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Founder here. That list is a lot of cart before a horse. You could master all those points and still not have a company on your hands.

#1: Solve an important enough pain point that companies or consumers will pay you for it.

Sorry it's not more catchy.

3 comments

Don't trivialize.

The list provides a very good insight into specifics of making a product/company work. These aren't sufficient conditions, but they are often necessary. Product packaging matters. Customer relations matters. Resource management matters. As does the non-technical side of things. All of these are integral to making "companies or consumers willing to pay you for it."

My intent wasn't to trivialize, only to prioritize. You're right; none of those alone are sufficient for success. But IMO the single most important priority for a founder of a software business was not mentioned.

"Make something that people want to pay for" is an obvious priority for any commercial entity, small or large.

To OP's credit, it's something that people forget semi-frequently.

I can think of quite a few products that look nice and the workflows are quite easy, but at the end of the day they're just not solving a problem I'd be willing to pay money for (and, often, they disappear later).

It's very hard to admit that you were wrong about the fundamentals of your product, and very easy to think that re-designing the homepage will fix everything.

I feel like I should place the "Marketing" section higher. There's a list of questions to do a market research before even starting and discover if the fundamentals of your product are correct.

For what it's worth, I enjoyed the article.

Most start-ups aren't solving any huge problems, and sometimes market inefficiencies are there for a reason (see all the start-ups involving the field of law, for example).

Even for the ones that are solving a big problem (that people are willing to pay for), it's very uncommon to have no competitors.

So typically the way to make a successful company is to be better than your competitors, and the way you do that is through customer support, UX, etc.

So to your credit, I think for most start-up founders this is the way to move forward. But it's definitely a bit of a sunk cost fallacy - it's really hard to admit your idea will never be successful and to start over from scratch.

It's easier, and has more obvious ways to measure success, to adjust relatively minor things.

Not really?

Look at twitter. Fundamentally people do not want to pay for it. They still haven't figured it out.

What if, they are paying for something already, and you build a more advanced one? That is to say, it does something the others don't that makes it a little better and easier.

I don't suggest to learn it all before starting. But I wrote #1 in the "Marketing" part:

"Have I solved a problem serious enough for people to bother to become my customers?"

On second read, I get it. Thank you. That's big-thinking "marketing" to me, but it's there. :-) As long as a founder themselves owns that sort of marketing role then it gets the attention it needs and (still) I think the other items on the list need to be guided/gated by this marketing to a large degree even from the first days.

Thanks for the added clarity and article.