Playbook / Lessons
All lessons
Short lessons from sources anyone can open for the steps of building a business. 215 lessons; every quote is linked to the page where you can read the original.
First buyers: what it takes to get them
- Go out and recruit users by hand
- Three paying customers in 48 hours
- There are no facts inside your building
- Find real people with a problem first
- Nobody is waiting for your launch
- Make early customers pay you
- Your first buyers are early adopters
- Start from a list of everyone you know
- Sales starts with the founders
- Do not underprice your first client
- Polite praise is not adoption
- One simple product, one traffic channel
- Onboard the first users yourself
- Sell a service first for cash flow
- Chase the first paid customer
- Gather an audience before the offer
- A few devoted users beat many lukewarm
- Ship a startup and test demand in a month
- Spend your effort talking to customers
- Make your offer instantly understandable
First customers: the offer, the price, and getting paid up front
- Test the price before you build the product
- Ask for 100% up front on the proposal
- A price tells buyers what to think of you
- Charge more when losing a client would not hurt
- Aim for customers who cover your living costs
- Price on value and earn more from fewer sales
- Price is part of the product, so talk about it in interviews
- Always try to get paid upfront
- A money-back guarantee starts the billing relationship
- Hold your work until the invoice is paid
- Start selling before the product is polished
- Stop being the bank for your clients
- Find your worth with early customers
- Offer a discount for paying in full in advance
- Price follows the buyer's situation, not your cost
- Work stops until the retainer is paid
- Price a new productized service from your minimum
- Ask for the first week in advance
Money: pitch, investor email, accelerator application
- Seven questions your pitch should answer
- Venture money made stalled growth a crisis
- Lead the pitch with a story, not numbers
- Set your rate from sellable hours
- Pick good investors and finish quickly
- No investors, nothing to waste
- Don't pitch VCs before you're ready
- Take profits while the good years last
- Put a number in every pitch sentence
- Check your margin after variable costs
- Send investors an update every month
- Fund growth without selling equity
- Choose the partner, not the firm
- Most companies do not fit VC
- Apply to accelerators early, and reapply
- Know your monthly gap to break-even
- Say what you do in your first line
- Build a floor, not a ceiling
Applications: accelerator, grant and lender — what gets you in
- Write shorter answers with proof in them
- Treat a grant as a bonus, not as your foundation
- Always leave the meeting knowing the next step
- Show funders you are not leaning only on them
- Have a live product before you apply
- Lead with income, assets and credit, not the story
- Weigh a government research grant honestly
- Meet a local banker before you need money
- Keep your application current
- Build a grant calendar with a safety margin
- If you cannot say it briefly, you do not know it yet
- A lean plan is enough, but have the financials ready
- Keep building while the application is out
- Be ready to defend your numbers in person
- A sloppy application reads as a sloppy company
- Get your finances clear with a free advisor first
- Read the whole application before you write
Sales and advertising: outreach, offer, paid tests
- Give every follow-up a reason
- Follow up on every non-reply
- Improve the top of the sales funnel
- Price is based on value, not cost
- Test one acquisition channel at a time
- Give your best customers something to share
- Test paid channels cheaply and quickly
- Customer service is a profit center
- Research prospects before you email them
- Ask past clients where you add value
- Schedule the next step on the call
- A customer must pay more than they cost
- Track each part of a LinkedIn post
- Test a price by putting it on sale
- Intercom's first customers came from email
- Pre-sell next season to past customers
- Segment CAC instead of averaging it
- A price cut becomes the new number
- Run small ad experiments, keep winners
LinkedIn: outreach and content — messages that get replies, posts that get noticed
- Write your first DM about them, not about you
- Research the person before you message them
- Make your first message about their goals
- Write like a consultant, not a content creator
- Put a name they know in your subject line
- Keep the first message short
- Assume you have ten seconds
- Post often so clients remember you
- Ask for less of their time
- Make every cold email genuine
- Find prospects through who your niche follows
- Don't pitch new connections right away
- Post from inside your buyer's problem
- Send a second email after a few days
- Email ten people to get a few replies
- Don't pitch strangers right after they connect
- Optimise your call request for a yes
- Never send the generic connect message
Repeatable sales: funnel, follow-up, recurring revenue
- How faster sales cycles help
- Subscriptions beat one-off selling
- Create urgency in every sale
- Schedule follow-ups with past clients
- Start the playbook with the first sales
- Retention is easier than finding new customers
- Do customers earn more than they cost
- Follow-up shows you care
- Package your service as a subscription
- Fewer offers make buying easier
- Experienced founders focus on retention
- Recurring contracts smooth out cash flow
- Recurring customers are worth more
Team and numbers: weekly numbers, first hires, delegation
- Know your burn and runway
- Write down your routine tasks as SOPs
- Judge burn against new ARR
- Make yourself unnecessary to daily decisions
- Send one weekly numbers email
- Know your hourly rate before you delegate
- Plan a warm first day
- Put a weekly cost on feeling overwhelmed
- Commit to OKRs as a process
- Run the bus test on your business
- Price your first sales hire
- Update your cash flow sheet every week
- Hire executives before things break
- Set up separate accounts and review them
- Define the role before you hire
- Hire people better than you
- Move from do-it-yourself to delegating
Raise: term sheet, board, investor updates, and money without VC
- Keep your cap table simple
- Use working capital financing for cash gaps
- Weekly CEO updates to your board
- Let customers finance your start
- Safe: convertible debt without the debt
- Don't depend on investor money for rent
- A clean Series A term sheet
- Growing a startup without venture money
- Create scarcity in your financing
- Being under-funded helps you
- Don't raise your Series A too early
- The anti-VC rules for solo businesses
- Choose board members who coach
- Show you don't need to raise
- Run board meetings so they help you
- Bootstrapping comes before any raise
- Send a monthly investor update
- What to know before an SBA loan
- Clean records before a seed round
- Pay your bills while building
Partners and paid growth: referral, affiliate and capped ad tests
- Judge early paid spend by payback, not LTV
- Pay for affiliates only out of real margin
- Put marketing metrics in the partner contract
- Ask your other referral sources, not only past clients
- Mention non-competing brands before asking for a deal
- Count active affiliates, not signed-up ones
- Use a small ad budget to test, not to live on
- Set the ad cost ceiling per client before you start
- Expect channel partners to be slow to start
- Be profitable on the first sale before you buy more ads
- Make your first partner want the deal to work
- Share the reward with the person who was referred
- Measure every ad test and expect the results to change
- Wait for your first 100 customers before paid ads
- Start with channels you already understand
- Track marketing spend as a share of revenue
- Compare channels on cost and setup time first
- Stop ads that are not driving sales
- Cut your acquisition costs with partners
- Put referral deals in a short written agreement
Expand: new markets, programs and partners
- Prove demand abroad before you staff an overseas office
- Stay in your first location for the first few years
- Recruit local partners like customers with a filtered list and outreach
- Expand into a client niche close to the one you already serve
- Check your product is needed and affordable before choosing a market
- Prove the concept first before you franchise it
- Pick one test market and localize instead of copy-pasting
- Use the Commercial Service and EXIM before your first export push
- Do not give away free consulting to win a bigger customer segment
- Vet any foreign distributor before you hand over your brand
- Check the new market needs your product before you localize
- Test a second location with a pop-up before you sign a lease
- Visit the new market and meet users before you hire locally
- Test a new country with a localized version of your site
- Land one small team first, then expand inside the account
- Pilot your model in a second territory before you scale
- Reframe your pitch for US buyers before selling there
- Win first clients in a new industry with an introductory package
The system runs: operating cadence, delegation and owner-free operations
- Hire a COO who can hire and manage executives
- Step away to find what breaks, then build a system for it
- Delegate decisions, not only tasks, as you scale
- Build systems that free your best people to do great work
- Keep the intent of your culture when its practices stop scaling
- Check cash, spending and margin every week, not every month
- Map your company's operating cadence on one calendar
- Track every task you do for a week or two, then delegate and document
- Run one fixed weekly leadership meeting with a named owner per metric
- Document training so it never lives in one person's head
- Write down everything you do before you try to delegate
- Define what the manager role must do before you hire or promote
- Put simple financial controls in place before you scale
- Hire the roles that bring in income before support roles
- Tell early employees how their roles will change as you grow
- Find the repetitive work where people bridge your software
- Make roles and decision rights explicit after your first dozen hires