The last product to get cancelled

Summary

Or how do I know I'm building a painkiller and not a vitamin This article was born from my frustration with the "vitamin vs painkiller" metaphor, which is a prime example of perfect hindsight, non-actionable startup advice. As in: no founder sets out on the startup journey intending to build a vitamin; yet, it can be very difficult to come up with actionable "tests" of what's what. I try to list here a few very concrete tests that have helped me create more certainty. It will likely be most helpful for B2B founders currently navigating product-market fit (PMF) and early sales. The last product standing This could also be called: how well do you really know your buyer? The tech industry goes through cycles of booms and busts. Some are dramatic like the dotcom bubble, while others are barely perceptible by outsiders like the 2022 post-Covid contraction. Usually, a boom is fueled by a technological innovation coupled with friendly monetary policy; everyone looks very smart and all sorts of product ideas find buyers. The freshly printed money needs to go somewhere, and it flows down the hill of ideas, from ideas that are inherently great businesses, to the plains of terrible ideas. Now, why the gratuitous metaphor? Because, there is a very real vertical stack rank of products: the Excel spreadsheet that your buyer (e.g. a CTO) puts together, during a bust, when they are asked to "cut 30% of our external tools budget". Which leads me to the first filter: Always know where your product stacks up in the "budget reduction spreadsheet" and why, and aim to be the last product to get cut (or at least be in the top 30%) Taking the example of a CTO buyer, here are some examples of products that get cut last: infrastructure that needs to be up for their own product to even work (database, network) communication (email, video conferencing) systems of records (ticketing, code versioning) If, from first principle thinking or by talking to your ICP, you can't confidently imagine your...