The emerging startup playbook
Eight learnings from the next generation of software
Over the past year I’ve unpacked the zero to $1 million journeys of more than a dozen breakthrough startups including Attio, Copy.ai, lemlist and Pinecone. And I’ve advised countless others during this messy period between having a product to sell and a repeatable go-to-market machine.
Many of these startups have seen breakout growth. Copy.ai started with four MVPs, then struck gold and scaled to 10 million users in only four years. Jam went from seven failures to 10x usage growth. Pinecone saw signups explode to over 10,000 per day.
Not one of these journeys was preordained. And none followed what I’d consider to be the “conventional” startup playbook popularized over the past decade or so.
The conventional approach tends to look something like this:
Build a minimum viable product (MVP)—you should be embarrassed otherwise you’ve shipped too late.
Launch with a big PR splash—open your waitlist all at once to capitalize on the lightning strike.
Push hard on cold outbound to prove you can s…
