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For Early-Stage Founders

My 11 Startup Rules

The Winning Startup Perspective, distilled into eleven rules

Eleven hard-earned perspectives that save you time, money, and unnecessary pain: the ones experienced founders mostly know and rarely say out loud to a first-timer, in the order you're most likely to need them. Each one comes with the idea it rests on and a true story of it in the wild.

Read it in one sitting, or take one rule at a time. The Winning Startup Perspective is the full book behind these eleven. Read it when you want the whole argument, not just the rule.

11
Rules
1
Core Idea
11
True Stories
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Tom Collopy · Unbiased Insights
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My 11 Startup Rules, by Tom Collopy
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You were never behind. You were never bad at this. You did real work, often a great deal of it, and you did it intelligently. You were simply running a sensible process from the only perspective anyone ever handed you — solution-first, product at the center, the customer's wanting assumed rather than examined. You heard problem and solution so many times, from so many sources, that no one ever thought to show you the other place to stand.

That missing perspective was the whole gap. Not your effort. Not your idea, necessarily. Not your persistence. Just the angle.

The Rules

My 11 Startup Rules

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01
Outcomes
Customers don't buy solutions. They buy outcomes, and tolerate solutions to reach them.
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02
Question Swap
Swap the question from 'do they have my problem?' to 'do they already want this outcome badly enough to act?'
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03
Wanting
A real problem is not the same as a customer who wants the outcome badly enough to act.
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04
Behavior
Behavior is the only evidence that counts. Everything else is a compliment.
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05
Aim
Name the specific person who already wants the outcome badly enough to act, before you build anything.
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06
Ask the Question
Ask the question you're afraid to ask. The answer is cheaper now than it will be later.
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07
Small Test
The smallest test that could reveal whether anyone will act is worth more than the most polished product.
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08
Cold Traction
Warm traction proves people will buy from you. Cold traction proves the market will buy from your content.
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09
Repeatable
Scaling multiplies what already works without you. He didn't scale the business. He scaled the leak.
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10
Discomfort
The outcome-first questions are uncomfortable because they can reveal your story is weaker than you hoped.
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11
Audit
Run one outcome audit on the idea, content, and customers you already have before you start over.
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Stop building around a story your customers don't share.

This book is free. Read it in one sitting, or come back one rule at a time.

Download My 11 Startup Rules
More From The Series

More From Tom Collopy

The Winning Startup Perspective, by Tom Collopy

The Winning Startup Perspective

The Winning Startup Perspective is the same eleven ideas, argued in full. Read it for the reasoning behind each rule.

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About the Author
TC

Tom Collopy

Unbiased Insights

Tom Collopy has interacted with over a hundred early-stage founders across six Research Triangle accelerator programs: CED GRO, Launch Chapel Hill, RIOT, NC IDEA MICRO, Wake Forest Founders, and Andrews Launch Accelerator.

He has also advised more than 50 early-to-seed-stage startup founders directly, meeting with them weekly for months, sometimes years, through exit or shutdown.

The stories behind these rules are composites built from that same weekly advising work, not any one founder's story, but true to what happens in the room.

His work centers on one observation: most founders are running a sensible process from a perspective they never knew they had, solution-first. These eleven rules are what that same process looks like from the other side: outcome-first.

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