> “I think the issue is just that truly solving an important problem for lots of people is so absurdly hard that very very few entrepreneurs can manage to achieve it“
But many businesses don’t try to make products for lots of people, just for very small, focused sets of customers.
> “People might love that your company is financially transparent and socially responsible, but that won’t get them to use your product. So thinking much about these things before you start seeing product-market fit feels like putting the cart before the horse.”
But what if your goal is not to find product-market fit unless it also satisfies other constraints like sustainability or financially ethical behavior? What if, in the absence of those, your preference is to go out of business and shut down?
> "But many businesses don’t try to make products for lots of people, just for very small, focused sets of customers."
I don't think this is proportionally less difficult. The advice that YC partners and other experienced founders will give you if you tell them you want to conquer the world is to start with a small, focused set of customers. It's a lot harder to get from 0 to this point than it is to go from a small enthusiastic user-base to a much larger user-base.
So even if you're content with a smaller market or a smaller share of a market than the typical VC-backed startup, it's still crazy hard to get any significant traction at all, and it still requires just about all your creativity and focus to get there.
> "But what if your goal is not to find product-market fit unless it also satisfies other constraints like sustainability or financially ethical behavior? What if, in the absence of those, your preference is to go out of business and shut down?"
The vast majority of founders do impose their own versions of those constraints on themselves. Everyone's ethics are different (as is everyone's definition of sustainability), but just about everyone has lines they won't cross and deals they won't make.
I think the point isn't that you should pursue profit above all else and forget higher values, just that regardless of the type of company you want to build, your first and most important challenge is building something a significant number of people want enough that they'll pay you money for it. Since this is so hard, all the early-stage advice is relentlessly focused on how to do it. And what's the best proxy for how well you're doing it? Revenue. Thus the outsize focus on getting it and growing it quickly early on.
But many businesses don’t try to make products for lots of people, just for very small, focused sets of customers.
> “People might love that your company is financially transparent and socially responsible, but that won’t get them to use your product. So thinking much about these things before you start seeing product-market fit feels like putting the cart before the horse.”
But what if your goal is not to find product-market fit unless it also satisfies other constraints like sustainability or financially ethical behavior? What if, in the absence of those, your preference is to go out of business and shut down?