Unfolding, part deux
What unfolding means for your sanity
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A few weeks ago, I wrote an article that’s gone a little viral on Unfolding. (Link)
It argues that the “best practices” on building startups - that tell us to run experiments, do research & analysis, interview customers, etc. - do not reflect how startups come to life in the real world.
Instead, here’s how to build a startup:
Sell & deliver something
In the process of trying to sell & deliver it, you learn that it is not quite right, for reasons you couldn’t have known in advance.
To respond to this challenge, you change something about what / how you’re selling & delivering. You might adjust your target market, your messaging, your pricing, etc.
You realize that, in changing this one thing, what you’re selling & delivering doesn’t make sense as a whole anymore. To make it all coherent, you change other things.
This is the unfolding process. It is how you get from something that kinda works to something that really works. And it’s why the thing that really works rarely resembles the thing you started with.
The unfolding concept doesn’t just simplify the process of building a startup. When you embrace the unfolding process, you get rid of most of your existential dread and anxiety. Unfolding de-fogs your brain, so you can put your soul into serving customers & learning.
Here’s how unfolding changes your mind:
Unfolding and what really matters
Unfolding tells you to do two things:
Sell & deliver (or in my words, repeating a single customer success story)
As you sell & deliver, pay attention to anomalies, strange anecdotes, or challenges / opportunities.
These are the only two things that matter. You’ll learn basically everything you need to know inline - that is, through your sales & delivery process.
As you sell and deliver, strange things will happen. Customer #7 will LOVE you, while Customer #8 will HATE you. Huh. Odd.
As you figure out why Customer #7 and Customer #8 are so different, you’ll realize that you’re really building a different business than you thought. Boom, unfolding.
This will happen again and again, if you pay attention.
When all that matters is learning through your sales & delivery process, why focus on anything else?
Unfolding and the future
We spend most of our time worrying about abstract future bullshit:
Will this work in the long-term?
Will this IPO?
What if I get pigeonholed into a small market?
Which is the best possible market for us to approach? What personas should we test?
What sequencing of markets should we enter, & what’s our long-term product roadmap?
How will we respond to eventual competition? What’s our moat?
What’s our 5-year world domination plan? Our vision?
When you embrace unfolding, you realize that you can’t have answers to these questions as an early-stage startup. The answers emerge in time.
Worrying about these future things today is a form of insanity. Worse, spending mental energy on them prevents you from being effective right now. All you need to do right now is close that deal, onboard that customer, and figure out why some customers say “hell yes” and others don’t.
We can’t know the future. The founders of Vanta and WPEngine both started out thinking they were building small lifestyle businesses. The founders of Loom and Segment observed anomalies with early customers that helped them uncover the real opportunity. In nearly every case, successful businesses emerge through the simple, grueling work of selling & serving customers.
Stop worrying about knowing the future in advance. Sell, serve, & it will unfold.
(Investors often push you to speak confidently about the future - just remember the two boxes.)
Unfolding and advice
As I build my next startup in the SOC 2 + cloud hosting space, I get plenty of feedback and advice from well-wishing founders and investors who have “looked into this space before.” I have heard:
What I’m working on is not venture-scale
Competition in the general space is intense, why wouldn’t Vanta/Drata/etc. just do this?
Why would anyone buy this, vs. doing it internally?
“We pivoted away from this direction after doing some research”
If I didn’t understand unfolding, I would go into an existential tailspin getting this kind of feedback. It would eat me alive.
But now I know this feedback assumes that the current thing I’m working on is totally unfolded. Of course it’s not. So I spend less time worrying about advice from people who don’t understand unfolding, and more time working with customers. We’ll see what unfolds.
-rob