Having met with hundreds of entrepreneurs and invested in 15+ others as an angel investor, I’ve started to see patterns as to what great startups and founders have in common. In my mind, these three are the most important.
High-level
- They would put their head through a wall, for their idea, if that meant success.
- They don’t shy away from things that others would be scared to tackle.
- They are, and continue to be, their biggest user
Insanely Passionate Founders
Steve Job’s said it best:
“People say you need a lot of passion for what you’re doing, and it’s totally true, and the reason is that it’s so hard, that if you don’t, any rational person would give up”
It’s so hard to be successful, and it needs to be sustained over such a long period, that if you don’t love it – you’re going to give up. Any sane person would. That’s why passion for your team, the product and your customers are so important.
Really Hard Problems
Paul Graham wrote: Instead of asking “what problem should I solve?” ask
What problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?
This opens up your thinking to truly great ideas that are hard. Hard ideas are worth solving. Creating another simple web app that lets you tweet better – and I would know – isn’t going to create a $100M dollar business. I think we need to look at the hard problems we face each day and take on the ones that we wished someone else would solve for us. Do you think Jack thought Square would be easy? Hell no. What about Drew with Dropbox? Everyone thought the market was too crowded and it made no sense. They just felt the process/solution sucked. Square: getting a merchant account to process credit cards, and Dropbox: File syncing that just worked.
Use Their Own Products
How people create products for other people is beyond me. All the best companies created products to solve their own needs and became their biggest users. Some examples: Instagram, Hootsuite, Twitter, PayPal, Dropbox, Ebay, Square, AirBNB and obviously, Apple. All the founders had the problem, solved it and continue to use the product. Some might think this goes hand in hand with the passion part, but I thought it was worth separating.
Many times founders start off solving their own problem, and then pivot into a product that is a departure from their initial vision, and then stop using it.
That usually makes for a very bad outcome. It’s worth staying in the problem, understanding what’s good or bad, and solve it in a way that you’ll continue being one of your most active users.
Do you have anything else you’d add to the list? What would your top 3 be?
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