What should founders at the ✨ very earliest stages ✨ focus on?
Understanding the problem you’re solving deeply.
👉 This means:
Learning the ins-and-outs of your customers: their frustrations, how they use existing products, how they would (efficiently) find your product, how you would displace their existing solutions, what has changed in the market etc.
Ultimately, uncovering these critical truths that the market has not yet found will ✨ make your business ✨.
👉 Not:
Burning time chasing after investors.
Pre-seed investors typically like to see *some* validation you deeply understanding the problem you’re solving.
Showcasing this understanding gives investors tremendous confidence in your ability to own your business and execute, even before you’re able to capture customer buy-in.
Developing this understanding early on will boost your investor win rate to generate the momentum you need for a successful and expedient round of financing.
Disproportionately focusing your valuable bandwidth and energy on pitching to investors without a well-articulated idea or proof-of-concept in mind leads to both parties walking away empty-handed, and frankly, underwhelmed.
However, when you do engage investors *before* you have clarity on your goal, optimize for the investor’s feedback vs. a formal pitch.
This is also a fabulous way to build investor interest and momentum well in advance of a formal raise.
As you embark on your new company, here are a few growth hacks that don’t require investor financing:
1. Discovery: Conduct extensive customer discovery.
Be assertive and proactive in reaching out to many, many customers and develop questions using first principles thinking.
There are several resources available to founders on what an effective (and ineffective) customer discovery process looks like.
This also allows you to deeply understand the competitive landscape to identify a differentiated value prop.
2. Demand: Build a customer waitlist (and, even better if you’re able to get customers to pre-order what you’re building in advance).
Conduct beta tests and show stellar “retention” by folks graduating from the beta tests and pre-ordering the product.
3. Validation: Look into non-dilutive government grants to obtain early scientific credibility and an early cash inflection.
Lean on experts (that are compensated based on success-based outcomes) to help you navigate the application complexities quickly.
Also, build relationships with advisors to provide valuable guidance early on, on top of extending credibility to what you are building to future talent and investors.
Ultimately, you have to nail the building blocks and strategy for a viable business, not just the storytelling and investor pitch.
Those building blocks, early on, start with a deep understanding of the problem.
