Hsu argues founder conviction beats testing landing pages for startup ideas
David Hsu · 20VC: Retool Founder, David Hsu on Why YC Is Helpful Pre Product-Market Fit but Not Post and Why VCs Are Not Helpful Pre-Product Market-Fit but are Post, Why it is Difficult to Become Unprofitable if You Set Yourself Up For Profitability Early & Why VC Th · Dec 17, 2020 · at 6:41
David Hsu is the founder and CEO of Retool. He discusses how founders should choose startup ideas, contrasting systematic A/B testing of landing pages with genuine founder conviction.
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“Yeah, so I think conviction is very important, and so I think when choosing ideas, I think conviction probably is sort of highest order you have to care about, basically, is do you actually get convicted about the idea? I have a bunch of friends now, and I'm sure you have many too, and maybe sort of seen many of these as investments, where people don't really know what to work on, and so what they do is they just sort of Throw 10 ideas against the wall, they go build 10 landing pages, and they go buy AdWords for 10 of them, and sort of see what does best. I think that very rarely works.”
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