Startup Business “Knowledge” Is Counterproductive
Elon Musk, our lord and savior, likes to say: “Founding a startup is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.”
Really though? He just says that because it sounds cool, right?
I’ve been working on my first own start-up for some months now. Here’s the first big lesson I learned.
I thought, with talented co-founders and a few years of relevant work experience from great companies, it can’t be that difficult. Just evaluate your idea strictly, build an MVP, throw together a sexy pitch deck and the rest will solve itself. The important things are scalability, timing and most importantly a platform business model. Don’t forget market and competition analysis and then the Excel model with the hockey curve. Oh yes, and AI has to pop up somewhere, that’s the future.
Fast forward. MVP is out and then: NOPE.
No hotcakes. Users don’t get what your product is good for. The trend is clearly towards video communication — it’s on your slide — but your users prefer to text. Your analysis showed 6 good reasons why entrepreneurs are the best segment for your product. But in reality, mechanical engineers like it most. Mechanical engineers?! They weren’t even in the analysis!
Lesson 1 — Can you build something people want?
Four development cycles, 100+ comprehensive survey responses and 100+ user and expert interviews later, we significantly changed the product and slowly our users started to dig it. In the meantime, we forgot the analyses and slides. Rightly so. We might as well have skipped them, which leads to the first lesson I wish I had learned before.
Can you build a product that doesn’t exist yet, that people want? Only once you can confidently answer this question with a yes does it make sense to put significant focus on business-related questions.
As so often in life, this lesson makes so much sense in retrospect. I get the feeling that all this start-up business “knowledge” almost seems counterproductive — because it is distracting. The crucial question is much more meaningful, natural, somehow: Can you build something that people want? Not need, but want. Something that doesn’t exist yet, or in a much worse way. In the fog of frameworks, analyses and jargon, this question seems to be just one of many, and one of the easier ones at that. But at the very beginning, it is the only really important question. Everything else depends on whether and how you can answer it. And finding a solid answer is hard.
When we release a new version at Angle, we test intensively for 1–2 weeks, elaborately evaluate user behavior and feedback for 1–2 more, and then go into the tunnel to build the next iteration. At the end of these 3–6 weeks, users find our product a bit better. And bit by bit, it actually becomes good. But more importantly, we gain a better understanding of what it is that people want and how we can deliver it. It’s arduous work. But that’s how you know you’re doing something meaningful that others won’t be able to copy easily.
So yeah, Elon has a point with the glass eating.
To be clear, DO seriously consider the business aspects of your startup — but only invest significant time once you know what exactly your product does AND that people want it. For us, what we had done initially didn’t make a ton of sense anymore once we had figured out the product.
We’re learning other stuff too on our journey. If you’re curious, follow us/me here. Or on LinkedIn. And if you want to try our product — it’s really good by now 🤩, promise 😉— sign up for early access: www.angle.audio
See you soon — stay tuned for lesson 2
Matu ✌️
