> Ultimately, the reason that the startup died was because I did not do the due diligence in discerning whether this was a problem that I genuinely wanted to solve with my entire being. That's the bar for creating a successful startup, you need to find a problem that you're willing to dedicate yourself entirely to solving.
My own startup journey has led me to a contrary belief: At the earliest stages of building a business, being flexible and continuously re-evaluating your assumptions in order to find real market opportunities is more useful than having a lot of passion solving a single problem.
If anything, I've met many many founders who have had too much passion about a single problem, which hurts them gravely when they refuse to consider the possibility that the problem they are passionate about is not a problem at all and they need to pivot.
I'm excited by this post because I think Jimmy deserves this success. I've never met him in person, but I owe him big time because:
1. His community was a big factor in my SaaS business getting traction among copywriters and content marketers.
2. I took a bike tour near his area and he saved me from trying to bike through a mudslide that had recently washed out part the route.
Biases aside, I've been a member of Superpath for awhile now and can say that he's put together a unique community that has a strong backbone of "givers" that can help the "takers". The vast majority of professional communities (especially free ones) devolve into places with endless questions with no one to answer them. Superpath isn't like that at all. Questions turn into threads with insightful answers and discussions.
We are looking for a quick-witted QA Engineer to join us as a founding member of a new team responsible for creating a portfolio of marketing products for our publishers. Our team's charter is to help our community of 3,000+ independent publishers grow their audience and you will help us empower them with the highest-quality tools.
• RAPIDLY GROWING COMPANY - In the past year, the company has risen to become the 11th largest digital property in the U.S. (just under Viacom and Apple) and manages 175M monthly unique visitors.
• ESTABLISHED REMOTE CULTURE - CafeMedia has been a fully remote company for years before the pandemic and knows how to create effective remote teams.
• POWERFUL MISSION - Our product enables thousands of creators and independent publishers make a living. We are a force for the open web, freeing creators from the walled-gardens of Facebook and Pinterest.
I'm a big fan of this thread because it helps correct the preconceived notion that culture is on a 1 dimensional spectrum between "bad" and "great".
At our 30-person company, we did an experiment where we took a culture framework that was evaluated on 2 axes, and took internal surveys between two years to determine where on the spectrum employees felt our culture was currently at, and what their ideal culture would be.
For anyone in a position to explore these questions at an organizational level, I would highly recommend doing an exercise like this. It gives more agency to the employee to express what direction they think would be optimal and brings awareness to the fact that totally different cultures can both be considered "great".
My own startup journey has led me to a contrary belief: At the earliest stages of building a business, being flexible and continuously re-evaluating your assumptions in order to find real market opportunities is more useful than having a lot of passion solving a single problem.
If anything, I've met many many founders who have had too much passion about a single problem, which hurts them gravely when they refuse to consider the possibility that the problem they are passionate about is not a problem at all and they need to pivot.