[varunjuice]

Thanks for writing this. I'm no veteran of startups but I did have the privilege in a previous role of seeing near failure up close, working very hard to ensure we grazed the graveyard, and are now (my former team that is) growing steadily.

The items you highlight are common across almost all startups, so the lessons I draw are meaningful across the board.

1/ Design startups for speed. There is no way in hell you will get rid of false positives. You need to make sure you survive enough till you hit a true positive. This does NOT mean writing more code faster. In fact, this means do NOT write any code if you can avoid it. Learn though extremely cheap means even if the means only return 10% of the signal of a working product. If people don't absolutely fall in love with the prototype, it's not going to work.

2/ Don't be blinded by big names. Big name customers love to stay in the know about what is going on. They also have inflated self worth. Go after the small guys, and start using that to beat the drum around the big guys. In a past role when I was selling, I was walked out of the building by a VP who called in to get rid of me. 2 years later they called me because smaller competitors had better products than they did.

3/ Engagement with a small feature matters a LOT - I agree with your take that deepening engagement for almost all companies prior to growth is a bad idea. It is relatively easier to find a "feature" 1 user likes, and then scale it out to other users, than deepen engagement with that user.