"Running a startup is 80% best practices and 20% best practices for you."
Early-stage startup operators should always stand on the shoulders of giants.
There are two goals whenever a new operation needs to be put into place:
- Get a good-enough operation running
- Do that as quickly as possible to enable learning, iteration and finally, scaling.
To achieve these goals requires you reduce the amount of reinvention and instead steal from others who have already done the thing well.
All it takes is 1-2 hours of basic research:
- Read "The Great CEO Within" or ctrl + f the google doc
- Google & open ~10 promising links
- Check First Round
- Check Lenny Rachitsky
- Check Y Combinator
- See what ChatGPT or Perplexity AI lobs up
You'll quickly find that you know enough to be dangerous, build an MVP operation, and modify it over time that based on your specific business/team/environmental needs and learnings.
Given it 1-2 months and you should be able to scale the operation beyond yourself via process, technology, hiring, or outsourcing.
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