When you ask a VC or a successful founder what’s the way to succeed, they usually respond in lines of “Build something people want” or “Build a great product and customers find you”.
This is actually just about a tenth of what you need to build a $100M+ startup.
There are great products that never see their first million, let alone set their sights on $100M.
There are products that are absolutely atrocious and still hit way beyond that.
By simple logic, it can’t be just the great product that makes you succeed. According to Brian Balfour, this thinking leads to product death cycle.
Believing that all you have to do is “build a great product” is essentially thinking “if you show up, you succeed” — which is dead wrong. (e.g., if you show up daily but make the same mistakes every day, you’ll suck just as much in 365 days as you did when you started).
