When You Find Product-Market Fit, Growth is Unavoidable
I recently talked with Samuel Thimothy from oneIMS. One thing that kept coming up was whether serving a small, niche market (as we do at my company) is a good idea.
My take is that serving a narrowly defined market makes it much easier to find product-market fit, and once you do find it, growth is unavoidable. People in a small market talk to one another and pretty soon the word-of-mouth flywheel gets going.
We also talked a bit about the pros and cons of raising funding, not using Slack, and stepping away from the day-to-day. Check out the whole interview here if you're interested.
Sponsor
Software Engineers: Get Paid to Write
If you're a software developer and you want to build your personal brand while getting paid to write about interesting technical topics, Draft.dev is for you.
Business
The Smallest Viable Audience by Seth Godin
"When you strip away the alternative mantra of 'you can pick anyone, and we’re anyone,' then you have to lean into the obligation of being the sort of provider that people would miss if you were gone. That’s not easy, but people with this sort of focus wouldn’t have it any other way."
5 B2B Go-to-Market Strategies Compared and Explained
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy exists as a vehicle of success for your company. It guides your actions, measures your outcomes, and ultimately gives your business purpose and direction.
Can growth continue?
"There’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas."
Technology
Writing for Engineers
"The first milestone for your document is an outline. Everything that is not directly contributing to this goal is a distraction. When you are happy with the outline, the second milestone is a fully fleshed out text, where all notes have been converted to paragraphs."
How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide
"Make time to be curious. Amidst all the talk of promotions and job titles and venture capital raises, it's easy to forget that – at heart – software engineers are problem solvers."
Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits
"It’s been fascinating to see which of those startups have done well and which have faded, now that some of those audits are 7-8 years ago."
Leadership
General Stanley McChrystal on Risk and Leadership
"Far too many leaders evaluate whether a decision was good based solely on the outcome of the decision, rather than whether the decision-maker made the best possible choice with the information available at the time."
When Everything is Important But Nothing is Getting Done
"We commandeered the entire company to deliver one project at a time, knowing that this radical unblocking would likely stall other projects. This trade off was okay because the previous state of affairs was that nothing was getting completed. So given the trade off between delivering at least the number one thing versus nothing at all, it was a bargain that even the most skilled internal negotiators were willing to try."
How to Hire at a Startup
Hiring is always hard. Even with 10 years of experience leading teams at startups, I make mistakes, and I’ve never met another founder who hasn’t.