{"skill":{"slug":"founder","displayName":"Founder","summary":"Build startups with product-market fit, fundraising, team building, and founder resilience.","description":"---\nname: Founder\ndescription: Build startups with product-market fit, fundraising, team building, and founder resilience.\nmetadata: {\"clawdbot\":{\"emoji\":\"🚀\",\"os\":[\"linux\",\"darwin\",\"win32\"]}}\n---\n\n# Founder Assistance Rules\n\n## Early Stage\n- Talk to customers before building — assumptions are usually wrong\n- Problem validation before solution validation — make sure it's worth solving\n- MVP means embarrassingly small — ship the smallest thing that tests your hypothesis\n- Speed of learning beats quality of product early on\n- Choose co-founders like marriage — complementary skills, aligned values, tested under stress\n\n## Product-Market Fit\n- Users that would be \"very disappointed\" without you — that's the metric (40%+ threshold)\n- Retention matters more than acquisition — leaky bucket never fills\n- Pull beats push — customers seeking you out vs you convincing them\n- PMF feels like demand you can barely keep up with\n- Before PMF, nothing else matters — don't scale what doesn't work\n\n## Fundraising\n- Raise when you have momentum, not desperation\n- Know your numbers cold — ARR, growth rate, burn, runway, unit economics\n- VCs pattern-match — know what pattern you fit\n- SAFE vs priced round: tradeoffs on both sides\n- 100 meetings to find 1 yes is normal — rejection isn't signal about your company\n\n## Team\n- First 10 hires define culture — choose carefully\n- Hire for slope over experience early — fast learners beat credentialed operators\n- Fire fast when it's not working — one bad hire poisons teams\n- Equity is precious — be generous but not careless\n- Founder doing everything doesn't scale — delegate before breaking\n\n## Execution\n- Focus is saying no to good ideas — not just bad ones\n- Metrics: one north star, 2-3 supporting — more means no focus\n- Weekly cadence: set goals, execute, review, repeat\n- Ship > perfect — iterate based on feedback\n- Default to action — analysis paralysis kills startups\n\n## Pivoting\n- Pivot on strategy, not vision — the problem matters, your solution might not\n- Data tells you what isn't working — customers tell you what might\n- Pivots require conviction — half-pivots fail\n- Runway determines pivot options — pivot with 18 months, not 3\n- Kill projects before they kill you — sunk cost is sunk\n\n## Survival\n- Cash is oxygen — know your runway in weeks, not months\n- Revenue solves most problems — paying customers validate everything\n- Cut costs in chunks, not slices — small cuts demoralize without saving\n- Down rounds happen — survive now, optimize later\n- Mental health isn't optional — burnout helps nobody\n\n## Founder Psychology\n- Imposter syndrome is universal — you're not uniquely unqualified\n- The highs are too high, the lows are too low — regression to mean happens\n- Find founder peers — they understand what others can't\n- Separate identity from company — you're not your startup\n- Ask for help — everyone does, they just don't advertise it\n\n## Common Mistakes\n- Building in stealth too long — the idea isn't the moat\n- Hiring senior too early — expensive people need infrastructure\n- Chasing press over customers\n- Raising too much and losing discipline — constraints breed creativity\n- Optimizing for valuation over progress\n","tags":{"latest":"1.0.0"},"stats":{"comments":0,"downloads":1469,"installsAllTime":4,"installsCurrent":4,"stars":3,"versions":1},"createdAt":1770674762089,"updatedAt":1778486238781},"latestVersion":{"version":"1.0.0","createdAt":1770674762089,"changelog":"Initial release","license":null},"metadata":{"setup":[],"os":["linux","darwin","win32"],"systems":null},"owner":{"handle":"ivangdavila","userId":"s178jdk12x4qj3gs2se3etxf3h83h7ft","displayName":"Iván","image":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/81719670?v=4"},"moderation":null}