For the longest time felt like I didn’t fail at things. I was brought up with the mindset that if something is doable, it cannot be hard. A mindset which compels you to find harder and harder challenges.

That all changed when Flex, the Techstars company I co-founded didn’t work out. It broke me. 

​Is anyone else exhausted by the world yet? The last 4 years have made the news effectively useless as a medium for informing the public, and the populace at large have become so tribally loyal that the main political parties behave like cults.

I keep coming back to the fact that the system (UK/US) is built for cars, and as hard as you try to switch to bikes it ends in tears.

Some pointers on how I operate to save us all some time

​Upon reading black rednecks and white liberals, and reflecting on the past 4 years of American existence on Independence day, I have started to find signal in my thoughts pointing to some key rules that explain how society works and why it feels so uncomfortable when things are going differently.

Last week I had an interaction with a founder looking for advice/feedback on the product he was building, that just threw me.

He was building a new diet/food tracking app and the tagline was "The food tracker for food lovers"

I pushed him on its meaning and how with so many existing competitors he could stand out. I literally had no idea what his product did, what it would do for me and why it is better than the current situation.

I’ve wanted to write down some thoughts for quite a while on the news of the fitbit acquisition by google, the current state of play with the Apple watch and how, in my opinion, with the right set up and investment fit bit can be transformed and put the Apple watch to bed.

This seems quite prescient given that today is the Apple watches 5th birthday and this week my Apple watch app Stretchy reached 3000 downloads (been out for 3 weeks).

​In this post I want to try and organise my thoughts around the idea of “10x” products, how jobs to be done can be applied when looking at 2 different products without heavy research and the levers that can be pulled to change how products going to market compare to incumbents.

​In this post I want to go over and organise a tonne of thoughts I have swirling around in my mind about the term Go-to-Market, what it actually means and what a great Go-to-Market and a bad Go-to-Market looks like.

This month marked the nails in a coffin for a business idea I was validating and researching and I’m publishing this post such that I can continue to learn in public.

Like many people who work on these projects I structured my approach and meticulously took notes in a document which I collaborated on with other people I respect the objective opinion of. 

This post is effectively a narrated version of the document. If you wanted to replicate the way I structure my thoughts I have attached the document at the end of the post. If you can find a fault with it, please let me know in the comments or on Twitter. More on that later.