TLDR: Action creates information, and you have 104 weekend days in the year.
Some of you were pretty offended last week when I mailed it in, not in the mood to write.
Pretty flattered honestly.
Not claiming I have product market fit on this little online journal, but it reminded me of advice we often give founders: upset customers are a great thing.
If a customer or user is upset, they’re demonstrating an emotional response to your product.
They’re signaling they need whatever it is your product is supposed to do.
And they need it so badly, they’re willing to complain.
Sure, as a big company, no bueno. But as a little baby day zero company, awesome.
Brian Chesky routinely recalls advice he got from YC’s leadership…
It’s better to have 100 people who love your product than 1,000 who just kind of like it.
There are dozens of reasons to love this advice.
It’s an invitation to focus.
An invitation to do things that don’t scale.
An invitation to avoid the blitzscaling zeitgeist of Silicon Valley until you’re ready.
An invitation to focus on customer value.
An opportunity to ignore the distraction of fundraising.
And many more.
But ultimately, it’s an opportunity to harden the foundations of the business.
Focusing on the first 100 customers is like turning iron into steel, putting your business into the crucible and removing the impurities.
But what’s more, is many of the world’s most successful companies started by winning 100% of a small market, and then growing that market into something massive.
By using these early days to focus in on building something that people truly love, you’re actually narrowing in on gaining and owning marketshare in a counterintuitively small market that will ultimately become your stronghold, your core, and your leverage for profitability and growth.
By contrast, when you go after a tiny piece of a big market and try to unseat the incumbent, it’s much more common to be subsumed through acquisition, and in turn, come up short on building a generational and mega billion dollar company.
Of course, I need to balance this take with the reality that we’re also undergoing a platform shift with AI that will allow challengers to build far more efficient infrastructure and higher leverage teams than their competitor incumbents. This should allow many founders to stand on the shoulders of these giants and move much more quickly than them to take their marketshare and rebuild important industries from the ground up.
But I digress.
If annoyed customers are such a good thing at day zero, why don’t founders ship more quickly? Why don’t they seek out this type of harsh reality as if they’re addicted to it? Why not ship crappy generic versions of the value they’re trying to create?
Lots of reasons.
They’re nervous and embarrassed.
They hate sales.
They think it needs to do everything instead of one thing.
They’re afraid of rejection.
Etc, etc, etc.
But one of my favorite quotes, which I came across more recently, is from Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase. Hey says…
Action creates information.
I love that.
He’s basically saying it’s better to make moves, take action, push on the world a bit, and see what you get back, see what you learn, and see how people react. Taking action creates new information, behavioral and quantifiable data that can be used to iterate on the puzzle that is constructing a durable business.
If I hadn’t hit send on that post last week, I’m not sure I ever would’ve known if people actually cared about reading the long-form version.
If you don’t ship your product, you’ll never know what people think, or what they’ll try to do with it.
“F*ck it. Ship it.” as Betaworks says.
The same is true for cold calling or approaching random strangers for user testing. These interactions are full of truths, and as founders, we need to be truth seekers.
We need to be emotionally detached from the features and functions, but defiantly passionate about the success of the business.
It’s that kind of cerebral approach that not only justifies, but enables hard decisions.
In fact, in that light, most decisions aren’t hard at all, just emotional, and there’s a difference in those who lead their business in that way.
Whatever people think about you and your product is fleeting.
Whatever mistakes you make, most everyone will forget.
So why waste time worrying about it? Burn the ships, go all-in, take action, learn things, move forward, compound progress.
And, as some of my favorite founders like to remind me, if you’re building and selling every single day, including the weekend days, you’ll get an extra 104 days each year to destroy your competitors.
Not sure? Build it. Ship it. Sell it. Rebuild it. Ship it again. Failure is not an option.
See you Monday.
I'd meant to jot a note, had LOVED that last post. The rawness, being to feel the weakness of crushed under the weight of time, and you still showing up per the drill, even with just that small little bundle of words...respect!