top of page
Featured Posts
Building Systems Before You Think You Need Them
There is a predictable moment in the life of an early company, usually somewhere between the twelfth and the eighteenth month, when the work that had been running smoothly on the founder memory begins to slip out of reach. Magnific.com Customer requests get answered late or not at all, important conversations are forgotten because no one wrote them down, decisions are made twice because the original decision was never recorded, and the founder, who had felt in control of the
Choosing What to Say No to as You Grow
Most founders begin a startup with a strong instinct to say yes to almost everything, partly because the early months reward generosity and openness and partly because saying yes feels like the kind of behavior that successful founders are supposed to exhibit. Magnific.com The instinct is reasonable in the first year, when the company is small enough that opportunities are rare, and almost any new conversation, partnership, or feature request is worth at least examining. The
When to Stop Doing Everything Yourself
Most founders begin a startup by doing every job that needs doing, writing the code, talking to the customers, designing the landing page, answering the support emails, and remembering which invoices are still unpaid, and in the first year that habit is genuinely a strength, because you learn the business by being inside every part of it. In the second year, the same habit quietly becomes the thing that limits the company, because the work expands, the hours run out, the pace
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
Why Your First Idea Is Probably a Feature, Not a Company
Magnific.com A pattern that shows up in almost every student pitch competition is the founder who has thought carefully about a single moment in a user day, has designed a clever solution for that moment, and is now pitching the solution as the company itself. The solution is often genuinely good, the team has clearly done real work, and the audience nods along because the problem is recognizable. The trouble is that the thing being pitched is almost always a feature inside a
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
5 min read
Choosing What to Say No to as You Grow
Most founders begin a startup with a strong instinct to say yes to almost everything, partly because the early months reward generosity and openness and partly because saying yes feels like the kind of behavior that successful founders are supposed to exhibit. Magnific.com The instinct is reasonable in the first year, when the company is small enough that opportunities are rare, and almost any new conversation, partnership, or feature request is worth at least examining. The
5 min read
Pricing Your First Version When You Have No Idea What to Charge
Pricing is one of the parts of an early startup that founders avoid for the longest, partly because the question feels uncomfortable to think about and partly because the available advice is so contradictory that it is easier to not decide than to risk being wrong. Some sources tell you to charge nothing in the early days, some tell you to charge from the first user, some tell you to follow your competitors, and some tell you to ignore competitors entirely. Magnific.com The r
5 min read
Finding Your First Ten Users When You Have No Network
Photo credit One of the harder truths of starting something while still in school is that you usually do not have the network most launch advice assumes. The articles tell you to email a warm list of contacts, to introduce yourself to your investor base, or to use the audience you have built over years of writing online, and although those are real strategies for founders further along, they describe a launch that is not yours yet. For a student founder, or any founder withou
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
What Minimum Really Means in Minimum Viable Product
Almost every student founder I have met has spent too long on their first version, showing up with three months of work, a polished interface, and a long list of features, only to ask why no one is using it, and the honest answer is usually that they built a product before they had a question, which means the version they shipped was not minimum at all but only an early one. The phrase minimum viable product has lost most of its meaning over time, because founders use it to d
5 min read
bottom of page