What are you trying to solve as a startup? | Magnus Hillestad

Magnus Hillestad is the CEO and co-founder of Sanity, a company with a gross revenue retention of 97%. Basically, nobody's leaving their product. How did they achieve that?

By being intentional. This is Magnus’s favorite word. What he means by that is asking yourself what you are trying to solve as a startup and then focusing on that using frameworks like SCQA, V2Mom, and others.

This episode distills the essence of the learnings Magnus has undergone and the myriad of books he has read. If you want to be more intentional about your product, this is a must-listen.

📚 During this discussion, Magnus mentioned:

• Justin Kan, the founder of Twitch, saying: ‘First-time founders focus a lot on the product, while second-time founders are all about distribution.’
• Elon Musk’s view on optimization
• Jeff Bezos, Regret Minimization Framework
• Principles by Ray Dalio
• Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell ​​by Alan Eagle, Eric Schmidt, and Jonathan Rosenberg
• The SCQA framework was invented by Barbara Minto, the author of Pyramid Principle
• The V2Mom framework
• Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

If you like this episode, share it with people who might benefit from it. Thanks!

This podcast is brought to you by Cieden, a digital product design agency. If you are looking for designers who are intentional in every design decision, let’s talk.