Today at a glance:
Opportunity → Modern Harvard Business Review
Framework → How to Build a MVP
Tool → Airstrip
Trend → No-Code APIs
Quote → Discover, Don’t Hire
Opportunity: Modern Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Publishing did $302M in revenue last year. If it were publicly traded it’d have a shot at being a billion dollar company.
The problem? Most of their material centers around big (often legacy) companies that don’t embrace modern tech. This means what you read about in HBR is already behind the cutting edge even before they write it.
Case studies are just a great, repeatable format, and they aren’t even all that HBR does. But even if a business just focused on building out case studies about modern startups and ran it across multiple platforms they could create a large business.
🧠 Framework: How to Build a MVP
Most founders think that the best way to build a product with a big vision is piece by piece.
The problem is that no one wants to buy half a product. To build a car, don’t even start building a car until after you’ve built a bike.
I share this graphic and framework with almost all of my consulting clients because it shows a universal truth of startups, you won’t learn enough about what type of product people want unless users are able to use it at each stage.
🛠 Tool: Airstrip
Most founders start a company to build, not to do legal paperwork. But as all founders find out, it’s unavoidable.
I just came across Airstrip though and it looks interesting, it provides compliant personalized legal documents for your use case, AI powered personalized legal assistance, and expert insights. Worth checking out.
📈 Trend: No-Code APIs
The cost of building software is going down. We’re going to continue to see this macro trend accelerate throughout this decade, and it seems likely that software will not be a defensible moat by the end of it.
A great example is no-code APIs.
Turns out you already no longer need to code to create APIs, and this is only getting easier with time and new tools.
For now, these tools lack the scalability that custom coded solutions can offer, but that’s likely to also improve over time. The rising interest implies that developers will increasingly adopt them as functionality improves and reliability + performance can match more traditional solutions.
I’d love to hear from some technical founders about whether you think no-code APIs are here to stay or just a passing fad.
💬 Quote: Discover, Don’t Hire
There’s been a bit of a debate on Twitter recently about whether to hire hungry, more affordable junior employees or fewer but more senior ones.
Count Netflix founder Marc Randolph in the former camp.
His point is that if you want people to do the best work of their careers at your startup, you have to be willing to take risks on people without a proven track record.
Not everyone agrees.
I once asked a friend on Y Combinator’s admissions team what the #1 thing they looked for on YC applications was and they told me it was past evidence of exceptional ability, because this was the most reliable predictor of future exceptional accomplishment.
This is the same approach Brian Armstrong appears to be taking with hiring at Coinbase.
What does this mean? Well, basically that the jury is out. It’s likely true that both approaches work better for different roles, at different companies. I’d advise you to consider how much time you’re willing to spend with each specific new hire vs how autonomous you need them to be from day 1, and weigh that against the extra cost of hiring more senior folks.
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