clarity

Notes from The Book of Clarity by Paras Chopra. Helpful guide for building a startup.

1. Start blank. No ideas. Only consumers.
2. Identify the user sets you want to build for.
3. Talk to every user in every set.
4. Find what they DO, not what they SAY they do.
5. See if you can find a pattern and do something better for them.
6. What burning pain can be solved only via your customized offering?
7. Define your market as narrowly as possible. Be the king of a pond.
8. Build a really simple product at first, let users help you iterate.
9. Innovate only on one thing that differentiates your business, copy everything else.
10. Be irreplaceable in the value chain.
11. Be cost-focused or quality-focused, not both. It does not work.
12. Don't price your product based on the value it creates, price it based on the products you want it to be compared with.
13. What kills startups is lack of feedback.
14. Cognitive biases are real. Find specific ways in which your idea can fail.
15. When taking advice, you want to seek feedback from someone who is honest, is an expert in your target market, and does not have a big ego.
16. When interviewing people, don't ask leading questions. This will lead to confirmation bias.
17. Approach problems from first principles before using internet or ChatGPT.
18. Success and failure criteria should be defined before starting the project, not after it ends.