Focussed Ideas, Weakly Held

“Strong Opinions, Weakly Held” is a pretty common framework that people use to go through life - and it is well lauded too. As Saffo describes it, “Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the ‘strong opinion’ part. Then –and this is the ‘weakly held’ part– prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt.” My trouble with this is that “Strong Opinions” are poorly defined.?

For founders, I would like to paraphrase and modify this framework slightly. I would call it “Focussed Ideas, Weakly Held.”

ShotGun v/s Pistol

Imagine your startup is a gun with a full barrel. A reload is offered only if your shots hit. If you make it a shotgun, you aim once and hope something hits. One shot. If you take a pistol, you get six shots, and the opportunity to re-calibrate your aim for each shot. Which one would you pick?

The best Startup Ideas are nearly always forged in low resource environments.

They are built in scarcity of talent, funds, early adopters and a lot more. Early on, in these resource constrained environments, startups can’t afford to spread themselves too thin. The shotgun approach seems like a good idea, but rarely leads to any good answers.

A Pistol like approach where you focus shot by shot, allows you more attempts, and more time to find the set up that works best for you. It doesn’t put as much a burden on your resources, and allows you the luxury to figure out how best to use your resources.

Focussed Ideas

Taking the metaphor a bit further, even when you’re using a pistol, you would want to take aim and shoot - and aim at the target you have in mind. The focus of the aim can vary - the general direction of the target, the general region around the target, a minute region around the target, or the exact point you’d like to shoot. Which of the focusses would get you closest to a hit with a high probability?

That’s exactly how founders should think about building a hypothesis. If you’re chasing a target of “Product-Market Fit”, a very specific hypothesis of your business will allow you to find it with a much higher probability. Let’s take a couple examples of focussed hypotheses. The first one is for a Web3 Startup :-

Example 2 is for a startup like Swiggy

Where can you apply this pinpoint focus??

1. The Problem - Solve one very specific Problem
2. The Ideal Customer Persona - Solve for one very specific persona
3. The Product - What exactly do you want to build?
4. The Expected Business Impact - What one change do you want to bring in your customer?
5. The Go-To Market - We're only targeting this specific geography / type of business, through these few channels we have in mind

A Focussed Hypothesis allows founders to have extreme clarity on what needs to be done - because you know exactly where you want to go

Weakly Held

Back to the metaphor, you took pinpoint aim and gave it a shot – only to miss. Perhaps the aim wasn’t correct, or wind wasn’t with you or the gun was faulty, or perhaps you didn’t keep the gun stable enough. Thankfully, you’ve got a pistol and a few more shots at it - Time to try again.

The same happens with startups. Every time founders execute a hypothesis, they receive feedback from the market. It is key that founders keep updating their focussed hypothesis.

Dear Founders, Do not fall in love with your hypothesis.

Do not fall in love with your product, the problem you’re solving, the persona you’re solving for, or the business impact you want to make. Everything can be sacrificed if it means getting to hit the target of “Product-Market Fit”.

Hold them weakly, keep testing your hypothesis out, keep learning from the market, and keep changing it. Brace yourselves for anything - from minor changes to complete overhauls.?

Through all this change though, never lose the focus you’ve brought in your hypothesis. Let all your future hypotheses be as focussed as your first one.?

Conclusion

TLDR; Have a very focussed, specific hypothesis which you strongly believe in, and be ready to nurture, improve, abandon, replace, and mutilate your ideas (sometimes all together)

If you’ve got a Focussed Hypothesis, Weakly Held, share it with us at [email protected] through a pitch deck. Applications for Class 07 are open.