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A dense collection of practical startup wisdom. “Product sense is everything. Learn it as quickly as you can.”
What it means
Akhmechet distills hard-won lessons into terse, actionable rules. The best ones cut against conventional wisdom: “Most investor advice isn’t very good for building a magical product — nobody can help you build a magical product, that’s your job.” And: “If you haven’t earned people’s respect yet, fundraising on traction is an order of magnitude easier than fundraising on a story.”
The argument
Product above all. “Ask two questions for every feature: Will people buy because of this feature? Will people not buy because of lack of this feature? No amount of the latter will make up for lack of the former.” Being good at engineering has nothing to do with being good at product management (simplicity-as-strategy). This is about reaching product-market-fit — the essential waypoint.
Fundraising as MVP. Treat your pitch as a minimum viable product — get it out, then iterate after every meeting. Don’t give away more than 15% per round. Keep a safe open (distribution).
Built-in marketing. Try to have marketing built into the product itself — the YouTube effect (users send links) and the Facebook effect (friends need to join) (network-effects, hook-model). This is growth-as-compass in action — the product itself becomes the growth engine.