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 the idea is unclaimed 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. Viral growth is something the product does on its own. You cannot write it into a plan.

"We only need to grab 1% of the market." Everyone is fighting for that one percent, and the real players leave no crumbs.

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 bring me retention or unit economics: the customer pays back their own acquisition. At the very least, the first sale. Then we can talk.