- Curiosity is a means to a different end
- The end is finding insights
- Insights are shortcuts to big impacts
- abstractions -> insights -> businesses -> impact
- most of the indian founders "struggle" their way through, since we are just now aware of the concept of "being curious"
- The concept of DIM (Discovery Implementation Measurement)
- Majority of your time should go in Discovery and Measurement
- What's DIM?
- Discovery: Validation, Market Research, Talking to people
- Implementation: Build out on your Discovery results
- Measurement: Measure and get to know if your hypothesis was correct?
- Be slow at hiring important people
- Its okay to date for a very very long time
- Meet many many times in formal, informal settings
- Get drunk with them and see if you still like them
- Do more of that until you feel that conviction
- The concept of failure was invented to designate an event
- Like this event was a failure
- But somewhere down the line, we started applying that term to people
- People are not failure, events are failures
- The valley has defined a new word for failure now, which is pivoting
- If this word (pivot) actually stops people from giving up, then this is great
Most of the meetings with founders go like this:
- the investor starts asking rapid fire questions for a duration of 30-45 mins
- followed by the founder asking questions to the investor
- most of the time, the investor gets asked only 2 questions
- what's your fund-raising process?
- when will you get back to me?
- that's it!
- very few founders realize that the investor that they are talking to, have already met a lot of founders in your sector
- they don't ask good questions
- Start with 100 customers
- If in the next month, you are left with 0 customers, you've got a leaky bucket
- fix the leaky bucket and you will get the product-market fit
- so if you have 80 customers still using your product at the end of 1 month, you've achieved product-market fit
Focus on creating value, not valuation
Think with first principles
- You never scout for ideas, you scout for insights
- Scout for ideas only when you want to copy the model
- Scouting for insights means:
- What are people doing?
- How are people paying?
- While searching for original ideas, you first need to understand about humans and human behaviour
- You know nothing about humans and human behaviour
- Your customers are human, your investors are human, everyone you interact with is a human and you have no clue about humans
- Spend a disproportionate amount of time understanding what human behavior is
- and what people's motivations are
- people will always pay money to get their motivations achieved
- if you don't understand the concept of motivation, you'll never create value