Advice
As a startup founder, you will get lots of advice, both solicited and unsolicited. How you deal with that is not always straightforward.
When you are building a company, you get advice. Lots of it. Both solicited and unsolicited. Especially when you’re looking to build something for the first time, most people want to help you. And one way they can help you is by offering advice from their own experiences, especially if they’ve done it before.
So far I’ve kept an open mind for advice, and I’m not going to change that. My job, I tell people who say they have some advice for me, is to “receive all the advice I can get, and then decide for myself what to make of it”.
Needless to say, a lot of the advice is fairly contradictory. In the initial days, a bunch of people told me that I need to get a cofounder exclusively to do sales. Others told me that if it is my idea, I need to do the sales myself. There have been lots of people saying that I should exclusively build for the US market. Others are saying that it’s important to have some “local customers” to iterate quickly with.
Then there are people who tell me that “with your CVs, funding should be easy”, while others say “in this market, you need traction to get funding”. Advice givers differ significantly on how specific the target market needs to be, and how we should segment it.
Projections
One thing that I understand is that a lot of advice that comes our way is generic. Unless someone is super close to us, or super invested in us or our startup (not in that sense - we’re yet to start raising funding), the advice that we get is likely to be boilerplate, and not specific to our company. Over the years, people would have formed their own hypotheses based on their experiences, and on what they would have seen.
And when doling out advice to us, they simply project these hypotheses to our situation and offer it to us. Putting it another way, “it is not us, it is them”. And that is also how I think of situations when GIVING advice to people. I (figuratively) put myself in their shoes and think of how I would think or react in that situation, and what my experience there is like. And tell them “I would do it this way”.
Adapting
The important thing for you to figure out is that when someone tells you that they “would do it this way”, you are NOT them. That the way they would normally react to most situations in life is NOT how you would react to those situations in life. And this extends to the thing that you are getting advice on.
More generally, any advice that you receive needs to be adapted to your specific circumstance and working style. What you should NOT do is to take the resultant sum of all the advice that you get from various people - that will give you a right royal mess, like the road layout in Rome here.
It will basically get you nowhere. Instead, a better way of dealing with advice is to take each piece of advice and first adapt it to your specific situation. And then later on you can take the “vector sum” or whatever, to know which direction to go in.
By adapting advice to your situation, you will see that some advice that initially appeared contradictory won’t appear that contradictory after all - usually you’ll find that one direction has a far greater magnitude than the other, and so knowing which way to go will be easy.
Solicited versus unsolicited advice
The one thing I’ve been unable to get a full grip on is in terms of relative weights for solicited and unsolicited advice (I get lots of both). One way to think of it is that for solicited advice, you’ve asked a particularly specific question, and so the other person might have thought harder in terms of what YOU should do, and answered accordingly.
The other way to think of it is that unsolicited advice is more “pure unfiltered” advice, and so might have greated value than solicited advice which might be more “manufactured'‘. I guess we are getting at a sort of meta problem here!
And I guess whatever you say now in the comments (please leave some!) will go into the solicited advice bucket!