The Best Startup Advice Shows Entrepreneurs How To Apply Concepts Instead Of Just Telling Them What To Do

A lot of what passes for startup advice out there in the wild is, well, lacking.

Look, I’m not here to criticize or point fingers. I’m here doing the same thing I’ve been doing for about 20 years now — since I founded my first company — and that’s to help entrepreneurs become better entrepreneurs.

One of the most useful projects I’ve taken on to make that mission happen is?Teaching Startup?— a startup that shows how to apply the very concepts it teaches by using those same concepts to grow itself as a startup.

Great idea on paper. Excellent results in practice. Really hard to pull off.

But here’s why the model is mandatory if you’re trying to help entrepreneurs become better entrepreneurs.

Showing You Instead of Just Telling You

Like I said, a lot of what passes for startup advice out there turns me off. I first became an entrepreneur well over 20 years ago, and believe me, I sought and absorbed advice like a sponge. But not only was startup advice hard to find, it was hard to practice, and in fact, most of it was hard to understand.

It took me a couple startup failures and one success of my own before I realized that it wasn’t me, it was the advice. There just wasn’t anything there.

With hindsight and experience, I realized that the problem wasn’t the people I was seeking advice from, they were great and smart and successful. It wasn’t their intent, they really wanted to help and in some cases were very generous with their time. It wasn’t that the advice was bad (“Bet it all on bitcoin!”).

The problem was that the advice was vague. It was platitudes. It was “go fast and break stuff” or “ask for forgiveness rather than permission.” Or else it was academic, full of acronyms and terms that didn’t mean anything when?all I really wanted to do was create something of value that people would pay more for than it would cost to make.

I mean, to be honest, every once in a while an entrepreneur will email me a question that has an acronym that I STILL HAVE TO LOOK UP. And then I find out it means, like, “profit.”

Dude. Just say “profit.” There are no stupid questions with me.

What is a Meta-Startup?

So I founded Teaching Startup almost two years ago as a startup to help startups do startup by showing them how to do startup while answering their questions about how to do startup.

Yeah, I made that a mouthful on purpose. It really is quite simple. It’s a meta-startup, a tool I can point to and say “look at this example.”

But make no mistake. It has real customers and revenue. It’s been profitable and growing since launch. And it has helped entrepreneurs launch products and raise money and scale up. We know this because they tell us. Often.

What follows is just one of the ways this meta-startup gives its members (customers) several peeks behind the curtain at actual, tactical concepts in real-world use.

The Customer Survey and Actionable Feedback

In the latest issue of Teaching Startup, I do a deep dive on the results from our Spring member survey. This isn’t just a “do you like us” kind of thing. Although it is a bit, and (spoiler alert) our Net Promoter Score (a brand metric) is 81.8.

But in the issue I walk through what that NPS means, why it’s important (or not), and what actions we’re going to take because of it. And I’ll be walking through it with the people who?supplied the data that became the NPS score.

I do that, along with 14 other questions that drill down into a specific theme. This time around, that theme is “adding value” — and our entrepreneur members will get an inside look at how to ask for, aggregate, and act on customer feedback to add value to their own offering.

This is our fifth survey. Previous survey topics included pre-launch feedback, post-launch feedback, feature priorities, and feature focus.

Members also get to see, first-hand, how we use their aggregated feedback to develop the product and grow the company. For example: Between the last two surveys we pointed out:?“Hey, remember when you all said you could do without the free bonus posts? Well, we took them away and you all got mad. Here’s the lesson we learned about customer feedback.”

In future posts, I’ll cover other aspects of how this meta-startup pushes startup concepts: like the fact that it’s all no-code, it’s a two-sided marketplace (there are other amazing experienced entrepreneurs involved, not just me), it uses a subscription pricing model, and how we use email and content marketing and advertising. I’ll also go over more results of the survey, which should give you an inside take on how value means everything and how to tap it and build it yourself.

You can read about those things each week, or you can join Teaching Startup and get a first-hand look. We have?two-layers of free trial and a commitment-free membership. Because that’s a good startup practice to follow.

Teaching Startup Tuesdays?is a series of posts that are one part content marketing, one part showing you instead of telling you, and one part revolutionizing the way startup founders and leaders get help.

If you’re looking for more hands-on startup advice,?get a free 15-day trial of Teaching Startup. It’s <1% of the cost of a traditional expert advisor, it’s on your time, and there’s no small talk. Use invite code LINKEDIN and get your first month after the trial for $5 (half off).