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Saying No to a Customer Feature Without Losing the Customer
Magnific.com Most early stage founders eventually receive a specific kind of request from a customer that they are afraid to refuse. The customer is one of the more valuable ones, they have asked for a feature that the founder knows would not actually help the product, and the fear is that saying no will damage the relationship. So the founder either says yes and builds something they should not have built, or says a soft version of no that leaves the customer confused about
The Co-Founder Equity Script for Two Students Still in School
The conversation about how to split equity between two founders is one of the more consequential conversations of the early startup years, and it is one of the ones most often postponed until the postponement itself becomes the problem. Two students building together will often work for months without ever formally agreeing on how ownership of the company will be divided, and by the time they finally have the conversation they have already accumulated enough asymmetries betwe
How to Hire Your First Person When You Cannot Really Pay Them Yet
The most important shift in mindset is to stop thinking of the first hire as an employee and start thinking of them as someone who is joining a venture, since the person you can attract without much money is almost never the same kind of person who would take a paid role at a bigger company. Their motivation for joining you is different, and if you understand what that motivation actually is you can structure an arrangement that works for both of you.
"Three Sentences That Explain Your Startup to Your Uncle"
Every Nigerian founder has had this moment. You are at a wedding or a family event, someone's uncle or aunt asks what you do these days, and the answer you have carefully written out for your investors or your website suddenly feels wrong in your mouth. You start to say "we are building a platform that", and you can already see their eyes glaze over before you have finished the sentence, and by the time you land on the word "user" or "solution" or "ecosystem", the conversatio
3 min read
The Naija Founder Story We Keep Repeating, and the Chapters It Hides
There is a version of the Nigerian founder story that has become the default in how we talk about Nigerian startups, and it goes something like this. A young Nigerian in Lagos or Ibadan sees a problem that everyone has accepted as unfixable, builds a clever technical solution against significant infrastructure constraints, raises money from a foreign investor who recognises the local knowledge as an asset, and eventually builds a company that either gets acquired or continues
4 min read
The Case for Boring Startups
Most startup writing celebrates the dramatic ideas. The article about the founder who built an AI breakthrough in a garage, the founder who reimagined a category that had not been touched in decades, the founder whose product made the news for being shocking, novel, or strange, all of these tend to dominate the public stories of what entrepreneurship looks like. Magnific.com The result is that student founders, who read these stories at the start of their own work, come away
5 min read
Unit Economics for Founders Who Hate Spreadsheets
Magnific.com The phrase unit economics is one of the more intimidating in startup writing, in part because the words themselves sound technical, and in part because the people who use the phrase confidently often present unit economics as the kind of analysis that requires a finance background to understand. The reality is that unit economics, properly understood, is one of the simpler concepts in startup work, and a founder who has never opened a spreadsheet can understand t
5 min read
What Student Founders Get Wrong About Networking
Most early advice about networking is built for people in formal professional settings, and it reflects the rhythm of a working life that student founders do not yet have. The advice tells you to attend industry events, to maintain a list of contacts, to follow up on every interaction within a week, and to position yourself in ways that make you memorable to future hiring managers. Magific.com None of this is wrong for the audience it was written for, but the audience is rare
5 min read
Why Follow Your Passion Is Poor Startup Advice
Few pieces of advice are repeated as confidently or as uncritically as the suggestion to follow your passion when starting a company, and although the phrase is meant kindly and is sometimes useful, it tends to lead student founders into companies that do not survive their first eighteen months for reasons that the advice itself helped create. The problem is not that passion is bad for a startup, since passion does meaningful work over the long arc of building a company, but
5 min read
The Quiet Cost of Building While Still in School
Most articles about student founders skip the part that no one talks about at the demo days, because the articles describe the wins, the funding rounds, the early customers, and the moment a professor told the founder they should drop out, while quietly leaving out what gets traded away to make those moments possible. This piece is about the trades, and it is for the student who is building something while taking classes and is starting to wonder why everyone around them look
5 min read
Is Your Startup Vulnerable? 4 Overlooked Risks Early Stage Founders Need to Address
As an early-stage startup founder, you are likely laser-focused on perfecting your product, finding your first customers, and securing...
3 min read
5 Enduring Myths That Are Making Your Startup Journey Harder
Launching a startup is undoubtedly challenging. The odds and competitive forces seem stacked against you. So believe me, the last thing...
3 min read
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