You have an idea. A good one. You think it could be big. Maybe even disruptive. But how do you turn that idea into a real startup? Here is the strategy.
Be Efficient
The startup grind is a war. A battle against competitors, investors, the market. Resources are scarce – capital, talent, time. Every shot must count. Visit Kirill Yurovskiy`s page
Strip away all excess. Focus ruthlessly on essentials. The core problem. The key solution. The leanest path to first revenue. Move swiftly but precisely. Take ground inch by bloody inch.
Scrap bloat. Kill side-quests. The clock is ticking. Lean into obstacles and overcome. Make each hour, dollar, line of code fight.
Prove Demand
Ideas are figments. Worthless guesses until customers vote with currency. Proving rabid initial demand is oxygen for a startup.
Build a bare-bones sample and shove it in their faces. Does the market inhale it like a starving mongrel? Or is it ignored carrion? Find rabid earlyvangelists willing to pay any price for your solution. If not, your idea is a dud.
If demand chokes supply, code like a demon and get to revenue ASAP. Cash is sustenance. Keep proving demand at each new level.
Find Unfair Advantages
You’ll face Goliaths with armies of capital and talent. You’re David, with just your wit and sling.
Fight smarter, not harder. Find undefendable niches and wedgeways into markets. Leverage bespoke insights, skills, connections, pivots others missed.
Maybe it’s a contrarian viewpoint. Or unique tech capability. Or perfect product/founder fit. Whatever it is, it must be undomesticated – unfair advantages only certain madmen can wield. Use that sling perfectly.
Master Turnarounds
Plans are fictions. Assumptions will be wrong – guaranteed. Startups are chaos in neat folders.
When walls rise in your path, savagely analyze for redeployments and cutaways. If a core strategy bombs, go full 180. Inflexible corpses litter startup graveyards.
Know when to pivot product, market, revenue – or the whole company. Tenaciously preserve optionality until you lock into what truly works. When you hit bedrock, pour concrete.
Ignore Distractions
Countless flies buzz for attention – competitors, investors, press, noise. They feed on startup failure.
Smash them aside. Focus singlemindedly on execution, growth, and the marathon ahead. Block out external noise and second guesses.
Let others play status games and scramble for press crumbs. You’re hunting bigger prey. Eyes on the prize.
Recruit Maniacal talent
Every hire is a high-stakes gamble in the startup trenches. Miss on just one cancerous hire and it metastasizes.
Recruit carefully. Strive for bizarre but brilliant fits. Insane productivity with deranged dedication to mission. People who GIT it down to the core.
Build a wolf pack of true believers prepared to sacrifice comfort, stability, money – everything – on the pyre of opportunity. No half-measures. This is total war.
Break Things, Break More
You’re an insurgent up against empires. Fight dirty.
Leverage outsider scrappiness to disrupt. Outmaneuver, out-innovate, out-distribute. Break established models, processes, dogma. Move faster, more leanly, ferociously.
Let decrepit giants slowly strangle themselves in bureaucracy as you outflank them with cunning and guerrilla tactics. Then conquer their thrones.
In the end, startup strategy is brutal. Plan for violence. Hack your existence into being through sheer force of creativity and willpower. Summon hunger stronger than your foe’s complacency. Find the cracks, splinter them open, and fight through.
After all, it’s a warrior’s game. May the hungriest minds with the sharpest blades triumph.
Never Stop
The war doesn’t end with launch or first sales. It’s just begun. Fight shifts terrain.
New fronts open in scaling, optimizing, expanding. Revenue battles, talent battles, territory battles. Capital wars.
Expect counter-offensives from rivals awakened by your audacity. Regression toward entropy and bloat. Complacencies seeping in.
Repel them constantly. Embrace the perpetual siege mentality. If it grows routine, you’re slipping.
Dominate the Beachhead
Found product/market fit? Established a profitable foothold? Don’t relent. Dig trenches.
Build bulletproof moats. Deepen value. Pile competitive fallback after fallback until unassailable. Root so deeply competitors wither trying to extract you.
Brands become bunkers, tech becomes fortresses, talent becomes artillery. Make your niche an impregnable stronghold none dare storm.
Harvest Windfalls
Wars breed black swans amidst the chaos. Stay frosty for serendipity.
Flukes, pivots, sudden openings uncovering unseen opportunities richer than your original quest. Lucky surprises that shortcut decades.
Exploit them maximally when grace strikes. Don’t cling to plans when windfall riches beckon. Flow like water towards abundance.
Burn the Lifeboats
There are no lifeboats in the startup crusade. It’s victory or death.
Take no prisoners, suffer no failure fantasies. No half-measures. Burn all return bridges when you cross them. Extinguish fallback plans.
Let urgency of stakes sharpen your execution to a razorial edge. When survivalism kicks in, miracles arise.
Stay Hungry
Hunger sustained you this far through all the carnage. Never lose it.
When surfeited with success, seek out fresh hungers. New mountains to storm, new frontiers to seize.
Comfort is the last weapon your enemies possess. The day you stop feeling scrappy is the day you start declining. Hunger immortalizes.
So stay lean and feral, my roaming startup samurai. Embody the spirit of zero to one. Build like there’s no other way to live.
