of security they would get by using Goodyear tires.

— 📖 Made to Stick

— Rob Walling (?)

— Just Enough Research

Those people who don’t buy from you, the ones who don’t take your calls, who sneer at your innovations, who happily buy from a competitor even if they know you exist . . . those people . . . Why are they right? Why are the people who don’t choose you correct in their decision to not choose you?

— 📖 This is Marketing

First time founders are obsessed with product. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution.

— Justin Kan, cited in Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

The people discussing what programming language is best are not shipping products. The people who don't care what programming language they're using are shipping products.

— 📖 Make﹕ Bootstrapper's Handbook

Copy. Not from your industry, but from any other industry. Find an industry more dull than yours, discover who’s remarkable (it won’t take long), and do what they did.

— Purple Cow

— 📖 This is Marketing

Focus on the smallest viable market: “How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?”

— This is Marketing

My step-by-step guide to landing pages that convert

Instead of focusing on successes and positive replies, I have to start hunting failures and rejections.

— 📰 I'm 100 failed experiments away from reaching my goals

Fail Ferrari-Fast and Fiat Cheap

— The Right It

Sneezers are the key spreading agents of an ideavirus. These are the experts who tell all their colleagues or friends or admirers about a new product or service on which they are a perceived authority.

[...]

IT IS USELESS TO ADVERTISE TO ANYONE (EXCEPT INTERESTED SNEEZERS WITH INFLUENCE).

— 📖 Purple Cow

Launch a new project and, in addition to serving your audience, you’ll be breaking something. The very existence of an alternative causes something else to no longer be true. When you launch the second hotel in Niagara Falls, the first hotel is no longer the one and only. When you launch the telephone, the telegraph is no longer the fastest way to send a message.

— This is Marketing

— This is Marketing

you want your product to be the main dish, or are you happy with it being the optional side dish? Everyone orders the main dish when they go to a restaurant, but a side dish can find a much better-defined audience.

— 📖 The Embedded Entrepreneur

Here's the interesting thing though which you see with both entrepreneurs and artists alike. Often, their best work was when they were constrained by resources

Here's a test: how many entrepreneurs you know who became successful (and rich) and then made a second project that also became as successful. It's fairly rare. And it's because success changes people's life. They are no longer (financially) dependent on the success of a project. They already have had money and success. Often the "chip on their shoulder" of "I'm going to show the world I can do it" is gone.

— 📖 Make

Testing the initial market appeal and/or actual usage of a potential new product by simulating its core experience with the smallest possible investment of time and money.

— 📖 Pretotype It

For each audience in your list, look for signs of the following: Purchasing agency: Can the people you’ll be selling to make their own decisions when it comes to buying a professional tool? Will you have to make classic sales, or can you sell in a more low-touch, highly automated way? The less work and the fewer people involved, the better. Budget scope: What kinds of budgets can your prospective customers in this niche usually spend on products and services?

For every audience you think is likely to pay or can be convinced to start budgeting for a solution to their problems, add another 0–5 value to their row in your list. Zero means that people are extremely reluctant to pay money for anything, and 5 means that there are plenty of products in the space that people regularly purchase.

Move the audiences that have no clear indicator of purchasing intent to another sheet.

— 📖 The Embedded Entrepreneur

— David Ogilvy

— Thinking in Bets

— 📀 Linkedin for Consultants Part 1

— 📖 The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Do YOU REALLY THINK that any one of the ten people who will buy out the entire production run of the world’s fastest motorcycle (0 to 250 miles an hour in 14 seconds) will ever take it to top speed? Of course not. But for $250,000, they sure could. Is your product the best at anything worth measuring?

— 📖 Purple Cow

How does it make people look to talk about a product or idea? Most people would rather look smart than dumb, rich than poor, and cool than geeky.

[...]

People talked about the hundred-dollar cheesesteak at Barclay Prime because it gave them Social Currency, was Triggered (high frequency of cheesesteaks in Philadelphia), Emotional (very surprising), Practically Valuable (useful information about high-quality steakhouse)

— 📖 Contagious

— 📖 This Is Strategy

Alright, let’s start by defining a Grand Slam Offer. It’s an offer you present to the marketplace that cannot be compared to any other product or service available

— $100M Offers

There are two axes, horizontal and vertical. They represent extremes of something that customers care about. They might be safety versus performance, luxury versus bargain, or sustainable versus convenient. The breakthrough is this: Each end of the axis has to be something that a customer might want. Not what you want, what they want. You can’t identify “overpriced” or “poorly designed” as extremes. That’s not positioning—that’s simply trash talking your competition

Bonus: There is usually space to outdo a competitor at what they have chosen to do. You can say that your scarves are more exclusive, expensive, and luxurious than the ones at Hermès, especially if you can back it up. Moving your competition to the center—the catch basin of mediocrity—is a powerful strategy. Most of the time, though, we’re looking for two axes that no one has thought to highlight before.

Your successful competition stands for something. When you choose to stand for something that contrasts with that, they can’t follow you.

— 📖 This Is Strategy

But most of the people we encounter are skeptics. They’re looking for an easy way to keep things the same. They’re uncomfortable with the tension that change brings, and will conceal that fear with objections that seem like thoughtful feedback. It’s not.

—— Seth Godin

“We often think the Internet enables you to do new things . . . But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.”

— 📖 Hooked

Anthony Iannarino teaches that that the job of a sales team isn’t to persuade people to buy from us. It’s to find the people who WANT to try something new, and to politely and eagerly send everyone else on their way.

— 📖 This Is Strategy

You can set this up with a lot of services like Olark or Intercom. What they do is they add a small chat box on the bottom left or bottom right of your web page. People can simply enter like, "Hey, there's a bug here" or "I want this feature."

— 📖 Make

If you can show up in a parody, it means you’ve got something unique, something worth poking fun at.

— 📖 Purple Cow