Maybe a simple question I didn’t see here: paying yourself a salary?
How true is it you’ll need to persist under extreme duress unable to pay yourself a salary? Relevant for us with kids / families where we provide the family’s income.
I will add a section. Pay yourself a salary at the very latest the moment you've raised funding. If a VC objects to you doing that, get a different VC. You're in for the long run, and support from your family etc. is important, and you're already taking on a huge risk by pooling all your risk in one company, vs. the VC who is happily diversified.
Investors who imply you shouldn't take a salary are no bueno.
> there are two separate personas that you need to “create”: The user persona and the buyer persona.
Even more important: stop using personas, start using actual people. I've experienced many startups make unforced errors by conflating people into personas. A better way is to tag people with attributes, such as specific interests, explicit concerns, tasks to be done, usage goals, learning preferences, and the like.
When you switch from personas to actual people, it opens up many more product experiments-- many of which are surprising and may even feel counter-intuitive to founders. Increase your startup chances of success by carefully connecting with your actual users.
Those two personas were very helpful to me in my previous life as a technical marketer; they helped me learn when to leave a job. Any time a company I have worked for told me they're shifting emphasis from talking about our product with the actual users to talking about "solutions" for the buyers, I knew it was time to start sending out resumes because the product was about to stall and the work climate was about to get insufferable.
Excellent writeup from someone who clearly cares about hitting the intersection of "good for customers, good for himself and investors, and good for employees".
We'd be much better off with people thinking and acting in line with this!
I resonate a lot with these reasons. I definitely know I am not the most optimal employee, but often times the people I clash with are people that I cannot respect. Either
- They think they're higher than me (you cannot collab like that)
- They want it their way, despite there being multiple ways to Rome, and will cut off the conversation with orders, not arguments
- They pretend to be technical and are only making the bureaucratic back-and-forth worse. You can definitely tell when someone knows what they're talking about
Sadly a lot of companies will reward these type of people by putting them in the high seats.
"Their way" - some way has to be chosen, without too many back-and-forth.
In addition to technical there could be other reasons to prefer a solution. Some of those reasons can't be stated - for various reasons, like privacy or intuitiveness.
There are some reasons people like that are rewarded, and not all of those reasons are bad.
This is really well written and clearly from someone who has loved through it. I think just about all of their observations are correct (except for getting a coach - incredibly detrimental in my experience).
Author here. I'd be curious what went wrong in your case? (Also, happy to soften that advice further if there's strong evidence that people find the advice detrimental).
How true is it you’ll need to persist under extreme duress unable to pay yourself a salary? Relevant for us with kids / families where we provide the family’s income.
Investors who imply you shouldn't take a salary are no bueno.
Even more important: stop using personas, start using actual people. I've experienced many startups make unforced errors by conflating people into personas. A better way is to tag people with attributes, such as specific interests, explicit concerns, tasks to be done, usage goals, learning preferences, and the like.
When you switch from personas to actual people, it opens up many more product experiments-- many of which are surprising and may even feel counter-intuitive to founders. Increase your startup chances of success by carefully connecting with your actual users.
We'd be much better off with people thinking and acting in line with this!
- They think they're higher than me (you cannot collab like that)
- They want it their way, despite there being multiple ways to Rome, and will cut off the conversation with orders, not arguments
- They pretend to be technical and are only making the bureaucratic back-and-forth worse. You can definitely tell when someone knows what they're talking about
Sadly a lot of companies will reward these type of people by putting them in the high seats.
In addition to technical there could be other reasons to prefer a solution. Some of those reasons can't be stated - for various reasons, like privacy or intuitiveness.
There are some reasons people like that are rewarded, and not all of those reasons are bad.