Paul Graham shares 13 sentences on startups. (Click the link for more info).
1. Pick good cofounders
Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard.
2. Launch fast
The reason to launch fast is not so much that it’s critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven’t really started working on it till you’ve launched.
3. Let your idea evolve
This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate.
4. Understand your users
You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives.
5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent
Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can’t expect to hit that right away.
6. Offer surprisingly good customer service
Customers are used to being maltreated. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with atrocious customer service.
7. You make what you measure
Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it.
8. Spend little
Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money.
9. Get ramen profitable
“Ramen profitable” means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses.
10. Avoid distractions
Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects.
11. Don’t get demoralized
Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus.
12. Don’t give up
Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus.
13. Deals fall through
It’s very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don’t, but because it makes them less likely to.
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