11/25/2024

Breaking down why most startup advice falls flat, and what to do about it

Written by: Jonathan Haas

The most dangerous thing about startup advice isn’t that it’s wrong—it’s that it’s partially right. After years of building products and watching others do the same, I’ve noticed that most advice falls into three distinct categories. Each comes with its own flavor of wrong, and understanding these patterns is crucial for anyone trying to build something meaningful.

The Winner’s Mirage

The most seductive startup advice comes from the winners—the ones who built Snapchat, scaled Instagram, or led product at Facebook. Their advice comes packaged in elegant frameworks and bullet-pointed Medium posts, each promising the secret sauce of success.

The problem isn’t that their advice is wrong. It’s that it’s right in a way that doesn’t matter. When someone tells you “at Facebook, we always…” they’re really saying “in this specific moment in time, with these specific people, these specific resources, and this specific market opportunity, we did…” The context is everything, but it’s the part that never makes it into the tweet.

What worked at Snapchat in 2015 worked because of Snapchat in 2015—the team, the market, the competitive landscape, the available technologies. Trying to replicate these practices without that context is like trying to win a race by copying someone else’s training schedule without accounting for their physiology, climate, or terrain.

The Bitter Pill

Then there’s advice from those who failed—not the thoughtful post-mortems, but the reactive, bitter lessons that come from unprocessed failure. This advice is the easiest to spot because it usually comes in absolutes:

• “Never hire remote workers”
• “Always build in-house”
• “Don’t trust VCs”
• “Product-market fit is a myth”

This advice isn’t just wrong—it’s wrong in a way that reveals more about the advisor than the advice. It’s what happens when complex failures get reduced to simple villains, when correlation gets confused with causation.

The Wounded Sage

The most interesting category—and perhaps the trickiest—is advice from those who’ve failed but processed that failure well. These are the founders and PMs who’ve done the hard work of understanding their mistakes, who can articulate nuanced lessons about what went wrong and why.

Their advice often rings true because it is true—for their specific situation. The problem is that even well-processed failure is still a sample size of one. The insights might be valuable, but they’re still filtered through the lens of a specific experience in a specific context.

The Way Forward

So if all advice is wrong, what do we do? The answer isn’t to ignore advice entirely—it’s to change how we consume it. Here’s what I’ve learned works:

1. Treat Advice as Data, Not Direction

Every piece of advice is a data point in a larger pattern. Your job isn’t to follow it, but to understand what it tells you about the problem space you’re operating in.

2. Look for Patterns, Not Prescriptions

The value in startup advice often lies not in the specific recommendations, but in the patterns that emerge when you look at multiple perspectives. What themes keep recurring? What contexts seem to matter most?

3. Understand the Context

When you hear advice, dig into the context:

• What was the market like?
• What resources did they have?
• What were their constraints?
• What were they optimizing for?

4. Build Your Own Model

The goal isn’t to find the right advice to follow—it’s to build a mental model that helps you make better decisions in your specific context. This comes from synthesizing multiple perspectives and understanding why different approaches work in different situations.

The Real Work

The hard truth is that there are no shortcuts. Every successful company, product, or feature is the result of specific people solving specific problems in specific contexts. The real work isn’t in finding the right advice to follow—it’s in developing the judgment to understand your own context and make decisions accordingly.

The next time you’re tempted to implement some proven practice from a successful startup or avoid some pitfall identified by a failed one, stop. Ask yourself: What’s different about my context? What assumptions am I making? What am I really trying to learn?

Because in the end, the only truly useful startup advice might be this: stop looking for startup advice, and start developing your own judgment.

The rest is just noise.