During my time at Hubble, there’s one thing I’ve repeatedly noticed: every day, a seemingly endless stream of founders take to the internet to impart their secret formula for surefire success—5 tricks for this, 8 tips for that, 10 hacks to turn your startup into the next Google or Facebook. In this veritable orgy of content, it can become almost impossible to identify which advice to actually follow.
Iterative or seismic, customer-oriented or market-oriented, costa or starbucks?
The internet is a weird and wonderful place. It’s made possible the sharing of ideas like never previously imagined. Unfortunately, however, this includes the bad as well as the good.
Rather than wasting time trying to sort through this humungous heap, founders would be better served identifying a number of successful key influencers, taking on board what they have to say, and then moving forward through trial and error. In other words, by mining areas they know to be resource-rich, as opposed to looking for diamonds in the geological equivalent of Sheffield.
And remember, documenting your experiences can be a useful exercise, but for gods sake don’t start acting like you’re the next Peter bloody Thiel. You only get to do that AFTER founding a billion-dollar multinational…
