Founders need a clear market promise before building anything. Split your time equally between selling, studying, and shipping, and keep asking whether your solution beats alternatives by a large margin.
What is your market promise? I think a lot of companies start with a question like what they want to do. They want to build a SaaS. I've had people first describe that, "What I'm building is a multi-tenant SaaS, blah, blah, blah." They might even tell me a little bit like what kinds of things it can do, like data transformations over a whole lot of data. That's great, but why? The why is the market promise. The why is how this is going to create value for your customers. And really, you gotta keep your eye on that particular prize because you start with the why of it And then you keep asking the question, is this the best way to do it? Is this going to be the highest value, lowest cost, shortest time to market? Is this going to deliver for the customer in a way that is 10 times better than anything else? Is this going to deliver on the promise that you're making to them? And that promise is really where I find we need to focus our attention and that many of us get lost, especially when we start doing development. It can't be that you're asking the marketing question all the time, right? I'd say 1/3 of your time should be spent on sales, right? 1/3 studying, 1/3 shipping, 1/3 selling. But when you do, ask, "What's the promise?"
