For almost everyone, a big part of your professional life will be communicating ideas to others. Your ability to communicate those ideas to others will be directly correlated with your success. I’ve noticed, over many years of trying to communicate ideas, that there are several common failure modes in| Elliot C Smith
Over the last twelve or so months I’ve been working to spin up a new line of revenue at Explorate. The company has, for most of its history, been focused around growing a freight forwarding services business. Rather than use off the shelf software, we developed our own. Fit| Elliot C Smith
It’s taken a long time to write this. Not because it was a secret but it has taken me about that long to decide what I wanted to say. The short version is that Maxwell Plus was an AI startup in health that we ran for six years, ending| Elliot C Smith
Sometimes I think technology has hit a bit of a wall. There are lots of every day things that I feel should be solved by now. For some vague definition of solved. The logical part of me, the part that has been building technology products for the last dozen years,| Elliot C Smith
I saw an article recently about the continued growth in the Avocado market. I don’t know why it showed up but something about it tempted me enough to read it. Most of the article was updates on weather conditions and a surge in production in some part of the| Elliot C Smith
I am about twenty percent into book seven of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books and it has been a blast. In particular the Audiobook versions read by Jeff Hayes. It’s funny, full of interesting twists and turns and often quite heartwarming. All while remaining very light hearted. If you| Elliot C Smith
I was listening to an episode of Lenny’s Podcast with the Head of Growth at Shopify. In it, they talked about how 30% - 40% of all experiments fail to show long term impact. I’m not doubting the numbers, but I think this misses the point. Experiments around| Elliot C Smith
I can’t remember where or when but I once was told an anecdote about economics and human perception that stuck with me. This is paraphrased somewhat so lets hope the original author forgives me. The story goes like this: It’s fairly well known that if you’re lucky| Elliot C Smith
Your business will live or die based on whether or not you manage to find, and maintain, product market fit (PMF). Product market fit is notoriously hard to measure, especially with leading metrics. In the long run there's only one metric that manages to capture concisely if you’ve nailed| Elliot C Smith
I’ve noticed that, generally speaking, people have one of three modes when it comes to working on ideas. These ideas could be anything but for the sake of clarity, assume I’m talking about some new initiative within a business. The three modes are Drafter, Editor and Critic. Finding| Elliot C Smith
I often get comments on my very much overkill home webcam setup. It stems back to a time where I was experimenting with making YouTube videos and podcasts. Despite not doing much of that any more I’ve kept the setup at my desk for days when I work from| Elliot C Smith
Both the company I started, and the one I work for now have been trying to disrupt. That is to say, there’s an incumbent process or system that exists and we’re trying to do better. In both cases doing better means higher accuracy and delivering answers earlier. First| Elliot C Smith
I hear a lot of people say they want their startup to be more ‘experiment driven’. I’ve encouraged that behaviour a lot myself. Take bets, see how they progress, gather data and use the result to validate, or invalidate some sort of hypothesis. If executed well, this approach can| Elliot C Smith
There is a lot of advice out there stating that every product should be as simple as possible. Less clicks, less decisions. There’s even a prominent story about having too many jams to choose from and the overwhelming sadness that can cause. Like most high level advice, this idea| Elliot C Smith
Every company has a default. It’s the set of things that happen when nobody is pushing in any particular direction. Usually, its the combined momentum of all the pushing you’ve been doing. There are times in a company where its useful to remove that default. You want to| Elliot C Smith
This post was inspired by, but isn’t solely about, the recent market panic set off by the release of DeepSeek. I don’t claim to be able to pick which new technology fads will be winners. Sometimes bubbles deflate a little but ultimately stick around. These I’ll call| Elliot C Smith
Word of mouth is a hell of a growth lever, but only when it works. It’s now become almost universal to send your customers an NPS survey and—hopefully—use your scores in the high 80s to show how well you’ll grow organically. Truth is, this only works| Elliot C Smith
Knowing how to do something from first principles is a valuable skill. However, always starting from first principles is a good way to relearn many mistakes. I am the kind of person who likes to really understand things. I love a good spreadsheet or back of the envelope model. I| Elliot C Smith
Barnacle processes, invented when growth is lacking, can slow and kill otherwise great startups. Tech startups have a general culture of going fast. When growth is slow in a culture like that, people often still want to move around quickly. When that happens, people need to run in circles to| Elliot C Smith
The hardest part of transitioning into management is becoming comfortable with people doing things differently from you. Your job shifts from what you can output to how much output you can generate in others. Many first-time managers make the mistake of thinking their job is to ensure their reports do| Elliot C Smith
(This post also appeared over on the MSV blog.) It is easy to announce a new investment in a new company when all we need to talk about is the potential of an opportunity. But we don’t speak enough about the companies that don’t make it. Maxwell Plus| Elliot C Smith
Some definitions. The rest of this post will only make sense if we’re on the same page about what a technology and service business is. The scenarios I am describing combine human-delivered specialty service and a technology platform enabling that service delivery. In the long term, these companies tend| Elliot C Smith
I wish that more products had an option to reset to factory settings. Whether I haven’t used a product in a long time or have found a new way to set things up, there are plenty of reasons to return to square one. In a world where more and| Elliot C Smith
Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise successfully walks the fine line of communicating a complex set of ideas in enough detail to be both interesting and informative. The book introduces the reader to statistical modelling through examples in sports, politics, finance, and science. It makes no attempt to| Elliot C Smith
Few things can be as helpful and potentially time-wasting as modelling your business with a spreadsheet and setting metrics. A clear model of how you make money is a great tool to help identify bottlenecks or risks. On the other hand, it is very easy for models and the team| Elliot C Smith