Day 7: Snakes and ladders
There’s no lack of startup advice on the internet. Paul Graham’s essays, Zero to One, The Mom Test, The Lean Startup, and countless other literary works are practically ingrained into the minds of every tech founder. “Make something people want.” “Do things that don’t scale.” “Talk to customers.” As a startup-curious individual, these bits of wisdom would replay in my head, and I’d tell myself that I would follow this advice if I ever ended up founding a company. I found myself re-reading many of those posts today as I’m finally in a position where that it could apply to me, and I relate to the issues mentioned on a much deeper level this time around.
It’s a bit like the game of snakes and ladders. Good advice tries to keep you from sliding down the snakes and let you climb up the ladders. But it’s still up to you to roll the dice and land on that square. You must be in the position to receive that advice for it to affect how you’re making decisions. The founder of a late-stage startup might not find it feasible to do things that don’t scale anymore. Conversely, a founder on square one of her journey would need to find her first customers before applying the tips on customer conversations from The Mom Test.
It’s all about priorities. The most important snakes and ladders to know about are the ones 1-10 squares ahead of you. For me, that’s finding a real problem that people have, talking to those people, and building something that I think they’ll love. Since you’re a “customer” of this newsletter, I’d love to hear from you. If you’d like to help me improve these updates, reply to this email with why you decided to subscribe (or email me directly at hi@jinay.dev).
What I’m working on
I spent most of the day refining what my most important priorities should be. This involved a lot re-reading popular start-up advice and seeing how it applies to the things I’m planning to build. Not much to show on paper here, but the learning should be invaluable.
For my chord learning app, I was able to make some good strides on the chord detection algorithm with some hacked-together Python. There’s still tons of variability but I’d like to get it implemented into the app ASAP and iterate on it from there. My goal is to have a beta version out to users by Day 15 (June 15).