Silverstone: Courting mainstream media over trade press signals broader organizational failure
Lee Silverstone · How I lost $6M, Why hype means nothing, Plus a dozen other lessons from our last startup · PMF Show · Mar 8, 2024 · at 1:00:47
GymTrack co-founder Lee Silverstone reflects on the strategic trap of pursuing general media attention instead of targeted trade publicity that drives real customer growth.
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“I think it's a, Symptom of a broader issue within a company to spend time talking to reporters that are not industry specific reporters that are going to get you more customers. It's a symptom of broader failures in the organization.”
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Silverstone: Letters of intent generally carry very little weight
“Letters of intent, I think, generally speaking, don't carry a lot of weight, in my opinion. I'm sure some people disagree with me, but I don't think they do. But we then made them even less valuable, because we got people to sign them under the worst pretenses…”
Silverstone: Startups discover value better without external stakeholders early on
“The longer startups can stay experiments without these external stakeholders and their only stakeholders are the people on the team. And then the customer, the better you can run experiments and the better you can actually find value.”
Silverstone: Peloton and Mirror do not need proprietary hardware, just iPads
“Peloton mirror, like all of these ones that are like, you need the hardware to build the future. It's like, actually, no, you don't. You just need an iPad with software on it. It's the same thing.”
Silverstone: Never pitch a VC as a casual conversation without a deck
“Go in, have a deck ready, present the deck, walk the person through it, control the conversation. This is a pitch. This is the, oh, let's just have a conversation is like, yeah, that I terrible. Never do that.”
Silverstone: LP intros to VC funds are better than portfolio founder intros
“A lot of angel investors are LPs and a lot of like founders who have had exits are LPs. I actually think that's the better intro than founders.”
Silverstone: Early products that must do everything to deliver value fail
“That, like, lesson of, like, the everything comment, I think it's, like, one of the scariest things I've, like, you'll ever hear at a startup is, like,
Well, this product would be cool if it did everything.
Right.
And it's like, it won't be good until it do…”