3 builders who never spoke to each other

Cut the number of things that must go right

Chained requirements collapse your odds even when each one looks likely, which is why marketplaces, with several conditions that must all hold at once, so often fail. Remove risk by choosing conditions you can pick rather than hoping for them, and do not expect to buy the domain expertise after the pitch has been sold.

The method

1. 01

   Count how many separate things must all go right, because chaining requirements together collapses your odds even when each one looks likely.

2. 02

   Be wary of building a marketplace, which piles on conditions that must all hold at once and therefore usually fails.

3. 03

   Avoid a two-sided marketplace as a bootstrapped side project, and abandon it early if someone better positioned launches the same thing.

4. 04

   Remove risk by choosing conditions rather than hoping: pick a market that is large and healthy so demand is not in question, compete in a niche the incumbents cannot or will not chase, and either hire someone you have already worked with or build something that needs no hiring.

5. 05

   Arriving from outside an industry with a playbook from another one, then hiring the domain expertise after the pitch has been sold, is too late.

What it returned

• 70%

  Six requirements at 70% each leave you at 12%, and he notes real startup requirements usually sit lower than that, with well over six of them.

• 70

  Help A Creator, his HARO competitor, absorbed an estimated 70 to 100 hours before he dropped it, partly because Elise Dopson shipped Help a B2B Writer and was better placed to run it.

• His list of simultaneous requirements: attract both sides affordably, deliver real value to both, stop people transacting around you, and still be worth using at the first hundred buyers and sellers rather than only at scale.

• Bassem Hamdy, chief executive of Briq, describes Katerra as consumer packaged goods people selling construction as a manufacturing and logistics problem without construction experience, then scrambling to hire builders once it was already too late.

Sources

• 2021 Year In Review | Corey HainesCorey Haines · corey.co · What didn’t go well · 2022-01-01
• Capturing luck with “or” instead of “and”Jason Cohen · longform.asmartbear.com · Capturing luck with “or” instead of “and” · 2019-10-08
• What Happened to Katerra: How It Raised $1.6B and Still FailedFailory · failory.com · Why Did Katerra Fail and Shut Down? · undated