Startup Dogmas

Entrepreneurship at its essence is a craft defined by resilient dynamism fueled by one’s visceral passion of bringing a vision into being. However, with success comes imitation and the ossifying forces of institutionalization blurring the core thesis of solving customer problems by necessitating process above willpower. Any true innovative startup attempts to solve a problem that has yet to be identified or defined, thus any attempts to ossify the dynamism of vision manifestation into a process defies the incontestable grittiness of entrepreneurship. Processes exist more to justify institutions more than they exist to solve problems.

Talking to Customers

While talking to customers is imperative for any founder building a product or service, human nature is a prickly thing to contend with as customer behavior and customer preference can be almost entirely uncorrelated. Every founder truly seeks to identify customer behavior, not customer preferences which can only ever be truly validated indubitably via product-in-hand— all other modalities, via questionnaire, interview, or landing page are approximations.

Talking to customers is most effective when you can physically point your finger at the problem, less so when you discuss problems as abstract potentialities. In the latter case via an example of a social media app, it’s simply more effective to propose and present a solution, removing the possibility of the interviewee misconstruing a potential solution rather than attempting to describe the problem space effectively. People don’t know what they want until they’re shown what they should want. A factory manager operating a factory could physically point to you which machine is malfunctioning and or inefficient, thus in that microcosmic Turing-complete environment, there would be much less ambiguity in identifying and creating a solution.

If you were to interview a potential customer of what they prefer all else withstanding, you’d be given answers that most assuredly lie outside what their economic and or social profile enables. Ask a hundred young men what car they’d prefer to drive, they’d tell you an exotic supercar. Ask this same group of young men what women they’d want to date, they’d tell you a supermodel.

In both examples above, a one-to-one mapping of customer preferences translated into a literal product would likely not solve their actual needs. Fundamentally, humans assign value relationally defined within their immediate peer groups ordered under some hierarchy. Most people lack the wisdom to independently identify and associate value solely under their own volition outside external mimetic forces that collectively define socially derived value hierarchies.

The exotic supercar and supermodel girlfriend are in fact status signals, both objects of desire made valuable in part by their scarcity. In both examples people are in need of either an economical transportation vehicle and or partner to love, not public displays signaling wealth and or status.

As a founder, especially in the context of consumer markets where user preference is fickle varying between person-to-person, taking the word of potential customers at face value will not take you far and sometimes even in the opposite direction of a true market solution. While businesses are more rational entities, less fickle to individual whims and desires, ultimately decisions are made by a person, subject to all the paradoxes of human being and nature.

Had you interviewed mobile users in 2006 asking them what was wrong with their current cellphone before the release of the iPhone, most if not any would not have told you that the solution to their needs would’ve been the synthesis of a cellphone, GPS and iPod all-in-one. You’d probably have gotten answers along the lines of “I like having separate devices so that if I lose or damage one of them I can still have two other functioning devices.” While these answers might have been genuine, representing real customer pain points, building products directly using customer feedback at face value would lead you in the less profitable direction of product iteration rather than capturing the alpha from revolutionary, paradigm-changing products.

The predicament is that truly revolutionary products need product-in-hand validation as that is the only means to acquire the user behavior necessary for determining the optimal amount of development resources to expend on said product.

Some products can’t have their demand validated solely through a landing page because the product is contingent on an existential precondition via some network effect. The best example is a social network— why would you sign up for a social network solely by its landing page if there’s no value for you to use it today, only potential value contingent on how many other users join?

Talking to customers is overrated, it’s useful to address market context but it’s not where the magic of entrepreneurship happens. The most successful businesses can identify the fundamental attributes of human psychology, leveraging it most effectively in their favor as customer preferences become fluid entities to shape rather than static objects to describe.

Building Small

To address the problem of market validation, specifically the acquisition of user behavior, the common dogma is to build small and iterate at maximum velocity above all else. While true in spirit, in application this begins to break down as many “early” products don’t actually solve smaller problems along the way, thus yielding noisy market data with little signal if any at all.

A car at 95% completion, missing only one wheel, and steering only in a single direction is not going to be much of a car or something worth testing in the marketplace. Had Henry Ford rushed his automobile to market, skipping past some imperative functionality via a partially functioning steering wheel, Ford may not have become a profitable company existing over 100 years in the global marketplace.

This heuristic of iterating quickly can only work if said product can be segmented piecewise while still providing novel value to customers as an independent product at that point of segmentation.

Extending this example to building an automobile, maybe you’d start with an engine or transmission first, try selling that component to other automakers until enough capital is accrued to build the car in amalgam but in that example, you’re being relegated to operate in a lower margin business rather than capturing the entire value chain of the end product. However, the fundamental value proposition of an automobile comes in the amalgamation of its components, not as each sub-component operating in isolation. This problem is no less true with software products, it’s just you’re more likely to have a usable product at those segmentation endpoints than with hardware products. An 85% completed video game without any of its design flair, completed world terrain, and all the things that define a video game from the user perspective would make the game nearly unplayable even if technically mostly operational.

This is exactly why process is not useful when operating under the purview of unknown unknowns, which is why things just need to be built. This is where founders are made, the leap of faith to take the plunge in building something great and knowing when the product is ready to be tested in the marketplace. It’s the most perennial question to all of entrepreneurship, sometimes best answered only by intuition.

While there’s value in identifying first possible customers for concentrating focus, you risk limiting a larger market scope to a smaller customer base, especially by any early successes from these tailored optimizations rather than focusing on solving a larger, broader problem. The truth is that founders want their specific product to serve as many people as possible, there’s no real value proposition to scope down your market if done only to arbitrarily optimize marketing costs.

Grand universal problems necessitate universal solutions, not particular ones. If we truly do live in a continuous universe, then all particulars must point back to some universals.

Take a look at a product like Google search, it was intended to index the entire internet. Following the single-function, single-output product-development heuristic, Google would’ve started out building a product only for a specific demographic of engineers or some fan fiction website rather than a general-purpose product. OpenAI built a general-purpose chatbot rather than focusing on one specific market instead which arguably was pivotable to its viral growth because it enabled anyone to try it, not just a specific demographic.

While Google and OpenAI are outlier companies creating outsized returns in their specific markets, the very nature of their feat is not predictable or repeatable in any sense of scale. Product development heuristics are not useful in developing any novel problems. Rather than build small you should build as large as humanely possible, and take inspiration from the great companies. Better to fail aiming high than to be stricken with the regret of “what if”.

Conclusions

The truth is that no one is going to understand the problem you’re trying to solve more than you. You as a founder have probably spent the most amount of time thinking about it, at best looking for external “processes” via entrepreneurship books will be a source for analogous creativity but nothing more.

Wisdom for most is contingent on people’s direct circumstances, few people can set aside their own priors meeting you where you’re at. They’ll only be able to analogize their own reality and subsequent heuristics that have given them success in their node paths. Looking for pathways to success in entrepreneurship books is not the path toward success.

Process inhibits greatness, as entrepreneurship is never about process but solving customer problems. Build and keep building without thinking too hard about processes, if you’re building something worth the challenge there’ll be no process to guide you along that journey only a resilient iron will and nothing less. The time to generate is now — t3gin.

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