(2024-09-08) Maurya10x Your Odds Of Success With Shorter And Better Feedback Loops

Ash Maurya: 10X your odds of success with shorter and better feedback loops. I averaged about two years between ideas, which is the typical time window to achieve product/market fit.

According to data from top accelerators and VCs… it takes roughly two years to achieve product/market fit, and 80% of products never get there.

And therein lies the problem. Finding one successful idea using these numbers could take 20-30 years! It’s no wonder the average age of a successful founder is 45.

reducing idea cycle time and increasing idea cycle quality are the keys to significantly raising startup odds of success.

I. Reduce idea cycle time.

You need to gather enough evidence from multiple experiments to make a sound go-or-no-go decision on an idea.

After a lot of testing, I’ve settled on 90 days. (Quarterly Review)

I give every new idea 90 days of runway, after which I make an evidence-based 3P decision - pivot, persevere (persist), or pause (perish).

More than two-thirds of successful founders report pivoting to a variant idea versus completely starting from scratch, which carries across learning from one cycle to the next.

this stacking of learning and the next point further increases your odds of success to 10X or beyond.

II. Increase idea cycle quality.

Ninety days is not a lot of time. If you break this into 2-week sprints, you get only six sprints.

When you practice this at the early stages of an idea, you quickly realize that what’s typically riskiest isn’t technical or product-related but customer behavior and market-related.

3 Actionable Tactics

I. Learn before you pitch.

Understanding your customers better than they do is a superpower and a skill every founder should master.

II. Sell before you build.

This evidence of demand (or traction) is how you make sound go-or-no-go decisions on an idea.

III. Use a 10X launch.

Rather than trying to get everyone to use your product, why not start with just ten carefully selected, ideal early adopters?

If you can’t deliver value to them, what makes you think you’re ready for hundreds of customers?

Rolling out your product in 10X stages automatically prioritizes “what’s riskiest” for you.