Six for February 24

Welcome new subscribers! I’m glad you’re here. Here are six more stories, curated by hand from my artisanal Vermont home-office.

Not a subscriber yet? Don’t you know it’s free!?

Prior Fools // We’ve all been there. You join a new team and immediately begin to notice all the things your new colleagues do that are inefficient, wrong, or just don’t make any sense. The question is: what do you do with your observations? You don’t want to come in and start shaking things up, especially when you might discover there’s a reason things are done this way. Nat Bennett writes about his technique - the “WTF Journal” - for cataloguing the thigns he notices and deciding which ones to do something about. link

Sunk Cost // The story goes: Intel was flailing. CEO Andy Grove asks his colleague Gordon Moore “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Moore answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” To which Grove responded, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?” I love this mode of thinking because it helps us abandon biases - notably the sunk cost fallacy - that keep us locked into decisions that clearly aren’t working. As decision-making expert Annie Duke would say: your decisions should be based on expected value, not how much you’ve already wagered. link

Default Alive // “I didn't set out to be a profitable startup. But once I got there, I realized I wouldn't want to build a company any other way.” If you want to control your product, your culture, and maintain your vision, being profitable really helps, writes Linear Co-Founder Karri Saarinen. While being profitable isn’t something you can just decide to be, your strategy can include targeting profitability by keeping your team small, and focusing on the right market and the right product category. I’ll speak for myself: I’ve lived the deeply-unprofitable venture-backed startup story enough times that I’m ready excited to give Saarinen’s way a try. link

Another One Bytes The Dust // Triplebyte got product-market fit, and then deliberately pivoted away from it. In this deep-dive post, former Triplebyte Head of Product Rachel Wolford recounts how the need for outsized venture-scale ROI led the company to abandon their successful recruiting product in favor of finding hockey-stick growth somewhere else, ultimately leading to their demise. It’s a stark example of how hard it is to stay on the venture treadmill. link

Options: Open // As startup leaders, we need to be decisive and have a clearly communicated vision of the future. These imperatives can also seriously inhibit good product development. Paul Brown writes about how this imagined certainty and premature commitment can end up costing teams big. If you’re a pre-product-market fit leader with a 6-month feature roadmap, you might need to read this. It’s possible to make fast progress while keeping your options open and admitting you don’t know exactly what the future holds. link

Users First // Choosing the right tech stack matters deeply for your startup. At the same time, the vast majority of users won’t spare a passing thought for which front-end framework you used. I agree with Marco, who writes that there are no ‘best’ languages or frameworks, only technologies designed to solve specific problems. Especially for non-technical founders asked to opine on tech stack decisions, just remember that your tech stack must live in service of your product and your business - that’s the only outcome that matters. Your stack alone won’t be the reason you win, but it could be the reason you lose. link

____

Thanks for reading. If you opened any of these links to read more, consider subscribing & sharing Six for Startups with someone else who might find it helpful or interesting.

____

Six for Startups is compiled each week by me, Isaac Krasny. I’m a veteran startup product leader, founder, & CPO. I’m currently the product advisor for the GrowthCraft Startup Community and a coach and consultant helping guide founders to product-market fit.