Tyson on Startups
How to make the punch hurt less
Over the next while I’m going to be focusing on the challenges facing non-technical founders and how they can avoid them. First up it’s, surprise surprise:
The importance of Idea Validation
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”
Mike Tyson
Most people, including me think they are a genius and the only thing standing in their way and a unicorn startup is a killer execution. Statistics tell a different story.
Around 90% of startups fail. If this many construction projects went unfinished entire neighborhoods would never exist. Why is this acceptable in tech?
It’s impossible to truly predict a startup’s success. But knowing that there’s a significant pain point and building a product that is uniquely positioned to solve it is a great start.
This whole newsletter is essentially a validation project. It takes about twenty minutes a day and the conversations it’s leading to is invaluable in understanding how I can solve my target customers pain points. I’ve jumped into programming headfirst too many times only to realize either:
My idea is much more complicated to build than I realized.
Now that I’m talking about it, nobody is excited.
This required me to build humility to not lock myself in a basement and do the big coding heroics and save the whole world with my skills.
Ever wondered why so many Software Engineers are writing blog posts and so many non-technical founders are trying to build AI companies?