A Daily Curation of the Web's Best Content for Startups
Startup School: How to Get and Evaluate
YC Group Partner Jared Friedman shares a framework for how to get and evaluate startup ideas.
Big Ideas:
► Start with a problem
► Avoid tarpit ideas that are very difficult to solve.
► Think of your first idea as a starting point
► Competition is good. It shows there is a market for the idea.
► Don’t worry about your passion for the idea. Ideas grow on founders if it starts to work.
► Look for ideas in your area of expertise for Founder Market Fit.
Sara Dietschy: Creator Raising $350,000 on Kickstarter
Sara Deitschy’s Kickstarter campaign to sell creator desktop accessories has now raised over US$350k. She has 872k followers on YouTube and had her first viral success when Casey Neistat promoted her video.
Big Idea: Physical products are difficult to manufacture and deliver, but can be a good business model for creators.
Building a 400K Subscriber Newsletter
“The Gist is a newsletter all about sports, written entirely by women. Ellen and her co-founders have scaled a massive team to 20 people. They’ve grown The Gist to almost 400,000 subscribers, and they’re earning fantastic revenue from it.
Ellen talks about how they grew The Gist in the early days. She also talks about their process of testing, how they launched with a launch party, and a bunch of other things.”
Big Idea: Newsletters and other content-focused businesses can be big businesses if approached with a startup mindset. The Gist started with multiple co-founders and raised over $1m to build the business.
From Broke At 26 To $100 Million Net Worth By 31
Sam Parr and Shaan Puri interview Alex Hormozi to discuss his journey from sleeping on gym floors to making millions.
After advice from Russell Brunson of ClickFunnels, Hormozi changed his business model from running gyms to teaching gyms how to get more customers.
“You are in a level 2 business opportunity with a level 10 skill set.”
I highly recommend listening to the full interview. There are some big insights for sales and entrepreneurship. I’ve listened to it a few times now.
50% of Success is Market and Idea Selection
This is a short tweet by Romeen Sheth, but a huge insight.
Many people say that ideas are worthless and execution is everything. However, growth is so much easier when you start with a good idea.
“A big mistake many first-time founders make: Spending too little time on market + idea selection. 50%+ of the outcome of your startup is baked into what you decide to work on and when.”
My favourite quote on this topic is from James Clear;
“If you’re not working hard, ideas don’t matter. The best idea is worthless without execution.
If you’re already working hard, ideas are crucial. Most effort is wasted on mediocre ideas.”
Nathan Barry on niching down and doing unscalable things to build your business
“My SaaS business hit $1,500 MRR and then got stuck. Until I learned an important trick…Here’s the exact method I used to scale to $100k MRR in the next 12 months.”
This is a solid blueprint for creators as well.
How To Begin (with Michael Bungay Stanier)
“Today’s guest has accomplished a lot of big things. He’s a Rhodes Scholar, successful consultant, author of the international best-selling book The Coaching Habit, and also the author of the new book How To Begin. In this episode, he shares a practical, step-by-step method for moving your big ideas forward.”
Highlights:
• Michael’s team works in 6 weeks intervals with a two-week break to evaluate and recalibrate.
• It takes about 5 years to do a big idea. How many big ideas do you have in your life?
• Most people give up too soon, rather than hang on too long.
Create products that people love by validating your idea first
Great specific blueprint to follow with multiple examples.
This is a great post to review when you are thinking about a new business idea.
“Here’s a three-step process you can use to validate ideas:
• Create a problem hypothesis from your idea
• Set up a system to pull people to you
• Find the pattern of pain”
Start a Business, Not a Startup
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson share why you should start a business, not a startup.
“A business without a path to profit isn’t the business. It’s a financial instrument, because that’s what this has become, like startups or like NFTs you’re hoping to sell it on to the greater fool, someone who will just pay more money for your shares, not because there’s something underlying there that necessarily has value, but simply because this is how we pass things around.”
Summary of Jack Butcher’s Million Dollar Build Once, Sell Twice Course
Simple overview of Jack Butcher’s course that had sales of over $1m in 2021.
“Here’s the operating system:
1. Start sharing ideas
2. Attract like-minded people
3. Figure out their problems
4. Build products that solve their problems
5. Extract proof you’ve solved their problem
6. Document/share your process along the way (which becomes a product)”
