I think entrepreneurship is a subject where no rules can be derived for success. So I rely on these principles for elimination. Most ideas were borrowed from the great minds in the footnotes.
- Solve a problem that you face yourself1
- Do not work full-time on something until your customers ask you to1
- No “marketing” until your first customers do it for you1
- Optimize for each customers’ experience before optimizing for scale (e.g. investment, workflow)2
- Monopolies (e.g. Google) create their own market and draw analogies to existing industries; homogeneous firms fake niches by drawing intersections of existing markets3
- Have a secure career back-up4
- If prototyping allows you to learn, stop hesitating and strategizing. Keep building until it becomes too easy
- Before selling, know how it was built, even if you do not have the skills to build it yourself
- Successes are random; failures are deterministic - learn from (others’) failures5
- Innovation is about iterations6
- Ideas are worthless without good execution1
- Invest in a bonded and capable team, rather than a single idea that may have to be pivoted
- Inverse. Solve or prevent a problem is better than (over-)optimizing an existing solution7
