Product & Startup Builder

Here's the SECRET 2-step formula for MASSIVE startup success

Added on by Chris Saad.

Here's the SECRET 2-step formula for MASSIVE startup success

Step 1: Build a product that solves a real and urgent problem for people.

Step 2: Let those people know about it in a way that they can understand.

Easy right?

Of course, it's much easier said (or written) than done.

Who are the right people?

What's the right problem?

What's the right solution?

What's the right product?

Where do the right people hang out?

What's the best way of explaining the problem + solution to those people?

Who are the people, processes, and technologies that can help you answer and execute all of the above?

There are countless other decisions and deliverables you need to get right to make this very simple equation work.

But do NOT forget the equation.

Don't lose sight of the goal, and don't make it the execution more complicated than it needs to be.

Because in the end, the goal is actually very, very simple. And the execution is already very, very hard.

On the virtues of saying NO to opportunities

Added on by Chris Saad.

People often struggle with the idea of Focus. 

People generally don't intuitively understand why staying disciplined with a "Minimum Viable Problem" and a corresponding Minimum Viable Product is key to their growth and scale.

You'll hear phrases like this...

"Why can't we just support this extra use case?"

"Customers want our product to do X!"

"This is an important opportunity!"

"Isn't it easy to just..."
 
There isn't an industry, product category, or customer profile in the world where you won't be asked to handle more use cases.

Your customers will ALWAYS want to have more of their needs met across all their use cases.

This ALWAYS appears like a great opportunity. A no-brainer, right?

However, it's not necessarily the right opportunity, or in your startup's best interest, to solve these additional use cases. At least not right away.
 
Why?

The secret to scale is creating tight alignment from the very tippy top of your funnel all the way to the deepest part of your product so that you achieve real Product Market Fit (PMF) and corresponding rapid growth.
 
PMF is when a high percentage of users go through the ENTIRE funnel cheaply and easily: Awareness -> Interest -> Education -> Adoption -> Value Creation -> Uh-huh moment -> Retention -> Advocacy
 
If you carelessly stumble into new use cases, two bad things will happen.
 
Bad thing 1

1. At first, you will typically just add some features to the product and/or some messaging to your website.

You will typically NOT spend the time and money to create a solid funnel for the use-case from top to bottom (product marketing, product education, product support materials, product features, edge cases etc). 

The customer will therefore fail to make it all the way to the bottom of the funnel (retention + advocacy). 

This will result in either... 

a) Produce high-churn customers who don't make it all the way through the full funnel OR

b) Access to a very shallow pool of customers who are willing to tolerate an incomplete funnel for that use case. 
 
Bad thing 2

You will realize your mistake (hopefully) and work on creating such a funnel. However, this forced and premature effort will pancake the team.

Supporting a new use case is deceptively difficult and costly, cutting across all functions of the team, including marketing, sales, product, engineering, and customer support.
 
In summary

This is a counterintuitive mistake that diffuses focus too early for startups. A common mistake that many operators often fall into.
 
You want to nail your first Minimum Viable Product use case. 

You want to scale it to everyone who will buy what you have.

You want to avoid stumbling into new use cases and instead make very intentional decisions about when to expand your focus area. 

You can typically expand into new use cases only after you have nailed PMF (or decided to pivot) and secured or allocated fresh funding and resources to win in that additional use case.

Head vs. Body

Added on by Chris Saad.

This year's lesson

- Your head: For competence and control

- Your body: For calm and joy

Spend more time in the latter.

Do you deserve any credit?

Added on by Chris Saad.

As a leader, your job is to make your team look good in front of others.

That doesn’t mean lying, obfuscating or dissembling.

It means…

1. helping them to do the very best work

2. Letting them take the lime light and credit when presenting it

3. Clarifying or defending it when others underestimate or misunderstand it

When do you get your flowers?

Hopefully they take the time to give you a shoutout sometimes!

Signs and symptoms of misalignment

Added on by Chris Saad.

💥 Common causes of org dysfunction

Ever found yourself stuck in a dysfunctional part of the business and can’t quite figure out why?

One of the most likely reasons:

Everyone is making things up as they go—and squabbling all the way.

In other words: lack of alignment.

Here are some common (but not exhaustive) reasons why alignment fails 👇

🎯 Refusing to set one clear target

Someone in your chain of command won’t set a single clear focus. They hedge.

This breaks everyone downstream.

Companies need clear (often singular focus).

Without it it’s impossible for everyone to work together to achieve a goal.

🚫 No targets at the top

Leaders above you might WANT to set a target—but never actually do it.

No hard decisions. No documentation. No socialization. No team-wide alignment.

This failure often comes not just from the top (e.g. the CEO) but from a manager somewhere in your chain of command.

Leadership is both top-down and middle-out.

CEOs set high-level targets, but leaders at every layer in the business must define the details, push back where needed, and make sure traders are understood (managing up).

Otherwise, senior leaders are is flying blind.

🔄 Moving targets from the top

Someone in your chain of command sets a clear focus—then regularly changes their mind.

All leaders should be:

✅ Documenting a clear plan

✅ Anticipating and communicating change

✅ Shielding their team from thrash

✅ Defending the plan when leadership gets nervous

🧭 Confusion about what to align to

Focus areas might exist—but leadership hasn’t created or shared a canonical set of principles, assumptions, vision, or roadmap.

Maybe they think everyone “just gets it.”

Maybe they prioritize execution over documentation.

Maybe they keep re-documenting things with different words and diagrams.

Whatever the reason: no shared mental model = no alignment.

🙅‍♂️ Refusing to get aligned

Even with a clear plan in place, a leader (in your org or another) just… doesn’t align.

They ignore direction, pursue their own thing, and trigger constant re-litigation of previously settled decisions.

Sometimes this is subtle: They say they’re aligned but use vague or contradictory language.

Or they nod along—and then go rogue anyway.

🙃 Failing to say NO to distractions

This is a form of toxic niceness.

Everyone wants to be friendly. Collegial.

But even the most aligned leaders have:

A - Different tactical views day-to-day

B - Random off-strategy ideas

C - A tendency to drift from strategy over time

If your leadership (or YOU) don’t say NO to distractions, even the best-laid plans will crumble.

Plans are worthless unless everyone takes responsibility for sticking to them.

🧠 Complete failure of cognition

Sometimes someone in the chain just has no clue—and no path to figuring it out.

At that point—depending on your role—you have two choices:

Fire them. Or quit.

💬 Seen any of these firsthand?

Drop your story or advice in the comments 👇

Companies are like human bodies

Added on by Chris Saad.

Companies are like human bodies.

If every organ is working perfectly, except one, the patient will still die if left untreated.

You cannot have a strong product team and a weak marketing team. You cannot have a strong ops team but a weak sales team.

Just like an elite athlete, every organ needs to be operating at peak performance for the body to be able to deliver extraordinary outcomes.

This applies at every level of granularity in your company - from individual people, to functions, to entire squads or departments.

The easiest thing to do is to ignore mediocrity. It’s a form of beta region paradox where the dull pain you’re experiencing is not sufficient to motivate a change - so you end up just tolerating things for too long.

Stop tolerating dull pain.

The truth is the dull pain is -1, whereas your high-performing team should be operating at +10.

There are a lot of things

Added on by Chris Saad.

Overheard "Wow, there are a lot of things, aren't there!?"

While working with a designer and a founder to help them think through all the implications of a seemingly simple feature for their product...

Upon hitting about the 10th screen we needed to modify, he exclaimed:

"Wow, there are a lot of things to change, aren't there!?"

I replied:

"Absolutely! This is the difference between product and engineering. Product has to think through all the nuanced and essential details that turn a little checkbox into a delightful feature that delivers on its promise."

Remember:

1. Don't forget to think through all the upstream and downstream effects of your features.

2. When planning your roadmap (or distractions from your roadmap!), never underestimate the cost and complexity of even "simple" features.

Focus. Essential for survival.

Added on by Chris Saad.

I've been thinking about this idea (see attached image) a lot lately.

The power of focus can not be overstated. And when you think you've focused enough, you probably still have more to go.

Want to learn more about how to do this well? Let's talk.

4 dimensional strategy

Added on by Chris Saad.

Are you blind?

If you’re a hammer, every problem seems like a nail. If you have a big vision, then everything feels urgent all the time.

The reality, however, is that solutions to most complex problems (and many problems in life are complex) require a nuanced and multifaceted solution that plays out with careful execution over time.

It’s not product led vs sales led growth, it’s each strategy doing their part to contribute to overall growth.

It’s not Feature X vs Feature Y, it’s Feature X THEN feature Y.

It’s not Market A vs Market B, it’s Market A THEN Market B.

You need 4 dimensional thinking.

Thinking that looks past 2 dimensional solutions, to see the complex interplay of systems under the surface.

Thinking that looks past 3 dimensional plans that conflate all actions together, to see how execution can be phased out over time.

You also need the discipline to resist getting yourself and your company derailed by 2 dimensional thinkers.

Cut deeper.

Added on by Chris Saad.

I will never fail to be amazed just how deep you have to cut to truly achieve the level of focus you need to succeed.

However much you think you need to cut, double it.

Are your sales cycles too long?

Added on by Chris Saad.

If the sales cycle for your high-priced enterprise SaaS tool is too long, then one of the things you need to consider is creating simpler products that create a smooth price/effort engagement ramp for your customers.

Is your product too complicated to do that?

That's the point. It's too complicated.

Each product and business is different, but there is ALWAYS a way to do it.

If you can't figure it out, talk to a senior product leader to help.

How do you answer THAT question?

Added on by Chris Saad.
Here's what you say to an unsophisticated investor who demands exclusivity when investing in your startup...

---

Hi Miss Investor,

Thanks for getting back to us.

Completely understand and respect your perspective regarding the issue of exclusivity.

Let me walk you through a chain of reasoning and see if it resonates with you

✅ 1. Any Silicon Valley-style venture scale company's (think Canva, Uber, Atlassian, Xero etc) number ONE mission must be equity growth for its investors. It wants to deliver 10, 100, or even 1000x returns by increasing the value of its equity through a series of funding rounds and eventually an 'exit' to a large acquirer (or some, of course, IPO).

✅ 2. The moment you invest, you will be a major equity holder of the business and will therefore hopefully want the same thing we want (maximum equity growth).

✅ 3. The #1 way to maximize equity growth is to do the following (amongst other things)...

➡️ a) In a rapidly changing and highly competitive landscape (think of all the AI companies, Silicon Valley disruption, etc), the key is to preserve optionality for the business (especially in the early days) so that it can make quick decisions, adapt to circumstances, and WIN no matter what the world throws at it. So any pre-commitments can tie it down and choke it in the crib before it gets a chance to thrive.

➡️ b) Go global as quickly as possible. So we will need multiple vendors and partners across multiple countries.

➡️ c) Successfully convert all qualified opportunities. So we need a mix of vendors to ensure broad coverage for the most challenging use-cases and circumstances.

➡️ d) Be obsessively user-centric (think Netflix, Amazon, etc), including by finding and offering the best solution for any given situation. Better outcomes lead to more trust, more utility, and faster (exponential) growth. So, a marketplace of independent vendors will likely be required to drive competitive pressure and price discovery for users.

I hope this line of logic not only highlights why it would be an amazing opportunity to keep the company free of any exclusivity deals, but also shows just how ambitious and effective we are at executing towards a huge exit for you and all our investors.

Cheers

Mr Founder

The SECRET to validating your startup idea in the age of AI

Added on by Chris Saad.

Here are some things that are NOT validation for your startup in the AI era

❌ VC funding - They have no idea what's going on right now either

❌ Academic endorsement - They don't know what users really need

❌ Media coverage - They just need to fill column inches and air time

❌ Government Grant Beuracrats - They REALLY don't know what's going on

❌ Nice words from your former colleagues - Your MVP should be embarrassing!

❌ Nice words from potential customers - People just like to be nice

❌ 1 or 2 big enterprise clients paying you to do something custom for them - You can't scale this

The only thing that really matters for validation is...

✅ Real users REALLY using your product (Do this first)

✅ Real users paying for your product (Do this second)

Don't screw up these seed stage fundraising tricks

Added on by Chris Saad.

Some thoughts about raising money for a seed-stage company from angels...

I advise founders to have a roadshow period BEFORE they officially start fundraising.

Use this time to introduce yourself and the startup and see if they might be a fit for your round.

There are a few KEY things to do during the roadshow.

➡️ Ask Key Questions

You want to ask them 2 key questions before you finish the meeting.

1. What do you need to see us do/achieve to get conviction on investing during our fundraise?

2. Who else should we talk to in your network who might be interested? We'd love 2 or 3 intros.

Remember, for Question 1, this is less about gathering homework assignments and more about...

1. Uncovering the hidden objections in people's heads.

2. Giving you a chance to commit to something so that when you return, they have evidence that you know how to execute and keep you word.

3. Minimizing or eliminating any room for them to say NO when you come back asking for money.

Pro Tip: Try to guide the requests from Question 1 toward a small set of things you're already planning to achieve! If they give you a random metric or goal, try to get them to agree that the north star metric you've ALREADY decided is the right one to hit.

➡️ Create a methodical pipeline of investors

Make sure you end up talking to 100-150 angels at least. Question 2 above (intros to other possible investors) should help turn your initial list into more and more people.

Make sure you have a methodical spreadsheet with all your notes and what you committed to as part of Question 1 so that you can follow up properly.

➡️ Timing

1. Try to talk to everyone within a 4-8 week timeframe. Don't let this diffuse out into an endless process. You need to keep things tight and build momentum toward the fundraising process itself.

2. Tell everyone that the fundraise will start at the end of the Roadshow (no more than 2 months out) so they know when to expect you back.

Let's talk if you need help with this.

I've been doing a LOT of pitch deck and fundraising advisory work lately.

The path to failure

Added on by Chris Saad.

If you have...

The Right idea

+ Wrong time = Fail

+ Wrong team = Fail

+ Wrong investors = Fail

+ Wrong implementation = Fail

+ Wrong go-to-market = Fail

+ Poor alignment = Fail

+ Weak perseverance  = Fail

+ Slow adaptation = Fail

In startups, like in life, the stars need to align for outsized value creation and success to occur.

In Startups:
Choose your market timing well. Choose your founders and operational team well. Choose your investors well. Choose your implementation details and roadmap well. Choose your go-to-market strategy and tactics well. Manage your team's alignment well. Maintain your team culture and perseverance well. Adapt quickly without thrashing.

In Life:
Choose your life stages well. Choose your spouse and friends well. Choose your career well. Apply your superpowers well. Craft your attitude and personal brand well. Maintain alignment amongst your family and friends well. Continue to invest in each other well. Know when to pivot, adjust, and/or move on.

It’s like threading the eye of a needle.

Very difficult. Nearly impossible. 

However, the effort and the outcome can be very rewarding if you put your heart and soul into it with the right people by your side.

If any of these elements are fundamentally broken, though, the pain, suffering, and failure will be heartbreaking and maybe even maddening.

You can push and push, but you will ultimately get nowhere.

It’s like a supercar on a track with a flat tire. The horsepower will never overcome the friction. And you’ll mess up the rims trying.

Are you OBSESSED with solving problems?

Added on by Chris Saad.

Talking to a former employee at a startup I used to advise about his new startup, "I was just a fly on the wall, but I so admired how you help companies build products that people genuinely love. Every conversation I've had with you, you're so focused on the problem, and I LOVE it."

I love this.

Also, I love bumping into founders who have a BRILLIANT B2C app that they THINK is a B2B play. So much latent potential at risk of being totally wasted. When I tell them the REAL potential of their app to disrupt (rather than support) their "customers", their eyes light up and they get a glimmer in their eye.

Remember: Go forth and disrupt the slow, the lazy, and the unimaginative. Eliminate (rather than optimize) inefficiency, waste, and pain.

Feature Prioritization vs. Effort

Added on by Chris Saad.

When it comes to product roadmap prioritization for your early stage product: If it's worth doing, it's worth doing.

Factoring in "level of engineering effort" and other random data is typically just noise.

Focus on one question: "What is the #1 reason why more people are not getting more value from my app more often?"

Once you've identified the top problem and the key feature ideas for addressing the problem - DO it.

Don't overcomplicate it.

The only reason you need to concern yourself the level of effort is to a) estimate when key features will ship (and therefore when GTM activities and business metrics might change) and b) understand if you might want to slice the iteration into even thinner slices so you can deliver value more quickly (WITHOUT compromising on the final requirements). c) hold your engineering team accountable.

What's left when AI can do everything for you?

Added on by Chris Saad.

What's left when AI can do everything for you?

Taste, judgment, intuition, and taste.

In short, wisdom.

With a core group of truly wise people on your team, you can leverage AI to execute faster, make a bigger impact, improve people's lives, and make big money more quickly and easily than ever before.

Hiring well and firing fast has never been more important.

Having great advisors and mentors has never been more essential.

The market has crashed. Now what?

Added on by Chris Saad.

As always, capital efficiency is key.

Software, AI, and disruptive business models of all kinds tend to deliver maximum value with minimum cost and friction. This means an economic downturn is typically an opportunity for tech startups.

If your product does not deliver efficiencies and scale for your users and customers, then you should ask yourself "why not?"

If your product delivers efficiency and scale, then it's essential that you lean into this story in your messaging and in your product strategy.

This approach should set you up to survive the downturn and thrive when macroeconomic conditions change.

But here’s the catch: how do YOU maximize value and minimize costs and friction within YOUR business?

Certainly, using software and AI tools is key. But it's also essential to recognize that in times of uncertainty, you can’t afford to tolerate mediocre people in mediocre teams with poor alignment and suboptimal outcomes.

In these situations, every decision and every dollar counts more than ever.

Find/retain the very best people, sharpen your focus, and tighten your alignment.

Not sure where to begin? Let’s talk.