The strangest thing about startup advice is that either it doesn't seem to work, or people don't read it. If it worked and people read it, good startups would be getting more and more common. But they're not. I haven't run the numbers, but no investor I've ever met has told me that startups are more likely to succeed now than before.
Most things aren't like startups, and it'd be terrible if they were. If the lessons from civil engineering didn't hold from one building to the next, we wouldn't have anywhere to live.
And yet, people still seem to read startup advice or, at least, want it enough that there are endless books and companies and universities dedicated to giving it. I've even given a lot of it myself over the years, whether people asked me to or not. I think the conclusion, therefore, has to be that startup advice just doesn't work.
Easy to say, hard to do
One explanation of why startup advice doesn't work is that it's mostly just wrong. But this doesn't feel right to me. It would be surprising if no one ever learned anything about how to start a startup. And even if people learned hardly anything, as long as they wrote it down, it'd still be adding up over time.
Another explanation is that most advice is right but still bad. This happens when the advice isn't really a strategy, but an outcome. If you're a man, being tall is often better than being short, but 'be tall' isn't good advice. Which means 'make something people want' isn't good advice either. Making something people want is what all good startups do, and hearing the phrase might make you more aware of it, but it doesn't help you figure out how. Whenever I find myself giving advice about metrics, like "get X users by Y date", it's mostly because I don’t know how to do it.
But the main reason startup advice doesn't work is, I think, that startup advice is easy to give other people but hard to follow yourself.
Sometimes advice is correct and contains a strategy, but it's still hard to follow because you are living in first person. This happens all the time, and it's most common in the situations that are most important. If your friend is dating an asshole, it's easy to see. Unfortunately, usually they don't see it themselves because they are them and not you. And often, even when they do see it, they stay with the asshole much longer than they should. I don't blame them. If you’ve ever been in love, you’ve been delusional. You might have even been the friend dating the asshole. And if you've ever broken up with someone, you'll know that there's no good way to do it. Don’t date assholes - easy to say, hard to do.
Startup advice is like this. For example, in the early days of Entrepreneurs First we discussed moving to San Francisco, and never did it, I think because if it didn't work out it would have probably killed the company. One day, EF might have to come to SF, we said. But not today. Today, we go to Singapore! Meanwhile, a common piece of advice we'd give on the cohort would be 'run into the spike'. We stole this from Genius, reframing their original 'do the thing you least want to do next' as 'do the thing that might kill your idea/cofounding team'. I now see the irony.
EF delayed coming to SF until it was around 10 years old, long after I'd left. This was, it seems so far, the best decision they ever made. It could have killed the company. Run into the spike - easy to say, hard to do.
I think this is one reason why most founders who succeed once still usually fail when they try again. Even if you know what you're supposed to do, even when you give great advice to people in your exact situation, everything important is harder in first person.
I'm no good at following my own advice, and often I don't know what founders I'm advising should do. But I'm currently working on some new ideas, as well as advising some founders, so I was thinking of ways around this. I want a way to make startup advice work, and I think I found one.
How to take your own advice
If startup advice doesn’t work because it’s is easier to give to other people than to follow yourself, to figure out what to do you should flip your situation around. Every startup CEO has a competitor. Even if you don't know who they are, you can be sure they exist. In some San Francisco townhouse is some other founder hacking away on the exact same thing you are. Any idea worth working on will have people working on it, especially once it starts to seem promising.
Usually, it's not a good idea to focus too much on this. Startups kill themselves before they kill each other. But, when you're wondering what to do as a founder, you can use your competition to tell you what to do. Just imagine your scariest hypothetical competitor, and then ask yourself what they're doing right now that makes you so afraid of them. If you're the CEO of a company trying to work out what to do today, ask yourself what you would be most afraid of if your CEO nemesis did. Are they launching something? Are they closing that big customer? Are they raising a round from someone awesome? What makes them scary to you will be what makes you scary to them.
This works because it is a reflection of reality. Your nemesis is your own advice on exactly how to win, you just need to copy them. At some point, winning means beating everyone else, so you'll need to become the most terrifying founder on the planet one way or another. And, conveniently, you don't have to know anything about startups to know what's terrifying.
May you break up with your toxic partner and move to San Francisco.