Featured Posts

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.

The Google Sheet That Can Run a Small Startup for Six Months

There is a version of the small startup that thinks it needs to buy a proper CRM, a proper project management tool, a proper customer support system, and a proper analytics platform in order to feel legitimate. There is another version, which is often the more successful one at the early stage, that runs most of the business out of a single Google Sheet for the first six months. The second version is not less serious than the first, it is just clearer about what actually matt

Tools

3 min read

Tools That Make Customer Conversations Easier

Most founders agree that customer conversations are the most valuable work of an early startup, and most founders also struggle to do them as consistently as they would like. The struggle is rarely about willingness or about the founder underlying skill at conversation, but about the small operational friction that surrounds each conversation, including finding the time, capturing what was said, reviewing the patterns across conversations, and acting on the learnings. The fri

Tools

5 min read

Choosing Tools You Can Quit

A subtle but expensive mistake many early founders make is choosing tools that are very hard to leave, and the cost of that decision is rarely visible at the moment of the choice. Magnific.com Modern software is designed, on the whole, to make adoption easy and migration difficult, since the value of a tool to the company building it grows with the volume of customer data it holds, and most tools have learned to hold that data in ways that quietly increase the cost of switchi

Tools

5 min read

The Free Tools That Can Replace a Full Operations Team

Most early founders assume they need more operational support than they actually do, in part because the businesses that publish operational advice are usually larger than the ones reading it, and so the recommendations skew toward the kind of systems that make sense for a team of fifteen rather than a team of one. The result is that founders set up complicated workflows in their first six months and then spend a portion of every week maintaining the workflows themselves, whi

Tools

5 min read

A Simple AI Stack for a One Person Startup

Most early founders working alone spend more time choosing tools than they spend using them, which is one of the quieter ways a startup loses momentum in its first year. A new application launches every week, a friend recommends something different every month, and before long the founder has six trials open in their browser, none of which are paid for, and none of which have actually been put to work on a real task. The aim of this piece is to suggest a small and opinionated

Tools

5 min read