Startup formula

Not even having nearly 400K followers will prevent you from products failing, as @levelsio shared about one of his recent custom GPT products.

Good example of most of your projects still failing if you have more followers

Idea * execution * distribution * market demand = result

Just having idea + product + distribution isn’t enough, there needs to be market demand too

– @levelsio

That’s a good formula but it got me thinking that there’s some more factors at play.

How about:

• Expanding vs shrinking market – In a fast growing novel market, even sub-par products can have growth because there’s constantly new customers entering the space. In old shrinking markets, it’s more of an uphill task to acquire new customers.
• Timing – Sometimes you launch something and it falls flat, then you come in later and it succeed. Solar panels first developed in 1800s, but they didn’t become economically viable until the 1970s oil crisis spurred interest in alternative energy sources. External conditions for it to succeed that are outside of our influence as important as conditions that we can influence.
• Founder-product fit – Skills, knowledge, familiarity, competency and existing resources/networks that the founder have of the niche and product.
• Sustainability – Is the business positive ROI and sustainable? If you bleed money/time/effort faster than it accrues, it fails.
• Motivation – Most business fails because founders give up. Simply that. It could be burnout, or lost interest, or co-founder falling out.
• Luck – A catchall term to describe everything that is outside of our influence and awareness. Very often the conditions that led to our product success is beyond what we can realistically observe, lest influence.

I like the initial formula because it focuses on what we can do. But thinking through it, there’s so many interdependent moving parts and emergent properties of this game called entrepreneurship, that it feels almost impossible to have any reliable working formula.

But as entrepreneurs, we’re not deterred by that, isn’t it?

Ending off with this quote by JFK:

But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon… We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…

What other factors are there?