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How We Secretly Lose Control of Our Startups
Should Kids Follow in Our Founder Footsteps?
The Evolution of Entry Level Workers
Assume Everyone Will Leave in Year One
Stop Listening to Investors
Was Mortgaging My Life Worth it?
What's My Startup Worth in an Acquisition?
When Our Ambition is Our Enemy
Are Startups in a "Silent Recession"?
The 5 Types of Startup Funding
What Is Startup Funding?
Do Founders Deserve Their Profit?
Michelle Glauser on Diversity and Inclusion
The Utter STUPIDITY of "Risking it All"
Committees Are Where Progress Goes to Die
More Money (Really Means) More Problems
Why Most Founders Don't Get Rich
Investors will be Obsolete
Why is a Founder so Hard to Replace?
We Can't Grow by Saying "No"
Do People Really Want Me to Succeed?
Is the Problem the Player or the Coach?
Will Investors Bail Me Out?
The Value of Actually Getting Paid
Why do Founders Suck at Asking for Help?
Wait a Minute before Giving Away Equity
You Only Think You Work Hard
SMALL is the New Big — Embracing Efficiency in the Age of AI
The 9 Best Growth Agencies for Startups
This is BOOTSTRAPPED — 3 Strategies to Build Your Startup Without Funding
Never Share Your Net Worth
A Steady Hand in the Middle of the Storm
Risk it All vs Steady Paycheck
How About a Startup that Just Makes Money?
How to Recruit a Rockstar Advisor
Why Having Zero Experience is a Huge Asset
My Competitor Got Funded — Am I Screwed?
The Hidden Treasure of Failed Startups
If It Makes Money, It Makes Sense
Why do VCs Keep Giving Failed Founders Money?
$10K Per Month isn't Just Revenue — It's Life Support
The Ridiculous Spectrum of Investor Feedback
Startup CEOs Aren't Really CEOs
Series A, B, C, D, and E Funding: How It Works
Best Pitch Decks Ever: The Most Successful Fundraising Pitches You Need to Know
When to Raise Funds
Why Aren't Investors Responding to Me?
Should I Regret Not Raising Capital?
Unemployment Cases — Why I LOOOOOVE To Win Them So Much.
How Much to Pay Yourself
Heat-Seeking Missile: WePay’s Journey to Product-Market Fit — Interview with Rich Aberman, Co-Founder of Wepay
The R&D technique for startups: Rip off & Duplicate
Why Some Startups Win.
Chapter #1: First Steps To Validate Your Business Idea
Product Users, Not Ideas, Will Determine Your Startup’s Fate
Drop Your Free Tier
Your Advisors Are Probably Wrong
Growth Isn't Always Good
How to Shut Down Gracefully
How Does My Startup Get Acquired?
Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?
How to Pick the Wrong Co-Founder
Staying Small While Going Big
Investors are NOT on Our Side of the Table
Who am I Really Competing Against?
Why Can't Founders Replace Themselves?
Actually, We Have Plenty of Time
Quitting vs Letting Go
How Startups Actually Get Bought
What if I'm Building the Wrong Product?
Are Founders Driven by Fear or Greed?
Why I'm Either Working or Feeling Guilty
Startup Financial Assumptions
Why Every Kid Should be a Startup Founder
We Only Have to be Right Once
If a Startup Sinks, Founders Go Down With it
Founder Success: We Need a Strict Definition of Personal Success
Is Quiet Quitting a Problem at Startup Companies?
Founder Exits are Hard Work and Good Fortune, Not "Good Luck"
Finalizing Startup Projections
All Founders are Beloved In Good Times
Our Startup Culture of Entitlement
The Bullshit Case for Raising Capital
How do We Manage Our Founder Flaws?
What If my plan for retirement is "never retire"?
Startup Failure is just One Chapter in Founder Life
6 Similarities between Startup Founders and Pro Athletes
All Founders Make Bad Decisions — and That's OK
Startup Board Negotiations: How do I tell the board I need a new deal?
Founder Sacrifice — At What Point Have I Gone Too Far?
Youth Entrepreneurship: Can Middle Schoolers be Founders?
Living the Founder Legend Isn't so Fun
Why Do VC Funded Startups Love "Fake Growth?"
How Should I Share My Wealth with Family?
How Many Deaths Can a Startup Survive?
This is Probably Your Last Success
Why Do We Still Have Full-Time Employees?
The Case Against Full Transparency
Should I Feel Guilty for Failing?
Always Take Money off the Table

We Only Get to be Great at One Thing

Wil Schroter

We Only Get to be Great at One Thing

Startups can only be great at one thing — if we're even that lucky.

One of the greatest challenges in our early days is that our ideas for new features and strategies far outweighs not only our resources but the amount of progress we've made on our core product itself. We'll sit in strategy sessions saying, "Oh boy! What if we added this feature, or went down this path! Now that would be incredible!" without realizing our big ideas are actually going to be the death of us.

What we fail to understand is that great companies are built by maintaining a razor-sharp focus on their core product with an unrelenting drive to be the absolute best at that one thing, at the expense of all other distractions. Great Founders have the ability to never lose focus of what makes the product great and to (gracefully) bring the focus of their team back to what matters. It's way hard than it sounds.


Customers Buy the Car, Not the Heated Seats

Think of our product like a car. When we go to buy a car, of course we consider all of those features, like the sweet heated seats or the touch screen entertainment unit. Those features help us pick one car over another. But that's exactly where we get confused when we're building a metaphorical car for people.

If people don't want a car to begin with, it doesn't matter what features we put in it. And if our car is a crappy car, they also won't care what features it has. People buy a car first because they need transportation. No one buys a car and says, "Well I actually don't need to drive, I just love the fact that it has heated seats!"

We have to be awesome at building a car first and worry about features second. No matter how many features we add, if the car sucks, no one is going to buy it. Yet we tend to spend an insane amount of time distracted by so many features that aren't the car. If we can't build the best car, all the features in the world won't save us.

The Cost of Building the Wrong Thing

When we think about where to invest our valuable time and resources, we have to think about this as a zero-sum game. If we work on Feature A, it comes at the cost of Feature B. But if we're working on features at all, when what we should be doing is improving the core product, we're not only devaluing what we're in business to produce, we're giving our competition the opportunity to one-up us.

That's the real cost — investing in the wrong direction. If we were working in a total vacuum with zero competitors, then we could probably afford to make some of those mistakes. But in any competitive field, our mistakes are our competition's leap forward (and vice versa).

Every single major battle between two products was won by the company that built a better core product first. Tinder has added a bunch of features since launching, but the reason we know who Tinder is was because they came to the table with swiping left or right when other dating sites were using older mechanisms for matching. That was the product, that's why they are worth $10 billion.

We're Lucky if We're Good at ONE Thing

When we start to split our focus away from our core product, we also overlook the fact that building a market-leading core product is no small feat. PayPal in its early days did just one thing well — allowing two people with an email address to exchange money. That's it. 20 years later you know what? That's still all they are good at! And that's OK.

In this startup business, if we can find one single thing that we're good at, or ideally the best at, we are orders of magnitude ahead in life. We need to think about being intently focused on being the best at our one thing at the expense of anything else that's simply a distraction.

One thing done better than anyone else is what defines every successful product we use today. In our early years, with resources being far from plentiful, as Founders we need to concentrate all of that focus into greatness. If we're so fortunate to achieve greatness in our market-leading product — awesome — let's go build a feature. But until we get there, let's shelve the features and concentrate our focus.

In Case You Missed It

Why Can’t I be OK With Where I am? (podcast) Why is it that as Founders, we feel like we must constantly be chasing something - otherwise we don't feel satisfied? Listen in to find peace within Startup chaos!

Optimizing for Happiness. We do something in our planning at Startups.com that is relatively unheard of in the startup business: we optimize for happiness. Here’s how we do it.

How I Harness My Insane Startup Anxiety. There are two types of Founders: those that admit they are wracked with anxiety, and those that are lying about it. We’re all going to deal with it for the rest of our lives — so why not use it as a superpower, instead of reacting like it’s kryptonite?

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