Windsurfing 101 for Startup Founders
How It Helped Us To Find the Product-Market Fit
When I met Ron, my friend from the sailing club, he was a very bad businessman. The thing with Ron is that he gets bored very fast with the regular ways of doing business (or with anything else for that matter, but that’s another story). He always looked to disrupt something and to be the weirdest guy around. You know this adorable type, right? But he’s in the office furniture business. Not a good place to be weird.
Anyway, today Ron is doing fine. Better than fine, actually. So what’s changed? I talked to him about this a couple of days ago and we agreed it was the sport. He spent a good part of the last five years learning and practicing the windsurfing.
It seems Ron’s “transformation” was not a fluke. A lot of people are doing better once they get addicted to windsurfing or to other extreme sports. I talked about this phenomena with Steven Kotler, the bestselling author of the beautiful and eye-opening “The Rise of Superman”. Steven attributed Ron’s success to all those wonderful chemicals produced by your brain when you do extreme sports. Those chems help you to make the right split-second decisions (sometimes the ONLY right decision left to your disposal) and ultimately bring you to the new level of the human performance.
I agree with Steven. He is an avid extreme sports practitioner as well as successful writer and scientist, so he knows very well what he’s talking about. And I experienced effects of those naturally produced dopamines many times myself so I also know what he’s talking about.
But I also think there is something more than a simple (OK, not that simple) chemistry of extreme sports that makes a lot of people better businessmen, learners, friends and human beings. Honestly, I never met an experienced windsurfer who was a bad person. There MUST be something else as well, both in practical and philosophical senses.
I think the reason for this is that windsurfing is a highly tangible
way to learn how to deal with forces which are far beyond
your control and comprehension.
And because those forces — winds, waves, currents — are beyond your control, they are very similar to the market forces. In fact, they are very similar to the general life dynamics. You can not fight them. You can only adjust, exploit and make them work for you. The more you surf (it’s addictive, so you can’t really stop), the better you get at that.
So in the next section, try to replace “wind” with “market” and “board” with “product”. You will get the picture.
Windsurfing 101 for Startup Founders
“Windsurfing” is a self-explanatory name. You surf winds, not anything else. Even when you ride waves or do some freestyle acrobatics — it’s still about the wind direction and how you position yourself about it.
The most fundamental rule is this — you can’t sail straight against the wind. Period. There is a sector about 90 degrees wide in the direction where the wind is coming from and it’s called a “no-go-zone” for a good reason. Sounds simple? You’ll be surprised to know how many beginning windsurfers burn incredible amounts of energy fighting the basic laws of nature in that sector.
Second, you can’t sail straight down the wind for a long time. Surfing downwind is thrilling as hell, but eventually you WILL lose it. It’s the most unstable state for your board and the rig — you just can’t control it in a long run. Unless you are Jason Polakow, but in this case there is not a whole lot of things in this world you can’t control anyways.
So what CAN you do? You can accumulate enough speed by going a bit downwind, get yourself going fast enough so your board gets lifted out of the water and you start hydroplaning on its surface.
Then your friction becomes so low and your speed becomes
so high that you actually can go against the wind.
Still, it’s going to be a very limited flight time if you just freeze and try keeping at that. The good news are that you can maintain this blessed state for much, much longer with just a tiny adjustments of your stance.
For the external observer you ARE going against the wind and it looks spectacular. But in the reality what you do is going one degree downwind for speed, then one degree upwind for control, and you keep alternating constantly, just by moving your body back and forth, no more than inch at a time.
Eventually you learn to do this dance so automatically, you forget all about it. Eventually these tactics for handling the major forces will become a part of your nature.
Eventually you will do this even when you walk on dry land.
Especially when you do business.
So recently we took a good look at our own company, Filtr8, to see how well it is “surfing”. Obviously, we did pivots (a lot of them). I can still draw the ten-levels decision graph we had about our positioning, even if you wake me up in a middle of the night. But as it turned out all those pivots were actually just a small adjustments while trying to sail against the wind.
Only when we applied the laws of windsurfing to that graph we understood well what our best vector of the movement is and where we should direct our business. And while doing this analysis I was amazed to see how well some characteristics of windsurfing are aligned with the lean methods of a startup development.
I’m sure these musings are not going to become a part of MBA curriculum any time soon (replacing Porter Five, anyone?) but you must admit there is something beautiful and true about those metaphors. So beautiful I had to share it.
Oh-oh, there is a wind coming, must run ☺
