Subtle real advantage nobody talks about: if founders can access deeper pools of capital early/quickly, they can get bigger faster without spawning lots of competitors.

If your startup is real, pitching Sand Hill is sometimes like giving away copies of your treasure map

1. The major problem most startups face is marketing and the ability to carve out a niche, find and retain paying customers.

Even with a stellar developer team and a stellar product, your startup may not grow or survive without a great marketing and sales teams.

2. Start growing your audience before you’ve a product or an idea.

You should start promoting yourself and building your audience before you have a finished product or even before you have a great idea that you want to build.

3. Don’t wait to start building your audience after you’ve launched a product.

Most first-time developers actually ignore marketing.

They’re oblivious to the challenge of attracting people to take a look at something they’ve created.

4. At least until they see their first project crash and burn within hours of the launch.

There are so many times that I have seen developers spend countless hours building something, releasing it with no fanfare...

5. and only then trying to figure out how to promote it by asking marketing questions on Indie Hackers, Quora or Hacker News. Don’t make that mistake.

👇Thread.

Published a new essay: The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics – 80 slide deck included!

This was a deck that I created on my (longish) interview process with @a16z. It was a long path, starting with meeting folks at the firm 10 years ago. But the purpose of the deck was to explain how I would use my superpower in an investing context

Here's what I explain in the deck. As investors (whether angel or VC) we're often confronted with an up-and-to-the-right graph. Is it going to go up? Or down?

One solution to forecast these growth curves is the Growth Accounting Framework, where you add up New+Reactivated and subtract churned users. In each time period that gives you the difference in monthly actives.

The problem with this is that it's a lagging metric, not a leading one. We need to go one level deeper and look at the underlying loops that drive these numbers, to understand the quality.

Yesterday, I wrote about how easy it is to sell ice cream on a crowded beach: https://t.co/a9z2ZTixb7

Today, I’m at the local fair.

There are hundreds of vendors.

But there are also huge crowds who are hot and thirsty; lots of demand for cold drinks!

Go where the crowds are!

Again, this is just a metaphor!

But it’s a good reminder:

🍋 If you have a lemonade stand, it’s better to go somewhere hot, where there are a lot of thirsty people.

💻 If you want to make software, it’s better to go where there are a bunch of potential customers.

BTW - targeting a good market doesn’t mean you’ll automatically win!

There are a TON of factors that influence a business’ success (or failure).

But choosing a market that has a lot of demand (and good channels) is essential for future success.

In business, nothing is guaranteed.

You might be in a good market today, but tomorrow it could fall apart.

Markets are fickle.

Some days they want 🍦, other days they want 🥤.

The economy can go up, or it can crash.

A good competitor can come in and grab market share.

But this reinforces the point:

“Business is already hard, why make it harder?” – @asmartbear

Why try to enter a niche where there’s no demonstrable demand?

Why try to serve a total addressable market of 500, when you could go after 500,000 potential customers?