Starting a Startup

In this post, I will (hopefully) regularly update my thoughts and confusions on starting a startup. After about 4 weeks working full time with my co-founder Manojj, I learned a lot, in a fairly linear fashion. Everything was going good, I was watching YC startup school, Manojj was teaching me loads, but now that I’ve reached a sufficient level of deepness within this world, I have finally hit the inevitable stage of complete confusion and the point where you question yourself daily. Our minds are changing every few days, we are moving quickly, but we wonder - are we moving forward, or in circles? Speed means nothing without direction, right? Anyway, here I will post whenever we get to a new idea state, and I will write my thoughts.

I predict that in a few months, maybe years, and possibly decades, I will come back and think “what on earth was he thinking”, but I find that kinda fun and I look forward to it!

I spent my morning consuming Paul Graham - reading “Why smart people have bad ideas” & watching “Before the Startup”. I found them extremely interesting, and I was like damn, this guy is smart and I should definitely listen to him. He spoke & wrote about his experiences as an early founder with Viaweb and gave 6 points on why startups are counterintuitive. Early founders tend not to listen to YC partners, you need to be an expert in your users, not in startups, you cant game the system, startups are all consuming, they will change you a lot, and the way to get startup ideas is trying not to think of startup ideas. He also mentions the best startup ideas come from side-projects. Anyway, my thoughts:

It's interesting, you almost have to figure out your customer first, so that you know who you can deeply understand and learn about. But then, they say the best startups are side projects - now I wonder, how do we define a side projects For me, a side project is something that I work on to improve my life, or for those closely to me. Now, does that mean you should start looking at the world’s pain points and then treat them as side projects? Wait, but surely this line of thought is completely debunked with the fact that side projects should NOT be treated as startups in itself, so you should only develop it as if you are trying to make it for yourself, or a select few people close to you - right? If I took this advice I could start a 'side project' with the subconscious expectation that this would and could turn into a startup - but if i even have a trace of this thought, then doesn't it render itself as a 'startup idea', and no longer count as a side project? This must therefore mean that a side project, is one where you have some deep desire within yourself to solve this problem, no matter how niche, or useless it is to every other human on the earth. If it solves your problem, that's all you care about and you have the passion that pursue it with no expectation.

So let's say that you then have this side project, where you are truly, only focused on getting the solution working for yourself. How do you make that transition from a side project, to a startup?

• Well, it makes sense that if your product directly solves your problem perfectly, that it must also solve at least one other persons problem perfectly too? If so, this is the point where you begin to customer discovery - do people have the same point as you, and if so, do they feel as strongly as you?
• In this stage, you may be able to understand that actually, most of the market do understand and like your value proposition, but they may or may not agree with the implementation. This is where you begin to expand your product to fit more and more users, and deeply dive into their problem and suit their wishes.
• But what if they do not feel as strongly as you? What if the solution you made, only works for you?
  • Nothing? It's a successful side project, you learned about it, write a blog about it, and move on?
  • Continue using the product, and if you keep using for a long time, it must be really good at providing value, so maybe you can reconsider if this can be applied to an industry? I’m not sure

I think the reason this ‘side-project’ advice is kicking up such a fuss, is because we are working full time on finding a startup idea. So the fact that, on the side of this, we should be working on projects that we shouldn’t treat like a startup, sounds quite counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t we be better off spending all of our time talking to potential customers, like the founders of Brex did? Who knows.

This is what I’ve decided: We aren’t going to know what advice is worth listening to until we try ourselves. Let me try doing a few stress-free side projects during the week, alongside actively looking for ideas (even if Paul says “if you make a conscious effort to try to think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible sounding. Meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them. You'll waste a lot of time before realising they're no good.”)

Next topic: The whole thing about travelling to Thailand and going backpacking - this is something I absolutely must do, and I am not sure if I can NOT do it in my twenties, so it seems here that I have conflicting goals - seeing the world, and making my mark on it. We can all agree that if I spent 6 months of a year travelling, and the other half grinding, I would more likely to be successful if I was grinding the full 12 months. But, what is missing from this, is the quality of life between those two years - which one will I be a happier human for, and which one, in 10 years time will I be more grateful of? If I grind for a year, I am setting up (in theory) a great future for myself in terms of career and financial stability, but am I setting up deep, fulfilling happiness for my future self? Conversely, if all I did was travel, and have fun, I am sure I will learn a lot about myself, but will my future self be happy that I spent all of our money on experiences, so that in the future my family, wife, and kids suffer? There has to be a middle ground.

Also, I want to be the guy that can still travel a lot during the year, but grind hard on a startup, but I imagine that if we were to blow up like Cursor, I don't think I'd be willing to just stop for 3 months to go travel - right? They say a startup is like your child - would you leave your child for a 3 month break, and let it die? That's why it's hard to do this kind of thing whilst you are creating a successful startup. I guess, I am grateful I am aware of this as I write my thoughts out, because nothings done yet - I don't have a successful startup, so maybe I should go out and travel again? But times running out - don't I need to start my startup now - whilst I'm young, with no responsibilities? ARGGGGG

Oh and also Mark Reuben said something awesome the other day on my instagram reels -

"If the AI has reason, it wont do what the human can do, because we aren't reasonable. The breakthroughs come from what is not reasonable - what cannot be done, what's not supposed to be done. The AI cannot invent flight before the Wright Brothers, it can only regurgitate what the Wright brother did. And we do that, not by knowing more, but by believing in something that can't be. It’s something that can be imagined that allows forward motion. Always."

Manojj and I were discussing more common YC advice that you hear. We are told that we need to find a ‘hair on fire’ pain point - one that users are desperately trying to solve and are highly motivated to find a solution. I’ll let Micheal Seibel tell you about it in his words:

"As a founder, I never took the time to really understand what that meant and I thought it was just an investor marketing saying. Now, when I talk to founders I extend the metaphor to illustrate it more clearly. If your friend was standing next to you and their hair was on fire, that fire would be the only thing they really cared about in this world. It wouldn’t matter if they were hungry, just suffered a bad breakup, or were running late to a meeting—they’d prioritize putting the fire out. If you handed them a hose—the perfect product/solution—they would put the fire out immediately and go on their way. If you handed them a brick they would still grab it and try to hit themselves on the head to put out the fire. You need to find problems so dire that users are willing try half-baked, v1, imperfect solutions.”

I do think this analogy is great, and it makes perfect sense. Ultimately, that would be the ideal position to be in as a founder, but does this mean we should evaluate our ideas based on if it is a ‘hair on fire’ problem? If it’s not, should we disregard it completely?

We took Cursor, as an example. In its early stages, I think it’s fair to say that it started as a hair-on-fire type of problem for their ideal customer. I pay for Cursor, and use it daily. If you asked me 1 year ago, if I needed Cursor, I would say no. I have a chatGPT subscription so I didn’t need to pay for another LLM - I can just split screen GPT and VSCode and I was good to go. But if you asked me now, after using Cursor, I would say coding without AI embedded into my IDE was defiantly a pain point, and I would definitely pay for software to solve that. So what changed? Well, I saw the light, I experienced a better workflow and now in HINDSIGHT, I can identify that live without cursor would create quite a decently sized pain point. Isn’t that interesting. I only found a pain point in hindsight. This makes me think, does that mean we can build a product that we personally think is good and use, and then I guess hope that when other people USE it, they are like - wait, I love this, here’s my money? Essentially,playing on the fact that sometimes, customers don’t even know it’s a pain point until you show them? Is this realistic, or is this just luck? And it’s this “what if?” that makes me reluctant to disregard a product because people’s hair aren’t on fire. I guess time will tell!

So I talked to a successful (YC W24) startup founder today about the topic I discussed above - I was pretty much asking myself, how valid is the “hair on fire” advice? Surely I can think of examples of non hair on fire problems that people solved and that customers pay for. He explained that firstly, the ideal customer profile (ICP) for cursor wasn’t me. It was real software engineers whose hair actually was on fire. I just didn’t know it, because I’m not from that background. Ultimately, Cursor did solve a hair on fire problem for their ICP but happened to also solve a mild pain point for millions of other users like myself. In that way, he describe them as a bit of an anomaly, also taking into account how quickly they grew. I guess this has left me thinking, it definitely is a good idea to look at the best and quickest startups, but it’s not all I should be doing. The biggest startup names of AirBnb, Google, Apple, Cursor etc, are all great to learn from, but theres a reason they’re separate from the pack, and just because it worked for them, doesn’t mean it will work for us. Instead, we should take a holistic approach and look at what all successful startup’s have in common - solving a ‘hair on fire’ problem for their customers.

In hindsight I admit it does feel quite silly disagreeing and questioning advice from people who have been successful themselves AND been involved in so many startup journeys, regardless of their outcome. I guess that’s just my way of truly understanding a subject - dive in, realise I’m wrong, learn, and come out knowing that I now have a deeper understanding of the topic, rather than just taking it for truth.