Market, Product, and Entrepreneur

Investors are fond of debating which they care about more: the market or the entrepreneur. Some argue that given a great market, they can replace the team in order to execute on and capture that market. Others invest in great teams.

The reality is, great entrepreneurs find great markets. They build world-class products for those markets. They create efficient organizations that can deliver those products to market—execution machines that outrun the competition.

What’s more, many successful entrepreneurs are not necessarily first to market with their products. Rather, they build products that better meet the needs of their users.

In Chapter 1, I’ll discuss how to avoid bad markets. We’ll take a look at how some very successful companies pivoted from bad markets into good ones and how you can do the same.

No one sets out to build a bad product, yet it happens all the time. In Chapter 2 we’ll talk about the reasons bad products happen to good entrepreneurs. I’ll explain how you can avoid building products people don’t want, reduce adoption friction, and gain rapid adoption.

Believe it or not, a lot of companies are missing an Entrepreneur with a Capital “E”—a market visionary and product picker. I’ll talk about what to do if you’ve lost your edge as an Entrepreneur and how to get it back. We’ll explore how to fail fast—since it’s not failure itself that will kill your company but failing slowly that will do you in.

In Part 1, then, we explore three of the key ingredients for a successful startup: a great market, a great product, and a world-class Entrepreneur. You’ll come away with the knowledge to identify if any of these ingredients are missing—and how to remedy the situation.