Startup Strategy

Early adopters save your startup. They also, if you're not careful, define it in ways that make scaling nearly impossible.

Discounting your way to early traction feels like progress. It's usually the first step toward building a business that can't survive.

The customers who save your startup in year one are often the ones who quietly strangle it in year three. Here's why.

Success teaches the wrong lessons. The habits that got you through your first company are often exactly what will sink your second.

Most founders set prices by asking 'what's fair?' The actual question is different, and getting it wrong quietly kills companies.

Three of tech's biggest companies nearly collapsed serving customers who were never going to make them successful. The pattern is more common than founders admit.

Most founders treat market focus as a constraint to overcome. The ones who win treat it as a weapon.

Chasing product-market fit too early is one of the most reliable ways to build a company that fits the market that exists instead of the one that's coming.

Figma's pricing wasn't aggressive. It was a statement about what kind of company they were building and who they were building it for.

The funding advantage is real. It's also a trap. Here's what actually happens when startups have too much money to spend.

In 2013, every reasonable person told Butterfield that enterprise chat was a dead market. He ignored them. Here is why that was the right call.

Everpix had hundreds of thousands of users and a product people loved. It shut down because it priced itself into a corner it couldn't escape.

The waitlist, the invite code, the cryptic landing page. Deliberate obscurity is a growth strategy, and it works because scarcity is a feeling you can manufacture.

Customer discovery is gospel in startup culture. But the companies that built durable value often ignored what customers said they wanted.

The founders who turn down paying customers in year one aren't being precious. They're avoiding a trap that kills more startups than running out of money.

Basecamp never raised a Series A. Its better-funded competitors are mostly gone. The story of why is less romantic than you think.

How a single pricing page decision trains customers to spend more without feeling pressured. The mechanics behind anchor pricing, told through the companies that figured it out first.

Industry expertise feels like a competitive advantage. Often, it is the thing that kills you.