Top 3 pieces of advice for entrepreneurs in 2022 (article review)

Every year the First Round Review publishes advice for founders summarizing all the fantastic conversations and posts they published in the past year.

2022 was no exception, and the list of 30 pieces of advice for entrepreneurs brims with insight from some brilliant and inspiring founders and operators.

Here are my favourite 3:

1. Coach, don’t fix. I take pride in being a hands-on founder who can jump into almost any part of the company’s operations. However, that “jump in and fix things mentality” is not universally good. It has the potential to rob my team of growth opportunities. So in 2023, I promised to be more patient and lead by coaching more often than not.
2. Apply the Cinderella test to sharpen your messaging. Founders who look up to larger, successful companies might decide to communicate what their company does similarly. Usually, such messaging contains values or the emotional side of the brand proposition, such as ‘Think different, ‘Just do it’, and ‘Impossible is nothing’.
3. However, that’s a mistake for most early-stage companies as without having any credibility and brand liquidity yet; such messaging makes it very hard for early adopters to understand what you offer. Instead, founders must frame the messaging around strictly functional value points by answering a simple question: what does your product do?
4. Sidestep the PMF pressure to launch quickly. Product-market fit and the culture of lean startup pressure founders to go live as soon as possible. However, that’s not what the founders of Airtable ended up doing. They remained in closed beta for over two years to achieve the product-market fit without actual launch. Andrew Ofstad and his co-founders claim that launching a public MVP would create a lot of distractions and won’t necessarily bring them closer to their goals.

Cheers,
Sherzod