How to entrepreneur

Author: jacobhm98

content/posts/learning_how_to_entrepreneur.md

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+title = 'How to entrepreneur'
+date = 2025-11-20T07:20:37+01:00
+draft = true
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+
+# How to entrepreneur
+
+I'm soon coming up on 6 months of unemployment. Half a year of trying to be an entrepreneur full-time.
+
+I still haven't made it, unfortunately. However, I have learnt a ton. This post is a reflection on my entrepreneurial journey thus far and a discussion of my meta-entrepreneurial strategy.
+
+## Learning how to entrepreneur
+
+Before starting my entrepreneurial journey, I figured there were more or less correct ways of doing things.
+
+I figured that while I didn't have the slightest clue as to what I was going to work on, there were guidelines or rules I could follow that would optimize my chance at creating an economically sustainable business. The only problem was that I didn't know them yet.
+
+So, in parallel with actually building out products, I decided to start learning how to be an entrepreneur.
+
+I tried a few different things in order to internalize the key lessons I'd need. Here are the ones that worked, in ascending order of utility:
+
+- Reading as much medium to low quality online material as possible on how to entrepreneur -- think immersion learning on /r/startups (if it works for an LLM why wouldn't it for me?)
+- Going through YCombinator's Startup School
+- Speaking to various types of people in the space (VC's, angels, entrepreneurs in the struggle, post-exit entrepreneurs)
+- Discussion's with my co-founder/business partner
+
+Consuming online material was moderately useful. The sheer volume of thought out there means there's probably more useful information on places like Reddit/medium/substack than I'd be able to ingest from any other source, the only problem is finding it amongst all the slop. Still, passively browsing allowed me to gain a fuzzy sense of the key questions I wanted to answer, and informed future research.
+
+YCombinator's [Startup School](https://www.startupschool.org/) is a treasure trove of information. It is a curated set of videos and articles touching on bunch of topics an aspiring entrepreneur needs to learn about. You'll learn the lingo, and familiarize yourself with the basic structure of starting a startup.
+
+Speaking to people in the space is likely the highest utility thing I did per minute spent. An exception to this is investor chat's. Some VC's were tremendously insightful. with other's it felt more like I was a way for them to gauge the market/competition so they could pass this information on to companies in their portfolio. Knowing the difference upfront likely takes a bunch of knowledge I don't have, and if you're not actively raising I believe saying no to intro chats is the best thing you can do overall.
+
+My chats with angels were generally positive, though again, I think being selective upfront is EV+.
+
+The real absolute must do for any entrepreneur is to speak to other entrepreneurs. I find that speaking to all types of entrepreneurs has been valuable. Time and again I've been blown away by how generous more established entrepreneurs have been with their time, and getting to steal their hard-won knowledge by just asking the right questions is literally a cheat code. An added benefit is if there's synergy in your businesses, or if one of you can put the other in touch with someone the other needs. The culture of paying it forward has been overwhelming and inspiring, and definitely something I can hope to contribute to one day.
+
+All of the learnings gleaned through the above mentioned methods have been internalized through discussions with my co-founder. Having someone go through the same thing as you at the same time, who you can explore ideas and thoughts with as you come into contact with them is tremendously useful. I see it not really as an additive source of information, but as a multiplier of the above.
+
+## The entrepreneurial method
+
+My goal while ingesting all this information was to arrive at an representation of a meta-method of entrepreneurship, an entrepreneurial method analogous to the scientific method.
+
+While I don't think I'm there, I do think I've made progress on the initial stage.
+
+Note: It turns out someone else has made the same [analogy](https://learninglab.sses.se/research-recaps/introducing-the-entrepreneurial-method/)
+
+### Nothing else matters
+
+Like the goal in the scientific method is singularly to increase or decrease confidence in an experimental hypothesis, the goal of the entrepreneurial method is singularly to find a way to generate utility for other people. That's it. "Make something people want". That's what product market fit (PMF) is.
+
+The great thing is, through conversations with founders who have found PMF, I've heard time and time again that once you have it, your customers will let you know. There's no guesswork involved.
+
+While I can't yet speak at all to how one should efficiently and sustainably continue to generate utility post-PMF, I believe that falls into the domain of scaling and running a business, I do think the process of searching for PMF is clearer in my mind than it was before.
+
+#### Let go of your biases
+
+You surely have biases and preconceptions regarding what problems your imagined customers have. They're useful to the extent that they allow you to formulate an idea of what problem to solve, but may incur a cost if held on to post expiry.
+
+Your opinion about a problem-space needs to be directly grounded in customer insights. To me, there seem to be a few ways of validating these customer insights.
+
+You can speak to potential customers. Do they confirm your problem verbally through open-ended conversation (no leading questions)? Do they tell you about a different but related problem?
+
+You can manually solve your potential customers problem. Say that you have an hypothesis that there's room for software helping American expats in the EU file expat taxes. A good way to validate this is to find a bunch of Americans and charge them for your work of filing their taxes. How hard was it to find Americans willing to pay you? How auotomatable was the work you did?
+
+You can build out a minimal viable product (MVP) that solves your hypothesized problem. Do you find your customer's use your product when you tell them about it? Why/why not? Does another group use your product?
+
+These methods obviously have different strenghts and weaknesses. Speaking to customers is cheap in terms of up-front effort, but your results may vary depending on how honest they are, and how well they fit the customer profile. Also, they have no reason to speak to you -- you haven't solved a problem of their yet.
+
+On the other end of the spectrum, building out a full fledged MVP takes a lot of engineering effort. However, if you get real traction in terms of usage metrics, you know you've got something. You can also collect feedback at a different scale than if you were to speak to every one of your user's individually.
+
+Likely, you shouldn't be doing one or the other, but all of them synergistically.
+
+I've found that building a demo is a useful way to get initial conversations. It's proof of work. It shows you're willing and capable of solving problems in your chosen space.
+
+Similarly, you likely shouldn't jump into building an MVP purely based off a hunch. Have a few conversations at first if you can.
+
+### Action drives everything
+
+What does this mean in practice?
+
+You need to take action. It is too easy to speculate about potential problems, analyze market opportunities, be put off by how far ahead a potential competitor is, or think about cool new technologies.
+
+This is orthogonal to what you need to be doing.
+
+You are a shark. You need to keep swimming.
+
+Extending the scientific method -- all researchers in the world are constantly proposing experimental hypotheses, attempting to isolate the effect of an experimental variable, and using this to increase or decrease confidence of a combined explanatory model of the world, and if necessary amending this model.
+
+You need to be doing the same thing.
+
+You need to constantly be proposing novel problems you think people face, finding ways to validate whether they're real problems or not, and attempting to solve them for other people. If you can solve a real problem for one person, it's likely a real problem for another person.
+
+If it's a real problem for two people, automate your solution. Voila, you've now generated utility for a large group of people.
+
+The flipside of this is that most of the time, most research is largely useless.
+
+Most research affirms things we already thought we knew (useful because it allows us to convert a bias to knowledge), reproduces previous novel ideas, or disproves a new potential insight.
+
+I think it's likely the same for startup ideas. Most of the time, you're going to be wrong. It is really difficult to think of a new problem, or a new way to tackle an existing one.
+
+Time and time again I've been struck by the fractal like nature of the technological landscape. You start with a view of a problem space, an idea of the players and their relationships. You zoom in to a space that looks promising, only to find a similar amount of existing players and complexities in the subspace you thought were in the original space.
+
+Really, it's a testament to human ingenuity.
+
+The good thing is, you only need to find one real problem.
+
+So fail. Fail again. Dust yourself off and keep trying.
+
+## Should I stay or should I go
+
+On another note.
+
+When do you stop pursing a given problem space?
+
+What is a recoverable setback vs an insurmountable one?
+
+I suspect, "making it" in any industry is going to be difficult. You're going to have to overcome problems with anything you choose to work on. Finding PMF will always be difficult.
+
+When does pivoting stop falling into the "iterating quickly" bucket, and start falling into the "lacks the grit necessary to succeed" bucket?
+
+This is, in my opinion, one of the key fuzzy questions to learn how to answer in order to be a good entrepreneur. I don't think there's ever a clear right or wrong here, and likely you get better at this with wisdom and experience. Being good at this is probably where part of the "X-factor" of successful serial entrepreneurs comes from, just like having good "research taste" informing which problems you explore sets the great scientists apart from the good.