Read studying companies
Study 10+ companies in your industry on YCombinator or Crunchbase
Look for companies with traction: raised 10+ million or 50+ staff
Or study the AI startups in recent YC batches - not big yet but likely to grow fast
Read news articles, google “company.com tech crunch”
Google for site:techcrunch.com "raises" "india" “fintech”, replace with your country and industry of choice
If the news article is behind a paywall put the url into archive.vn to read it
Go through their product, break down UX, identify strengths and weaknesses
Here's an example from ContactOut
Study 10 to qualify for the prize, but really you want to look at 100s to learn.
How might you build a product that is 10x better?
Post your learnings on Linkedin / Twitter, comment on 3 other people’s posts.
Share your Linkedin post on Discord #goals
Every month we’ll pick $100 USD prize winners for great research
Keep going. You’ll need to study 100+ companies to become an expert and build a 10x better product.
Startups succeed by creating:
10x better product that solves an important problem
The way to do that is to study everything that has been done - study everyone in your industry. Learn all their products.
Paul Graham founder of YCombinator says he has learnt a lot about building startups from studying other professions like painting and writing that involve creating new things.
For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.
Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.
Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs-- not just at what they do, but the source code too. One of the less publicized benefits of the open-source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program. When I learned to program, we had to rely mostly on examples in books.
So you get good at startups by studying other good startups in your industry.
Creativity is copying from 100 different sources - Austin Kleon Steal like an Artist
But the key is do not just copy.
Take the best parts of what everyone is doing, rethink how to do things from first principles and
make a product that is 10x better.
E.g Apple’s Macintosh copied the Xerox Alto’s graphic user interface BUT they improved it by adding windows that are collapsible and can be dragged and dropped. They also added a mouse and made everything a lot more user friendly.
E.g Elon taught himself rocket science by reading tons of books, talking to all the leading experts and studying what NASA and the Russians did in the past. He even tried to buy a ICBM missile from the Russians.
Then he thought from first principles about how to improve everything. E.g why does a rocket need to cost so much when the materials that go into it are cheap? That’s how he made something 10x better with SpaceX.