Why Naked Startup?
Hello everyone! Naked Startup Guide has been in the works for a number of years now, and I couldn’t be happier to share it with you.
Naked Startup Guide is meant to be a direct and straightforward guide for founders, CEOs and operators. It will provide focused, fluff-free, no-BS and actionable steps along the early-stage journey.
Having worked in a number of early-stage startups as well as in the VC space, I've seen first-hand how general, universally applicable advice can be distracting, how it stuns founders into a fight or flight response and tough it is to navigate through the sea of it. Such advice would often be distracting at best and completely misguided at worst while wasting precious time and energy from the activities that matter most then and there.
None of the advice in the Guide will be new or revolutionary for those in the startup world. However, the way it is framed and structured here will help companies be more focused and not get sidetracked by the next, new shiny activity someone mentioned.
Sea of general advice doesn't help
There are a lot of great and helpful startup founder advice, startup schools, complete guides, entrepreneur’s toolkits and various other materials out there. The market is flooded with advice for entrepreneurs, companies and startup founders. It makes sense, everyone wants to be helpful and founders need help.
But, the abundance of general advice for entrepreneurs overwhelms a first-time founder. It probably overwhelms a second-time founder as well. More often than not, it leads her down the wrong road. If received at the wrong time on her startup journey, it results in distractions and precious time waste.
While on the surface it doesn’t seem like a big problem, it is. Time is the only resource founders will not get back ever. In a world of 18-24 month runway cycles, it is all they have.
So, each day and week spent on not-the-most-important work at that point in time means less days and weeks spent on the things that do matter. Which equates to a smaller chance of success.
The advice out there is mostly unstructured and rarely focused on particular stages of the business. It is “for entrepreneurs” or “for founders” and very general. Being positioned so broad, it will be helpful at some point, sooner or later. But then might to too late.
Great advice at the wrong time doesn't move the needle
Let’s share a couple of examples to paint the picture and make it plastic.
Reading about how to organise your enterprise sales process with a team of 3 account executives and 3 sales development representatives at a time when your company is pre-product is misplaced. At a time when you will want to understand how to get feedback and early interest with your MVP and get validation about the direction you are taking, how to scale sales is completely meaningless. It is a great thing to know and hopefully you'll need to apply it later in the journey, but now - it is meaningless. A single person does sales in the early stages (founder), a dozen people do sales at the Series B stage. There's a mismatch.
Learning about how to do a fully-fledged financial model, calculate your net margins and contributions three to five years in the future when you don’t have any revenue coming in is just silly. Creating a simple and mostly cost-based financial model to show seed-stage investors what their capital is spent on is one thing; putting together, managing and driving a complete financial model with various income streams and structures is a slightly different beast.
Watching videos about how product management and product marketing should work together, being supported by a full product and engineering team when you haven't reached product market fit is not helpful. In an environment of a seed stage company where Founders are looking for a direction to take, learning about customer discovery and the Mom Test, getting the positioning foundations right in order to get validation would be most timely.
Founders tend to be quite self-aware. They know that they don't know most things and want to correct that. They are eager to get things done and get educated. But, that desire leads them to follow the next shiny advice that comes along on a Twitter feed or is shared on LinkedIn by a VC. Such advice doesn’t matter at that point in time and will not make a material difference to their business.
Why the ‘Naked Startup Guide’ name?
Having a Guide in the name makes it self-evident that it is, well, a guide.
The Naked Startup idiom or phrase was inspired by the folktale The Emperor’s New Clothes created by Hans Christian Andersen. Emperor’s New Clothes idiom is often used in situations where people believe in the importance and value of something that is not as valuable as generally initially thought.
To connect it to the startup world - the advice received by founders is always praised as valuable, but in reality it isn’t always helpful as it's provided at the wrong time. So, the name is a little tongue-in-cheek, a cheeky and playful way of saying how this guide will try to provide advice that will be timely, real, structured and actionable.
What will the Naked Startup Guide cover?
There are two areas to start with: the Foundation and the Fundraising.
The Foundation is essential. It will cover the nomenclature, the expectations of a startup, set the stage up and the stakeholders. It will take a founder down the road of understanding how to secure good and strong foundations on top of which everything else will be built.
On the other side, the Fundraising Guide will cover the full fundraising process as one of the most important processes companies go through on their journey. It will take a founder down the road of setting the right expectations, show her a step-by-step process of getting to a “yes” and lay out the requirements before she starts.
After that, we'll see. Stay tuned!