Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
There are two types of startup runway (and you're probably confusing them)
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Hey Reader, I had a conversation with a client this week about runway. It’s one of the most critical decisions an early-stage founder makes, yet nearly everyone confuses the variables. They think “My runway is 6 months” — and that’s it. But there are two fundamentally different runways you need to track: 1/ Personal Runway (Your Savings) This is the money that covers your living costs. Many founders treat their startup like a Hollywood movie: they quit their job, deplete their savings, and go “all-in.” This adds unnecessary layers of risk, stress, and desperation. Launching a startup is hard enough without wondering if you can pay rent next month. I rarely work with founders who go all-in too early. You can successfully launch, validate, and build initial traction on 15 hours a week while maintaining your main income. The unnecessary stress of a limited personal runway blinds you to good strategy. 2/ Project Runway (The Investment) This is the money you invest into the business, outside of yourself. It covers people, marketing experiments, tooling, and engineering costs. This is the only runway that matters for achieving Product-Market Fit. You need a clear 6 to 12 months of this runway, because there is a 0% chance you will find PMF faster than that. The only universal rule for any type of runway: don’t burn precious money on “nice-to-have” features or vanity marketing Speak soon, P.S. My whole job is to help you ruthlessly optimize this second runway. I focus on finding the single, fastest, cheapest path to a paying customer. Book a free 30-minute strategy call. |
Clarity Filter
Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
Hey Reader, Founders love to pitch an inevitable future. They see a clear shift in the market, build a product for that future, and launch. Then they get silent buyers and a dead pipeline. They assume the product is broken. Or the marketing is wrong. But the problem is usually much simpler: they are early. And in an early-stage startup, being ahead of your time is functionally indistinguishable from being wrong. A market can be directionally attractive and still be a terrible opportunity...
Hey Reader, In my last email, I broke down how Sam Altman’s relationship network literally purchased his first company's failure for millions. Most builders read that and thought: "Great, but I don't live in SF and I don't know any VCs." You are looking at networking all wrong. You don’t need billionaires. You need a net of adjacent peers who are 6 to 12 months ahead of you. If you want to know if your current network is there yet, here's a handy validator for ya: Look at your calendar for...
Hey Reader, Founders love the myth of the exceptional product. They believe Silicon Valley legends won because they built better software. Here is the reality. Sam Altman's first company, Loopt, had no real traction. It failed as a consumer product. It was acquired for millions anyway. Not because the tech was brilliant. Because Altman had well-connected VC relationships. When the app failed, his network caught him. The relationships were the infrastructure that literally purchased his...