The essence of a good sprint plan lies in clear communication, collaboration, prioritization, and adaptability!

We created Living Spec to make all of this so much easier for your team 💻 ⁠
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Try it for yourself at livingspec.com

Feeling overwhelmed by information overload?

For product teams, one big challenge persists: wasting time searching for data!

We recently wrote a blog on how to combat this using Living Spec

livingspec.com/blog/from-chit…

Not sure where to start?

We have tons of templates and fun examples to spark your creativity and show you how to get the most out of our platform.

Try building templates for your team to use and easily replicate them while preserving pages, tasks and files

Struggling to organize your thoughts and ideas?💡

Shana Lord describes how LivingSpec has helped organize and share her ideas

LivingSpec isn't just another note-taking app. It's a flexible workspace that works the way you think!

Try it today: livingspec.com

(unless the product targets a very specific niche that has nothing to do with you, there are exceptions to every rule of course). Don’t start out with “how is this different than X” until you’ve had time to play with it.

Keep using the product, even if it’s rough. Keep giving feedback. The idea if that if you can’t convince your friends to use your product, how will you convince customers to use it

Try their product. Use it for real. Give specific constructive feedback. What do you like and why? What could improve and how? What is missing? What would it take for you to use the product?

You often feel alone. Your friends don’t understand the pressure you feel to make things succeed. And after you accept their money, the pressure gets even worse. Some startup founders provide a support network to each other, and that’s a big help.

Send too many emails and get labeled as spam. Use a mailing list and watch people unsubscribe. SMS doesn’t scale well. Not everyone is in every Slack or Discord group.

It’s nearly impossible today to reach your entire network of friends efficiently. Social media is fragmented and doesn’t show every post to every friend or is ignored.

And that is normal, but you’re expected to differentiate from every obscure competitor, most of whom you haven’t heard about previously.

You start an idea thinking there’s very little competition. Before your great idea gets funded, you might discover dozens or hundreds of competitors.

For several reasons, many investors will lead you to believe they are interested when they are not. Until their money is in the bank, assume they are not interested.

As soon as you have metrics (users, revenue, etc.), you are now measured on those metrics to see if you are growing and scaling at venture speed.

Investors often favor hype and youth over results and experience. Everyone loves the story of the super young founder, but in reality, most successful startups have older founding teams. Often the teams that cheat or lie get funded and the honest teams do not.

Questions on the surface are not what they seem. Simply terms like product market fit and go to market are loaded questions that most founders don’t have a real answer for until they’ve figured it out.

the expectation is that you have raised capital from friends, family, and angels first and have more to show and more figured out. Most people want to be the last first check so they don’t miss out but have removed most, if not all, risk from the investment.

Funding can be a crapshoot. A first-round or first investor rarely means that. Unless you have a track record of successful exits or have created a once-in-a-generation product with exponential growth,

Expectations are relentless. You are expected, with almost no reason, to be able to do everything needed to make your business successful. And if you don’t, someone else will.

The reality is that most startups fail, and the small number that succeed have many obstacles to overcome.

There are many reasons why startups are difficult, and I’ll scratch the surface here and revisit them in depth in the future.