The three Fs

Startup folklore has a holy trinity of first money: friends, family, fools. People reach me along all three lines: friends, relatives, and total strangers (I suspect the strangers are here for that third F).

They show up wide-eyed, with a ready set of incantations. I know them by heart.

"I have a brilliant idea nobody has ever thought of!" The dangerous one. Usually nobody thought of it first not because he is a genius, but because nobody needs it. If no one has touched the idea in thirty years of the internet, the first question is not "why am I so smart", it is "what do the rest of them know that I do not?"

"We launch, the press picks it up, and then it goes viral." Most likely nobody writes about you. And if they do, you get a two-day spike: people show up, look around, and close the tab. Virality is a property of the product, not a distribution plan.

"We only need to grab 1% of the market." Sounds modest, but one percent does not come out of nowhere: everyone is fighting for it, and the real players leave no crumbs. That "modest" 1% is usually further out of reach than the entire market.

And still, I never talk anyone out of it. The opposite: I believe in these people. I just want them to stew in reality for a while and come back. Not with a new fairy tale, but with facts.

Because one real sale is worth a thousand brilliant ideas. A person who handed you real money for real value counts for more than any "trillion-dollar market", and ten users who come back on their own beat ten thousand signups who showed up once and vanished forever.

So show me retention. Show me unit economics: the customer brings in more than it costs to acquire him. At the very least, show me the first sale, and then we can have a very different conversation.