Alliance, a letter from the founders:
Author:Imran
Other Organiser
Sitting in front of the computer, you got the idea of starting a business. You saw Cursor sell to Elon Mask for $60 billion. Perhaps the idols of the previous generation were Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel. You look at these founders and you can't help but compare yourself to them. They don't seem to be much smarter than you. Their résumés are not as bright as yours。
So, naturally, you ask yourself, "Why can't I do the same thing?" This is where most of the founders started. But that's where most of the founders are stuck。
They saw artificial intelligence. They saw encrypted money. They have seen thousands of start-ups that have received financing. Every track seems crowded. Every obvious idea has been put into practice。
They concluded that opportunities had been exhausted。
So they closed the computer, and they went away。
This is how a large proportion of start-ups die. Not because the founders lacked the capacity, but because they thought the game was over。
Let's take Cursor, for example. Not every road is a straight road。
As early as 2022, Cursor began to suffer like a glass bite. That was before ChatGPT was born. There is no ready script to copy. There is no obvious market. There is just a belief that artificial intelligence will revolutionize knowledge-based work。
To get to the ground, they focus on three things. First of all, they chose an area where they were really excited: artificial intelligence. Second, they're customers of their own products. Thirdly, they are unswervingly focused on heavy users。
Because if you can win heavy users, it's easy to handle others. Frankly, such a story is not unique to Cursor。
At the start of Stripe, the issue of online payments seemed to have been resolved, but the founders were convinced that developers would increasingly become decision makers within the company and that whoever wins the developer would eventually win the Internet. They've been through this, and although PayPal has proven the feasibility of online payments, Stripe has seen an opportunity to build a "developmenter first" version of the future。
Figma took several years to develop before the market was ready because they believed that the future of design was not a better single design tool, but a collaborative design in which all worked in the same document. Google Docs has demonstrated the power of document collaboration in real time. Figma extended this insight to the design field。
Shopivy was initially only selling single-board skis online because its founders believed that millions of micro-enterprises aspired to own their own customers, brands and destiny rather than relying on large platforms. The Amazon has proven that the central utility works. In the end, Shopify is betting that entrepreneurs will want to take ownership。
Different products. Same pattern。
Each of the founders began with a non-consensus belief in the direction of world development, and then took years to build it quietly before the future became obvious to all. They were lucky to have taken advantage of the strong East Wind。
For Stripe, this wind is a certainty that more and more commercial activities will be transferred online. For Figma, this is a strong belief that the software will support collaboration first by cloud and by default. For Shopify, this is the expectation that the Internet will enable millions of entrepreneurs to establish an independent cause。
Cursor follows a similar trajectory. The company was founded on the conviction that artificial intelligence would fundamentally reshape knowledge-based work and that software engineers would be the first major users to adopt it. This product may seem to be taken for granted today, but there is no clear guidance as they begin. Only faith can sustain it。
Different products. Different markets. Same bottom logic。
Early identification of long-term trends and identification of missing entry points will take years to implement before the rest of the market catch up. Verily, there is shade in all things. PayPal gave birth to Stripe. Adobe gave birth to Figma. Amazon gave birth to Shopivy。
The first generation of products attests to the existence of markets. Second-generation products are reformed around new insights, new technologies or changing customer behaviour. For the founders, it is important to know at which stage of the cycle they are at. If you're in early, like Coinbase or Cursor, your chance is usually to make new technologies work for heavy users。
Coinbase did not invent encrypted currency. It's just making the purchase and possession of bitcoin extremely simple, much easier than managing your wallet or wire transfer money to Mt. Gox。
Cursor did not invent AI programming. It just realizes that automatic filling is not the end, and that what developers really want is an AI original software development。
But if you're in the middle of technological change, the opportunities are usually different. Infrastructure already exists. The market has also been tested. Your job is no longer to prove that technology is viable, but to find that "mix" for the existing "mode", the blind zone ignored by the first generation of players. Many of the greatest companies were born here。
Now you have confirmed your place in technological change. You've got a few ideas, and you're going to start a big fight, but then you realize a disturbing thing: you don't really have a lot of ideas. You don't know the market, the customer, even the product. And that's normal。
THIS IS WHEN YOU HAVE TO ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES AND BEGIN TO ACCUMULATE CONNECTIONS, INSIGHT AND REPUTATION. FORTUNATELY, WE LIVE IN AN ERA OF X (TWEETING), WHICH IS EASIER THAN EVER. YOU CAN BUILD AUDIENCE GROUPS, MEET CLIENTS, INTERACT WITH HEAVY USERS AND LEARN DIRECTLY FROM THOSE WHO SHAPE THE MARKET。
The first thing I'll do is experience every product in this field. If you start a business on a track and are not a heavy user of the rod product, it is difficult for you to have a unique view of how the market is going. Combine every product in the ecosystem. Be the heavy user of each of them. Talk to those who like them, those who hate them and those who have given up on them. Find out why they stayed, why they left, and what functions they wanted but did not have。
In the end, you'll find that most markets do not win because existing firms are stupid. They have been replaced precisely because they have become successful。
As companies grow, they naturally become further away from individual users. The feedback cycle has become longer, marginal needs have been ignored and a new generation of heavy users has emerged that do not match existing products. That's where the newcomers found the opportunity。
The goal is not to come up with an idea behind closed doors. The goal is to be deeply immersed in the market until the missing puzzle becomes apparent. Once you do that long enough, you stop looking for ideas, and you start to realize they're everywhere. That's the state you want. Eventually you'll find that you have more opportunities than you can do。
Here's the hard part: choosing one。
Once you know what you think is right, the next question is simple: is it a ten-fold rise, or is it a burning eyebrow? If the answer is no, don't waste your time. Products are rarely replaced for minor improvements. They choose conversion only if something is much better or the pain is so severe that it needs to be addressed immediately。
The simplest way to find people who are already playing with their own alternatives is to find out what's going on. Spreadsheets, WhatsApp clusters, cumbersome manual processes, and replication of data between systems are signals。
The best founders are looking for pain, because when it hurts big enough, the customers are impatient to steal the product from you. And when the pain is small, you can't be saved by more marketing, growth hacking or sophisticated positioning。
NOW YOU'VE IDENTIFIED THE IDEA, FOUND THE PAIN, AND YOU'RE BUILDING THE MVP。
Construction of products has become easier than ever with Claude, Codex and various AI tools. Ironically, it also became a trap for itself。
I find myself adding functions just because I can. The product slowly becomes a suture like a scientist. Each function is justified in isolation, but the combination makes the product worse。
I finally got back to the principle of first sex. The most important question is not what I should develop. It's why people give up existing tools to use your products?
Every great start-up company has an answer to this question. Cursor could have developed another programming plugin. Instead, they fork away VS Code. Developers like this editor, understand how it works and embed it into the daily workflow。
Cursor did not ask users to learn anything new. It just keeps users doing what they already like, just integrating AI directly into this experience。
The best start-ups rarely force users to learn completely new patterns of behaviour. Instead, they find familiar processes, remove frictions and make significant improvements。
AS FOUNDERS, WE'RE OBSESSED WITH WHAT WE'RE BUILDING. AND CLIENTS CARE WHAT THEY HAVE TO GIVE UP. THE LOWER THE COST OF CONVERSION, THE HIGHER THE VALUE CREATED, THE FASTER THE RATE OF ADOPTION. THAT'S WHY THE BEST MVPS DON'T HAVE A LOT OF FUNCTIONALITY. THEY ARE EXTREMELY FOCUSED AND PROVIDE ONLY ONE REASON THAT CLIENTS CANNOT REFUSE TO CONVERT。
BY THIS POINT, YOU'VE FOUND PAIN POINTS, BUILT THE MVP, AND HOPEFULLY GAVE THE CLIENT A STRONG REASON TO CHOOSE YOU. NEXT IS THE EASILY UNDERESTIMATED LINK OF MOST OF THE FOUNDERS: DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS。
I've seen many of the founders spend months dying on the product, but only five minutes thinking about how users should find it. The fact is that distribution channels are often the moat。
Airbnb didn't win because its website was better. The founders knocked door to door, personally photographed the apartment, and in one city the landlord was manually directed to the premises. Stripe is a successive recruiter. Coinbase was active in the Big Bitcoin forums long before the encrypted money became mainstream。
Cursor is also an excellent example. Their team posted six posts on Hacker News. Most of the posts are in the ocean. They sent private letters to thousands of developers, listened with extreme patience to feedback and sought users one after another。
Today everyone says Cursor's success is inevitable. But over the years, they've been doing things that can't be scaled up。
The founders prefer to talk about product market convergence, but before product market convergence is achieved, it is the distribution channels that match the market. Where do your clients spend their time? Who do they trust? How do they find new products? The best founders not only build products. They built more distribution engines. Because the market cannot fall in love with products it has never seen before。
The final stage of all this is tenacity, adaptability and never-ending。
Unfortunately, I can't teach you that. No one can teach. It can only be seen through experience。
Cursor has once again become an excellent case. It took them years to develop before the market matured. Repeatedly, they sent private letters to thousands of users, which were ignored by the majority. Afterward, everything is in order. But at that time, the future was bleak。
The same pattern is everywhere。
The founders of Airbnb were repeatedly rejected, and even for one time the company was run by selling cereal boxes。
Young Weidar was tested many times before he became one of the most valuable companies in the world。
Rain, we hatched a start-up company that was born after the FTX crash, when most people thought the encryption industry was dead. When others fled the industry, they insisted. A few years later, they raised more than $100 billion in valuations of $2 billion。
The lesson is not that the founders are smarter than you. It's that they've stayed in the game long enough to make their insights compound。
So I've prepared the whole frame for you。
Looking for a change of technology cycle. Develop unique insight. I'm obsessed with your market. Communication with clients. Find a burning eyebrow pain. Creates as simple an entry point as possible. Win your distribution channels。
Above all, never give up when everything becomes difficult。
That's it。
There are no secrets. Most people cannot do this in the long term and on a sustained basis. And very few of those who did it eventually set up the great company of the next generation of founders。
The world is yours。
Make it。
