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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.
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
3 min read
What MVP Means in Practice, and How to Ship One in Three Weeks
The third week is spent finding five to ten users to try the flow, watching them use it, and recording what they do. This is the most important week, and most founders skip it because they are still in build mode and cannot quite shift to observation mode. Do not skip it.
4 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
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