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We discuss a lot of different kinds of advice here, and I hope at least some of it is useful! You won’t be surprised that much of the advice I offer were lessons I learned the hard way. I made a mistake, learned from it, and I share it here so you can avoid making the same mistake.
Most advice is like that. You either get it from people who faced a problem and solved it (useful advice) or from people who faced a problem and did not solve it (very useful advice). It’s about learning from someone else who faced the same problem to help you avoid making a bad decision.
Unfortunately, I have bad news: no one really has the same problems you have.
Yes, I have faced problems with customer acquisition, retention, fundraising and hiring. However, when I faced them at one of my companies, it was a different time in a different market with a different business. While similar, the situation was most definitely not the same.
And there is the catch with all advice: There is no one with the same business, in the same place at the same time as you.
Even your direct competitors have a slightly different situation. They might be in the same market at the same time, but they have a different team and a different product. In facing all the same problems you face, they have a different set of possible solutions.
This does not mean advice is useless! In fact, it can make advice more useful.
If you get advice from a group of people, there is no doubt they will not all agree. You get a portfolio of advice, much of it contradictory, from a group of people who all experienced variations of the problem you face. By looking at how their version of the problem is different from yours, you can start to see patterns in the advice! You can start to see why it all differs.
Even better, some of those advisors will have succeeded and others will have failed. What was the difference? Was it the time? Or the product? Or the people? You can start to discern the genome of success.
When I was starting my last company (an analytics business), before doing anything else I spent time interviewing the founders of every analytics company I could find. Both the successes and the failures! Unsurprisingly, they had very different and conflicting advice.
But my goal was to find that genome of success in the analytics business and I found a critical insight: The advisors who ran into problems with selling often had a mismatch between their price and their go-to-market motion! Some charged a lot but tried to sell with product-led growth while others charged too little and had sales teams. I realized that hiding in all the advice was a very important lesson about how to succeed in analytics.
That is absolutely the most valuable kind of insight you can have.
Don’t waste your time looking for advice from people who faced the exact same problem you are facing today. They don’t exist. Gather advice from multiple people and use their versions of the problem to put it all into perspective.
If you do, you can turn all of our mistakes into your success.
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