The traditional dogma in the startup ecosystem is that you can’t predict whether people will want your product. Instead, you do some customer research, throw an MVP out there as fast as possible, and hope it hits. That’s not my approach.
So far in my career, I’ve been early at four startups: Udemy, Lyft, Sprig and Maven. Three of them achieved over $1M in run-rate in their first six months of going live. I don’t think this is an accident. I generally think this early success could’ve been predicted before a single line of code was written.
