When building a company and product, having a singular obsession with working on it and solving the problem is an advantage over competitors that do not. The obsession leads to exploring the area in depth, more than any rational person would do. This leads to all sorts of discoveries overlooked by others.
See also:
- Having genuine curiosity and obsession might be a characteristic for dealing with skepticism
- Time horizons as a competitive advantage has a similar in beating short-term speculators
- Naval Ravikant talks about this at length in ‘how to get rich’
Links to this note
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At an early stage startup (less than 10 people), it’s a big advantage to do everyone’s job first. That doesn’t mean you don’t scale or hire other people, but doing their job first gives the most understanding about what the job actually entails and the knowledge of how it works.
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How to Do Great Work (Literature Notes)
I read How to do great work by Paul Graham. It’s a collection of advice I’ve heard from various places. It sounds wise but it’s impossible to disprove. It leaves the practical parts of applying it to the real world up to the reader. Still, I find myself agreeing with pretty much all of it and it took me a very long time to learn these lessons.
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Improving product quality requires consistent and ongoing attention. You will simply miss all of the details that contribute to low product quality if you don’t use your product every day.
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Having a meaningful mission that draw people in and compels them to do their best work together is more powerful than good culture alone. A company might have a distinctive culture of how they work together and other behaviors but if it’s in service of something trivial, there is a natural ceiling to how connected someone will be.
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Permission to Build New Products Is Earned
The right to build something new needs to be earned from existing customers. If they’re not happy with your core offering (most businesses start with a single product) they will worry that existing issues will make their way into the new product category. If people love your product they will naturally pull the company into other categories to solve more of their problems.
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Founders that are willing to take on problem areas that are unappealing because it seems like a lot of work is a moat. Schlep blindness, as Paul Graham calls it, is mostly subconscious and causes hackers to choose easier, but more competitive areas. This explains why you see thousands of todo list apps, but not a thousand employment compliance companies.
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A Little Bit Broken Is Still Broken
Engineers and product people tend to think about issues as frequency distributions. How many users does this impact? How severe is it? But this misses one inescapable truth from a user’s perspective: a little bit broken is still broken.
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Paul Graham’s essay on founder-mode vs manager-mode is about how the advice to “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs” doesn’t work well for founders in practice. Some of the blame, according to the author, is that professional managers and CEOs are really good at faking it and if founders only talk to their direct reports, they will be ineffective.