A couple of years ago, I was at a holiday party.
I love anyone willing to go on that journey.
So from the gate, I already want to do anything I can to help him out.
When I eventually ran into him, we started chatting.
He started pitching me his idea, and he spoke for 30, maybe 45, minutes.
Finally he paused to take his first breath.
I told him I thought his business idea was really cool, which it is.
Then I asked him, How many users do you have?
Oh, were still working on the business plan, he told me.
All right, how long have you been working on the business plan?
Do you have any software developers?
Yeah, my friend studied CS and were working on this together.
Hes working on the business plan with me.
I ended up talking to my fellow party guest for over 2 hours.
I told him everything Id learned working in software startups for the last 20+ years.
Its a stressful position to be in.
Every decision feels crucial.
Be hungry for feedback, and be ready to change radically, quickly.
Cost of change is one of the most important ideas that you could grapple with as a technology leader.
A podcasting system called Odeo ultimately became Twitter, a giant social data pipe.
Tiny Speck, a gaming engine, becoming Slack, a wildly popular messaging platform.
These represent sweeping fundamental changes to business models.
Making small and large changes is what enables ultimately finding product-market fit.
I had my first job in software in 1998.
Things were pretty different then.
Our first server lived under my desk.
I flew in a plane with a suitcase full of disk drives.
That was how you got software onto the internet in 1998.
People are not sitting around, just waiting for a great idea they can steal and then build.
Then amend the plan.
Youre wrong aboutsomethingin your business.
Think back to those three other teams building your same idea.
Theyre wrong, too.
But none of you understand what youre wrong about yet.
This probably wont surprise you, but this advice isnt only for early-stage startups.
At every stage, keep up this cycle of building, executing, and getting feedback.
Its only in this feedback cycle that youll learn where youre wrong and start to get more right.
Building the worlds most impressive business plan is not finding product-market fit.
So put down your business plan.
Find the simplest possible approximation of your idea that will give you any kind of signal.
Build that in an afternoon and then go give it to someone and see if they care.
Do whatever it takes to find that out it shouldnt take 18 months and a 90-page document.
Depend on uncertainty
At any point, something crucial about your business could change.
But you dont know what or where yet.
This framing is great for explicit decisions, but what if you dont know youre making a choice?
Many times, the choice isnt even visible yet but will reveal itself later.
In these situations, the answer is not to overgeneralize, building abstractions everywhere just in case.
Implement abstractions in only the places you have identified that have multiple implementations, i.e.
items with a high cost of change, where you also have high confidence that there willbea change.
Build in a way that minimizes the cost of being wrong, and then watch change closely.
Rob leads a team of 100+ engineers who are distributed around the globe.
Before that, he cofounded Copious an online social marketplace.
