I think one way for them to realise is through situations that put them in a position to seek advice and when prescriptive advice goes wrong for them. This need not be in startups but in any wicked environment. I think that could force many prescriptive advisors to reflect on what they dole out in the form of advice.
I hear your rationale to flip the rating for novice-reflective and expert-prescriptive advisors. In fact that’s how I started putting the framework together.
However after talking to a few founders and reflecting on my own experiences I felt there is more value in having an expert in the domain - considering the benefit of contextual stories you get to hear from them on how they handled similar situations. I just feel the merit of this experience though from a prescriptive advisor wins narrowly over the merits of being with a novice advisor even if the person has a reflective method. But I can imagine situations that warrant a scoring like what you suggested. I just hope people who read this note can try and be aware of these aspects to enrich their intuition when choosing advisors.
It was towards the end of 2017 that I got my hands on Principles a book written by Ray Dalio, CEO of the biggest Hedge Fund firm in the World — Bridgewater Associates. I had already read the summary version of Principles by then and was a big admirer of his efforts to build a team based on meritocracy. But one of the best parts of the book that I could relate with was the section under “Work Principles” where he explains how he tried to build a culture in which it is okay to make mistakes and unacceptable not to learn from them.
He goes onto elaborate how his company ended up losing to the tune of hundreds of thousand of dollars because of a careless mistake by one of his employees. He understood that letting the person go would build a culture that’s averse to failures and came up with a public log where everyone should list down the mistakes they commit, explain how it impacted the customers / company in detail and with reflection on how it could be avoided in the future. Everyone is expected to read the error logs and this has helped them avoid recurring mistakes or failures while also building a culture that encourages the team to move fast and break things. More about our adaptation of error logs in the blog post.
The closest is convertible equity, adopted by a good number of startups during their seed stage. You can read about SAFE by YC and KISS by 500 Startups, 2 informal instruments / agreements used to do convertible equity.
Agree with you. The execution could've been much better. To start with, it always make sense to do a validated questionnaire experiment than come up with a new survey like we did.
Talking about Milgram and similar experiments, though they are known to help achieve unbiased observations about human behavior, it actually doesn't rule out the validity of a well executed questionnaire experiment. Good questionnaires take care of authenticity using a lie score that tries to detect if the subject is trying to make himself / herself look good with the answers.
Thanks for admitting the failures you picked on the way. Since you said Mobile-only was a terrible thing to do, how did you decide Winnie has to be a mobile app and not a simple mobile responsive website in the first place?
I'm really curious how product folks decide to go mobile-first, especially in many cases where the user interacts with the app once a week or less frequently. Would love to know how you decided on this with the assumptions you made.
I have spent time on some of these sites and also tried Muzli. If a bigger part of inspiration is to solve a UI problem in hand, I'll recommend http://collectui.com/. They give you a well categorised collection of working UI done by different companies / products.
Though I'm not a solopreneur, I've been through similar streaks of difficult mornings. One thing realised - I was pretty weak on a sense of purpose those days. I wasn't sure what my immediate / 1 year / 2 year goals were and this led to complacency. Maybe deciding where you want to be in a year's time might help. A goal/mission to look forward is certainly a good thing to have. All the best!
Nice to see that Google picked up a specific use-case, material design on mobile apps, and built a guide tool. For color guide on more generic design requirements, https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/ is something you might want to look at.
https://typito.com/create - Help creators produce videos for web fast and easy. Provide them with simplified online work-flows to publish videos that give better ROI on online platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
You can check out the demo - https://typito.com/demo. The tool currently helps with one use-case - adding good-looking motion titles, images and text animations on your video before publishing on YouTube with a few clicks. Adding these elements, we have seen, improve the watch time and engagement on YouTube videos and hence give better ROI.
We went live 5 weeks back and have 15 active users (who publish more than 4 videos / month via Typito), mostly YouTube creators - the market we are looking at.
Most recent startups from India backed by YC seem to be solving problems within the country. Examples - Razorpay - Stripe for India, Kisan Network - Online Agriculture marketplace in India, Innov8 - Co-working spaces for Indian startups. Is that relevant when YC looks at an application that comes from an Indian startup / co-founders? We could generalise the question by replacing India with developing economies with good infrastructural problems to solve.
How would an Indian startup trying to build a global product primarily for the U.S / Europe market fit into the scheme of things?