Where should we begin?

You’re ready to wear the mantle of “founder.” What’s the very first thing you might do, exactly?

Friends of mine are starting something new, and asked for prompts to further define their plans. All new efforts, whether a movement or a venture-backed startup, take on similar shapes. Yet most startup advice is a flashlight in a dark wood: you see something useful and lack the map to connect the trails.

After looking for some model online, I wrote this list of four questions to help those get started:

1. Why do you believe you’re doing this?
2. What’s the “first useful thing” you’ll offer to those you wish to serve?
3. What does the horizon line look like?
4. How will you know if you’re on the right track?

I’ll examine these in turn, including articles and books for those who want to go deeper. Minn Kim and I also discussed on #thisisnotadvice.

(1) Why do you believe you’re doing this?

Anything new you make, while it’s for the world, or for your customers, or for whoever… is really for you. It’s only because of you that it may exist in this particular way. So honor that fact (too few founders do) by examining and naming your own motivations.

What do you hope, personally, to get from this new adventure?

Do you want to change the way people all over the world practice some part of their daily lives? Make enough to never need to work again? Satisfy your mother that you finally did something with your life? You can want more than one thing. Some you may think of as “side constraints” — a gate through which you’ll pass along the way — and others might be the thing for which you want to maximize.

If you’re working with another person, figure out what they want to get from this adventure too.

Consider working through the Partnership Charter. This works best for people who already have a strong relationship — the better you know each other, the more helpful it may be to name your expectations to each other. As with many things in startups: wring every ounce from your defining strengths, spend less time papering over your liabilities.

Some wants you can only discover later, along the way, like pioneering a new way of doing IPOs. Remember, it’s OK for your wants to evolve, dramatically.

(2) What’s the “first useful thing” you’ll offer to those you wish to serve?

You’ve already started a long list of many things you’ll make. Few founders feel the constraint of not having enough they want to make. Your imagination is at play, and you see all. those. possibilities. Relish in that! It’s part of the joy of starting something.

It’s time to set that long list aside. What is the first useful thing you’ll offer, to whom will it be useful, and why?

Of all the questions, this “̶f̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶f̶u̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶” “minimum lovable product” is the most important: because you’ll start working on it now, so it affects your behaviors, now. (Note for startup tradecraft nerds: this is different than an MVP, a Minimal Viable Product. That’s a version intended merely for the sake of testing a hypothesis. That said, if you read one book about startups, read The Lean Startup, and forgive me for recommending a book that I blurbed.)

Your first useful thing will, of course, prove something — what are you trying to prove? (And is there a single metric that will show you if you’ve proven it? If so, even better.)

The first useful thing will, ideally, be a “Lego building block” for a repeatable business — something that, if it works, you can repeat over and over at scale.

Avoid complexity:

Most founders, at this point, conclude they may need to build more than one thing at the outset. If you do, recognize that you’re multiplying the difficulty of an already-irrationally-difficult project. (If it were reasonable, it’d already exist.) If you want the thing you’re making to reach many, remember that simplicity is the handmaiden of scale.

Start small:

If you want to continue to think about this first-useful-thing question (I promise, it’s OK to stop now), then ask yourself more about those first few people you’ll serve: How will they learn about your offering? (There’s a whole genre of advice blog posts on “how did suchandsuch service find its first users” — peruse if you want some inspiration.)

But think how you might get big:

It’s often useful to think in orders of magnitude: how will the first 10 people you’ll serve find out about you? The first 100? The first 1,000, and so forth? What need in their life will compel them to set aside their deeply-entrenched ways to try your offering? What will they experience, how will it feel to them? (You don’t need to work this all out in detail, just have a guess for how it might unfold.)

And come up with something to prove that’s worth proving:

Often times founders develop such a limited “MVP” that they (like good scientists, but not great day-zero founders) are only testing one hypothesis. In a “first useful thing,” you need what I call a “systemic hypothesis.” You need to guess at multiple aspects of your solution at the same time (e.g., initial customer, initial product offering, maybe price, etc.), for the first useful thing to actually work and begin to build the momentum necessary to start to scale. The various aspects of the system in your systemic hypotheses are like stats on the back of a baseball card: if I told you how many walks a player had, you wouldn’t really know enough about the kind of player they are. You need enough of the whole picture.

Defer everything you can defer:

Note that one way startup efforts differ from each other: the mode of what you offer will shape much of your early activities (for example, is it a website with articles for someone to read? an in-person class? an event? a mobile application?). Each mode has its own properties, and this is a place where dialogue with someone experienced may help, since the flowchart tree of possibilities gets Very Large Very Fast — and your job at this stage is to narrow what you wish to build as narrowly as possible.

If you discover something you can wait to decide later, just park it on a list. “Just-in-time” inventory was invented by Toyota decades ago — to only purchase an auto part at the precise moment they needed it. You can practice just-in-time decisionmaking — only make the choices where the answer would matter now. I remember several marathon meetings I insisted on having, to decide what algorithm we would use to prioritize videogames on the yet-to-launch console we were making; it turned out that even with thousands of games we could just prioritize them manually. Oops. Wasting effort is the worst.

(3) What does the horizon line look like?

When those flights of soaring ambition come to you, or the savvy “when we do this, we’ll need to figure out this other thing,” capture the thoughts, the ideas, the feelings — in whatever way works for you.

You can do two things with these thoughts of the future:

• Keep them in mind to avoid inadvertently blocking yourself from ever reaching them
• Release them from your attention, for now

One particularly useful area to think about: language. The language of your new world is yours to choose. Are the people you’re serving members, or clients, or customers, or …? Language creates reality; the reality of your new project is yours to create.

When you make a choice that seems unusual to you, remember it as a story. You’ll tell those stories many times, later, to define your culture. Pay particular attention to how you tell your origin story — like daemons in His Dark Materials, your origin story will mutate many times, less and less frequently with time, until it settles.

Beware the “must do” thinking sneaking in here: you might start to think thoughts like “before we tell the world about this, we must have X, Y, and Z perfected.” Is that true? What if you only had X? Things that are merely helpful to each other, you can save for later — you only have time to do the necessary, if you’re going to make it extraordinary. (Remember that school-type thinking, where you think you need to get every question right, gets in the way. Your goal is to do as few things as possible, and make them profound. That story features a cameo from Donald Trump, the one useful thing he’s given me.)

Enjoy imagining, though. Read widely. Some books I’ve found helpful in imagining building something profound, listed among other favorites here: The True Believer, a history of mass movements written by a self-taught historian whose day job was longshoreman; Hit Makers, a study of why certain phenomenon become widespread in society; Blueprint for Revolution, the practical handbook of Serbian student organizers; The Starfish and the Spider, a study of how things can grow in surprising ways (for example, without a leader), citing my favorite example of a widespread phenomenon that was once new, Alcoholics Anonymous). Fiction helps, too. Stories are the molecules of imagination.

(4) How will you know if you’re on the right track?

Once you start walking, it’s easy to lose your way. Your ego may attach to the veracity of your early guesses. Wildly successful people often discard, mercilessly, ways of thinking to which they were wedded moments earlier. As Jeff Bezos points out, people who are often right change their minds a lot.

You might describe some yardstick in a sealed envelope, before you begin: “We’ll know we’re on the right track if, of the first 100 people who we serve, 90 come back”.” It could be a numerical score, a metric, or a sentiment.

It’s OK for this to be imprecise. In one of the many paradoxes of starting something new, you’ll need to change the unit markings on your yardstick as you go, and also need to avoid picking units that justify the choices you’ve already made.

You also may want to identify resources you’ll need. (Maybe capital or some kind of expertise you lack.) If you need those resources, then anticipate when you’ll need them and prepare yourself to earn them at that point. (Most new efforts actually need zero resources at the outset, and founders spend time too much thinking about this because it can relieve their ego: “maybe the reason I’m struggling has nothing to do with my efforts, it’s because I have yet to secure [some magic bauble].”)

Most valuably, there are things you can skip for now. Your attention is your new thing’s most precious asset. Preserve your attention for what matters, by avoiding:

• Pre-occupying yourself with stage-managing a single moment of release. The classic, often-ignored wisdom: “Don’t launch.”
• Worrying about “how a bill becomes a law” — plotting the precise sequence of steps that will lead you from here toward your vision is mostly a waste. At most, think about which things you’ll need to prove, at some point, to get there — in a thesis plan. If you like, you could put together a business model canvas to add flesh to the bones of your first useful thing — it’s a useful technique for elaboration.
• Playing house. Business cards were once a signal of this. Or elaborate mission statements for something that has yet to exist. (Organizational culture is a cluster of yet more just-in-time decisions.) This said, sometimes a little playing house can make you feel like you’re making progress — your drive is a critical asset, so if buying the URL makes you feel better, by all means!

Mike Tyson’s contribution to startup tradecraft: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Are your answers to these prompts imperfect? Great! That means you might be ready to begin. If the answers are perfect, it’s too late. You’ve likely grown attached to things you can only learn by doing — and the universe is a ruthless teacher.

(Like knowing what to do when a baby cries, even if answering these questions won’t actually quiet things down for you, it can be calming to have some motions through which to go — even if only to keep you from wondering if you’re doing it right. Nobody who ever started something successful “did it right.” So you might as well just begin.)

Focus on what’s at your feet (what you need to do immediately) and look at the horizon line to know where you’re going; everything in between you can usually figure out along the way.

In this way, starting something new isn’t like writing a novel or architecting a building, where you work on some plans and then one day, it’s finished. Starting something new is more like throwing a party… you’ll need to invite people before you know exactly what you’ll serve for dessert. And this party might last for a night, or it might go for a long time, maybe the rest of your life.

(Thank you Viviana Hurtado, Ph.D. and William Smith for notes on this, and of course the many conversations with founders whose wisdom I’ve drawn from here.)