Created by Rishabh Srivastava
This summary was largely done for my own note-taking, sharing it just in case it adds more value to other people.
I have no affiliation whatsoever with anyone in this note. This is a summary largely taken for my own reference, and may contain errors :)
Context
Source URL: Clubhouse
Keywords
Mental Models, Startups
Summary
- Talk by Paras Chopra, the Founder of Wingify around Mental Models — his first chat on Clubhouse
- Experimented with a number of products. Many of them failed, but two succeeded (including VWO). For him, mental models helped understand why some products succeeded and others failed
- How to transfer these mental models over to your team? Just giving them words or links to a blog doesn't help. You have to take a business problem that your team wants to solve, and then translate the model into a specific business problem
- How do you reduce your confirmation bias when you're trying to see if a particular situation falls is suitable for a mental model?
- Follow the Mom Test
- Models on hiring: don't believe too much in the title/labels. Focus on jobs to be done and capacity to grow
- The purpose of mental models is to get a good map of how the world works in your head. Mental models crystallize a lot of complexity in fewer dimensions
- Often, post-facto mental models (where you come up with the models after doing something that happened in real-life for you) work better than just reading a bunch of models in a book and trying to apply them without coming up with them yourself
Counterweight to the talk
- The talk was great, but Cedric Chin of Commoncog also has a phenomenal post on why mental models are suboptimal. Both this talk and Cedric's post have merit
- Summary of Cedric's post (and his larger series on mental models) is at https://rish.blog/Putting-Mental-Models-to-Practice-87d16826d96c4d8aa7453ca64eb58b76
Useful mental models
These are all taken from Paras’ website (https://invertedpassion.com/)
A. Understanding Markets
1. Capitalism and Value Creation
Whenever you're creating something for the world, address these two properties. This is easy to think about, but hard to implement
- Make something that's valuable
- Make something that's rare
2. Businesses exist to fulfil human desires
3. Evidence of desire is in people's behaviour, not in what they say
4. Be in the desire market, not in the solutions market
Solutions come and go, desires remain
5. Search for market-product fit, not product-market fit
Remember: shoot for market-product fit, not product-market fit.
6. Don't be a first mover, be the first one to get it right
Be an early mover, but don’t be a first mover as the lack of competition most likely signifies a lack of genuine customer desire.
7. Only two types of startups exist: technology-led and culture-led
Remember: best startup ideas capitalize on both emerging cultural trends and emerging technology.
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8. Define your market as narrowly as possible
Remember: it’s better to be king of a niche than a nobody in a vast ocean.
B. Building products and solutions
9. People don't like using technology
It’s easy for a creator to forget that the user has a life to live and using their product isn’t a highlight of her life. Rather, it’s likely a chore.
While engineers get excited by how sophisticated technology they’re exposing in a product, potential users want none of it.
Remember: a perfect radio is no radio. It’s just music.