entrepreneurship – Sean Shadmand

The Studio Era of Startups Has Begun

For decades, the startup game has been a one-shot endeavor. You rally a team, raise money, pick a problem, and commit. If you’re lucky, you pivot when you have to, maybe once or twice. But fundamentally, you’re placing a single bet. Pouring your time, capital, and reputation into one idea.

That world is changing quickly.

The world is focusing on their ability to now code more with fewer people, or allow folks with less coding skill to vibe code to success. The fact is, the amount of code was never what made a startup successful, or the number of coders. If that were they case no startup could disrupt a large, well funded, company. More significantly, a new paradigm of startup is emerging, one that leverages the startup creativity and ingenuity. One that helps founders evolve from creating a company with a product, but for just as much cost and time a studio of bets. One that moves with the agility of a hacker and the creative churn of a film studio. And AI is the accelerant.

Imagine if all the studios and accelerators you know were now able to be run by a few founders, with as little funding and workforce as the typical garage startup.

Every Startup Can Now Be a Studio

What’s different today isn’t the concepts, it’s the economics.

The execution bottleneck has collapsed:

Build v1 of an app in days, not months
Ship a prototype in the time it used to take to write a product spec
Generate research, copy, and flows on command
Test real experiences with minimal investment
Multitasking and directing employees has merged into one skill.

A solo founder can now run what used to require a venture studio’s entire apparatus. A three-person team can operate multiple product lines simultaneously in a pre-seed stage or earlier stage.

This isn’t just “faster iteration” it’s a change in who gets to play and at what breadth an entrepreneur can address a market.

The old studio model was top-down: institutions funding experiments. The new model is bottom-up: individuals becoming their own institutions.

When indie hackers ship 12 products in a year and 2 of them hit, that’s not hustling. That’s systematic creative output.

The Rise of the Experiment Engine

The shift isn’t just technical it’s philosophical.

Traditional startups were binary: succeed or fail. Traditional studios were capital-intensive: big bets, long cycles.

But now you can run a creative system where:

Failure is cheap
Iteration is constant
Signal emerges from volume
Products are hypotheses, not commitments

This is what studios do, but now it has been democratized. Again, it isn’t the amount of code and workforce people should be focusing on as they predict the future, it is the breadth of creative experimentation and lack of wide nets of attempts to fund a winning idea be limited to heavily venture funded organizations.

Pixar doesn’t bet the farm on a script — they storyboard, test scenes, rework characters. Record labels don’t drop millions on a demo — they release singles, test styles, build momentum.

Now individual founders can operate with the same creative methodology at a scale never before possible.

Remember “ghetto testing”? Half-baked landing pages, fake feature toggles, manually faked automation? All just to see if anyone cared.

Today, you don’t need to fake it. AI and automation let you spin up real features, fast with polish, interactivity, and branding.

This isn’t just efficiency. It’s a mindset shift. Testing doesn’t feel like cutting corners anymore. It feels like genuine creative exploration.

From Founders to Creative Directors

In this new world, successful founders aren’t just CEOs. They’re creative directors.

They guide taste. They shape vibe. They ask: “what world do we want to live in, and what prototypes can get us there?”

The core skill isn’t managing or scaling, it’s imagining boldly and moving quickly enough to find signal before the market shifts.

The Individual Studio Playbook

The next generation of great startups will operate more like personal creative studios:

Default to prototyping — Ideas aren’t precious until they prove value
Build multiple product lines — Portfolio thinking, not single bets
Use AI as infrastructure — Not just to code, but to design, write, and explore
Kill fast — Speed means nothing without the ability to stop wasted motion
Treat products as experiments — Hypotheses to test, not commitments to defend

The Democratization of Venture Capital

When the cost of experimentation drops to near-zero, everyone becomes their own venture capitalist.

You don’t need Rocket Internet’s playbook. You don’t need Betaworks’ capital. You don’t need Y Combinator’s batch.

You just need curiosity, taste, and the willingness to ship quickly.

More strange tools. More niche apps. More absurd experiments that just might work. We’re not heading into a world with fewer opportunities — we’re heading into a world where more people get to be entrepreneurs.

The studio era isn’t coming. It’s here.

The question is: Are you ready to be your own venture studio?

The Tension Between Big Visions and Small Iterations

Master the balancing of the two and become a legendary leader for a valuable product.

Every founder I know can articulate their grand vision. They’ll paint you a picture of how they’re going to change the world, disrupt industries, and build the next unicorn. But ask them what they’re shipping next Tuesday, and you’ll watch their eyes glaze over with the thousand-yard stare of someone who’s lost in their own complexity.

The paradox? It’s harder to make something small out of something big than it is to make something big out of something small.

And this single insight explains why 99% of startups fail, why enterprise software sucks, and why the most successful builders seem to possess an almost supernatural ability to know exactly what to work on next.

“Know When to Fold Them” Problem

Do you find yourself six months into your product and still “architecting the platform.” What a user actually does with the product today is more valuable than any genius level architecture or UI you are preparing them to use in the future.

This is what I call the Know When to Fold Them Problem. In poker, you can fold a small bet when you realize you’re beat. But when you’ve already pushed all your chips to the center of the table betting on a massive, interconnected system, folding becomes existentially difficult. In poker terms, you are “pot committed” and your ability to think clearly drops precipitously. Decision branches grow exponentially. Baggage of technology your implementation becomes burdensome. Your small product and company move at the speed of a larger one, and thus you lose one of your greatest advantages – being a mean, lean, nimble machine.

The brutal truth? Most builders and founders are terrible at managing the spectrum between atomic and cosmic.

Product Decisions Live on a Spectrum

Picture a spectrum. On one end, you have the atomic—the smallest possible thing that creates value. On the other end, you have the cosmic—the grand vision that changes everything.

The magic happens in the middle. But here’s where it gets interesting: the middle isn’t a place. It’s a dance.

The best builders I know—the ones who’ve built products that millions of people actually use—they’re constantly dancing between atomic and cosmic. They’re thinking in decades while shipping in days. They’re building cathedrals one brick at a time, but they know exactly which brick to place next.

The Warped Interpretation of “MVP”

MVP has become the most abused acronym in tech. Everyone thinks they understand it, but most people use it as an excuse to ship mediocre products.

The real MVP isn’t about just building the minimum. It’s about building the meaningful minimum. There’s a profound difference. What effs it up is the inability for must humans to understand how small something can be to have some semblance of minimum. It isn’t about know what MVP means, but decerning and being critical about where the line of “need”, “whish”, “want” live and how not to get stuck on your imagination of what the initial product set “should” be.

A minimum product is the smallest thing you can build. A meaningful minimum is the smallest thing that creates a complete experience for your user. One is about you. The other is about them.

The best MVPs you’ve never seen were deployed to tiny groups—AirBnB’s first hosts, Uber’s initial San Francisco cohort. Countless improvements and ruthless decisions to cut features and create focus happened in the shadows before these products hit the masses. The magic wasn’t in what they launched publicly; it was in what they learned and refined privately.

Learn from the Enterprise Trap

This is why software built in enterprises (or governments) are consitantly terrible. Whether you’re building products inside a large corporation or developing software as a direct contract for an enterprise client, you face the same fundamental problem: you’re optimizing for committees, leaders, and people that can express themselves with inherent importance, instead of having an individual procure and transform technological capability, true need, iterations, and robustness as a focus.

If Notion was built by an enterprise and its vocal leaders and wedge their preferences into the feature set, it would probably have ended up just like Microsoft Word. And, ironically, when I talk to most people that work in enterprises they wish they could use Notion – even with its far smaller feature set.

When enterprises build internally, they lose the discipline of starting small because there’s no market forcing function. When you’re building as a contractor for enterprises, you’re trapped by feature matrices and checkbox requirements. In both cases, you end up with a Frankenstein’s monster of half-baked features that nobody actually wants to use.

The result? Software that costs millions and makes everyone’s life worse.

Fallacy with Leadership

Leadership involvement is both essential and toxic. You need visionary leadership to maintain the cosmic perspective. But too much leadership involvement in day-to-day product decisions creates the exact opposite of what you want.

I’ve seen this pattern dozens of times. CEO has a vision. Product team starts building. CEO sees early version and says, “But what about this other thing from the vision?” Product team pivots. CEO sees that and says, “Wait, but we also need this other thing.”

Pretty soon, you’re building everything and completing nothing. You’re trapped in the middle of the spectrum, oscillating between atomic and cosmic without ever creating anything meaningful.

A Quality Paradox

Users love quality. They also love completeness. But quality and completeness are often in tension with speed and evolution. This creates another paradox: you need to ship fast to learn fast, but you need to ship quality to create meaningful experiences.

The answer isn’t to choose sides. It’s to redraw the battlefield entirely.

Instead of asking “Should we prioritize quality or speed?”, ask “What’s the smallest thing we can build that feels impossibly good?” Instead of “Should we build more features or polish existing ones?”, ask “What’s the one thing that, if we made it 10x better, would create real value?”

The Hard Truth

Most builders fail at this because it requires two skills that seem contradictory: the ability to think big and the discipline to start small. It requires the vision to see the cathedral and the humility to lay one brick at a time.

It requires saying no to good ideas so you can say yes to great execution. It requires disappointing stakeholders who want everything so you can delight users who want one thing done impossibly well.

But here’s the thing: the builders who master this paradox don’t just build successful companies. They build legendary ones. They build products that change how people work and live and think.

They build the future, one meaningful minimum at a time.

The Question

So here’s the question that separates the legends from the graveyard: What’s your atomic experience? What’s the smallest thing you can build that creates a complete emotional transformation for one specific person?

And more importantly: Are you brave enough to start there?

Because if you are, you might just change the world. One brick at a time.

What’s your atomic experience? I’d love to hear about it. The best builders I know are constantly refining their ability to find the meaningful minimum. It’s the difference between building products people have to use and building products people can’t live without.

More tips for early stage startups

Key Strategies for Startups: Control Your Tech, Move Fast, and Value Equity

If you’re a tech company, don’t outsource your core tech to another firm.

Think of your core tech as the heart of your company. It’s what sets you apart and drives your unique value. When you outsource this vital part, you risk losing control and potentially building something unnecessary as you adapt to feedback. No matter how loyal and supportive an outsourcing firm may seem, their primary goal is to grow their own business, not yours. Even if you offer them equity, their interests won’t fully align with yours—they are billing by the hour while you’re focused on trimming down for an MVP.

I’ve seen many bootstrapped firms spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, only to end up with an unfinished product they don’t fully understand. By keeping your core tech in-house, you stay agile, protect your intellectual property, ensure everything aligns perfectly with your vision and goals, and invest in your corporate tech culture.

You’re supposed to be a fast, nimble startup. Being stealthy will more often hold you back than set you up for a “blowout” go-to-market strategy.

You are building your startup because something is missing from the market. This inherently means it has yet to be addressed or addressed successfully. Either you will be the one to succeed where others have failed, or you won’t. Rarely does a large firm, which is not already chasing the market you are attacking, suddenly “steal your idea”. Large firms are slow-moving and full of bureaucracy. They have not innovated because their goal is to preserve their brand and existing income streams. If they did “steal your idea” chances are they would do a horrible job. More importantly, if you can’t do better than what they attempt, what’s your “x-factor”?

More likely, those large companies will become one of your investors or try to acquire your business and novel expertise. Why would they risk building a new department or team internally (and potentially fail – bad for the brand) when they can simply buy it after it has proven successful? If you’re still not convinced and think a few months to a year of stealthiness will prevent another company from copying you, consider this: if it were possible to copy you so easily, would you really have a chance of succeeding in the long term anyway?

As a startup, your biggest strengths are your speed, focus, talent, and flexibility. Large companies aren’t built for these advantages. Staying in stealth mode might seem like a smart strategy to build suspense or keep others in the dark, but it will slow you down and limit your options. Early feedback from customers, investors, and the market is invaluable for refining your product and strategy. By staying too secretive, you miss out on crucial insights and an opportunity to build relationships. Instead, embrace openness—engage with your market, gather feedback, and iterate quickly.

You aren’t bootstrapping well if you are paying others cash to do your core work. Your equity is even more precious and should motivate value, knowledge, and culture.

Bootstrapping is all about making the most of your resources. If you’re spending cash on tasks you could handle internally, you’re not bootstrapping effectively. Instead, consider using options to attract and motivate talent who are passionate about your mission. This not only saves cash but also builds upon your value with equity while creating a committed team culture that’s deeply invested in the company’s success. Equity can be a powerful tool when focused on building long-term value. Remember, your cash is limited. Equity will be the foundational element for future rounds, when used wisely it can drive long-term value and loyalty.

You may not yet be a venture business

It’s exciting to think about raising money, but venture is meant to fuel powerful growth and value. If you already have paying customers lined up, and those sales or design partners could lead to changes in the product you may be giving up equity for the wrong business. If you need money to pay for the time between invoices and payments consider debt financing to cover your float. This isn’t always the most exciting feedback to hear, but if you haven’t considered these tactics then you may be doing a disservice to your business’s ability to evolve properly.

Feedback: The Greatest Movie Evert sold

I just saw Morgan Spurlocks “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold”

The tight contracts, partner rejections, pitch meetings, cold calls, partnership management, moments of loss of control, brand push back, product placement challenges, and managing the selling of ones sole is depicted with more real reality in this movie than all reality shows on TV today.

I wanted to post this as a blog because I wanted to get your take on it. I feel that Morgan has yet again done a public service by exposing a hidden world in a creative and digestible way.

Here is a wiki on it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POM_Wonderful_Presents:_The_Greatest_Movie_Ever_Sold Check it out. For those that don’t know it actually is a pretty transparent view of what raising money, pitching ideas, and getting rejected really feels like. (As apposed to the faux “reality” TV shows trying to recreate reality)

Rotten tomatoes 73% fresh

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pom_wonderful_presents_the_greatest_movie_ever_sold/

IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1743720/

Some Thoughts on Entrepreneurship

I was recently asked to put together some quick points around entrepreneurship. Points became paragraphs and since I rarely get a chance to blog I figured I would kill two birds with one stone….

You have the x-factor
Try to listen, question, get help and delve into guidance and advice that makes sense or intrigues YOU, not just what people tell you makes sense or what is the current common thought. If you are special enough to be successful, it’s because you have your own mind and perspective that’s different and it’s the advice YOU consider and hold onto that matters (if you simply just listen to experts and do what they say because they are soooo smart then you should work for them and not yourself).

Experts eh?
If two experts disagree in a room on something then no one really knows the right answer – take a step back, it’s time to find your own path.

Do what you love
Do what you love — I know it’s cliché but truly getting that point is harder then it seems. You are an instant success if you’re doing what you love because otherwise you’re working hard at something you don’t love just to pay for the things you do love. Just cut out the middleman! If you accept the love-of-doing more then the love-of-having life gets so much simpler (sounds kind of hippie , I know). For example, If you love Ferrari’s then you should work around, on, or with them at any capacity you can (instant success). Don’t work your way up at some random office or profession that you don’t love just to buy a Ferrari some day. Seems like alot of wasted time just to experience some distant moment of possession.

Focus
Focus hard and focus on your core. Most anyone can make any one thing great if they focused on it and dedicated their life to it. If all you did was think about how to make one specific thing awesome every day I think you would succeed. P.S. Focusing on two things has half that chance of success or less and so on.

Blank pages suck!
Blank pages suck! Conceptualizing abstractly too long can kill an idea. Create, draw, promote, attempt, try, share, and do as much as possible even if it seems unneeded or premature. Don’t let technical know-how stop you. A movie can be cartooned without a camera, a car body can be made with clay, and a site for something to help a user base can be an office excel spreadsheet that is passed around via email in its infancy. You’d be surprised how much can be learned and/or gained traction from such things.

Actions + Ideas = Something Great
Every idea can be great, from a specialized trash can, to a purse design, to an ornament you place on your Crocs, or a website to share simple two line messages with friends (just look around you at what you own or do). Just stick with it (and mind you that doesn’t mean simply bull-headedly pushing a singular concept – that’s “lazy hard work”). Stick with improving an idea, listening to users, reacting and adapting yourself and idea to what you learn and come across. If you do all the above, you most certainly will succeed, right? 😉

Don’t Save Money, Save Time and Stress
Often times we go cheap to get things started, and being exceptionally frugal myself, this lesson was hard for me to see. Often times saving money comes at a greater cost then the time you lose, the stress you gain and the expertise you fail to implement. Hire people that can do a job exceptionally well, get equipment that will make your business work exceptionally well, etc. That doesn’t mean be lazy and spend money without research or thought…spend smart BUT getting someone cheap, bad equipment, lack of staff to handle the load, and cutting corners bites you in the ass often and seems to always end up more expensive and threatens your growth down the road; like death by a million paper cuts. Always get the best and figure out how to make it work in your budget!

7 tips on being an Entrepreneur

I was recently asked to put together some quick points around entrepreneurship. Points became paragraphs and since I rarely get a chance to blog I figured I would kill two birds with one stone….

You have the x-factor

Try to listen, question, get help and delve into guidance and advice that makes sense to YOU. Don’t just do what people tell you to, or what is the current common thought. If you are special enough to be successful it’s because you have your own mind and your own great perspectives. Those differences should be the lens in which you consider the advice you’re given, and how you choose to embrace the ones you connect with the most. It’s important to listen, but if you JUST do what the “experts” say then you should work for them and not yourself. It is a tough skill to master, listening well to experts is a key component to learning, growing, and it helps you avoid making the same mistakes. What I am driving at is how YOU work is unique, and that uniqueness greatly changes the result of advice you decide to implement. To put it in terms that may risk an oversimplification, true “jerks” work well employing jerk-like tactics, but nice people do it awfully – and vice-versa.

Two Experts Walk Into a Bar

If two experts disagree on something then it’s fair to say no one knows THE right answer – take a step back, it’s an opportunity to find your unique path.

Can’t Buy Me Love

Do what you love — I know it’s cliché but truly adopting it is harder than it seems. You are an “instant success” if you’re doing what you love. Otherwise, you may be working hard at something you don’t love just to pay for the things you do. I say cut out the middleman! If you accept the love-of-doing more than the love-of-having life gets simpler (sounds hippie, I know.) For example, if you love Ferrari’s you should work around, on, or with them at any capacity you can (instant success.) Don’t work your way up at some random office or profession that you don’t love just to buy a Ferrari some day. Seems like a lot of wasted time just to experience some distant moment of possession.

Focus is Deep

Focus hard and focus on your core. Focus doesn’t always mean doing less, it often just means doing more on one specific thing. Most anyone can make any one thing great if they focused on it and dedicated their life to it. If all you did was think about how to make one specific thing awesome every day I think you’d succeed. P.S. Focusing on two things has half that chance of success or less and so on. However, doing two things that both directly impact the greatness of one thing can compound your greatness. Careful, when you’re in the weeds those two examples can seem very similar.

Blank pages suck!

Blank pages suck! Conceptualizing abstractly too long can kill an idea. Create, draw, promote, attempt, try, share, and do as much as possible even if it seems unneeded or premature. Don’t let technical know-how stop you. A movie can be cartooned without a camera, a car body can be made with clay, and a site for something to help a user can start as a spreadsheet passed around via email. You’d be surprised how much can be done, learned from, or gown into from such basic experiments.

Actions + Ideas = Something Great

Every idea can be great, from a specialized trash can, a purse design, or an ornament you place on your Crocs. Just stick with it. Stick with improving an idea, listening to users, reacting and adapting yourself and your ideas.

Don’t Save Money, Save Time and Stress

We can often go cheap to get things started, and being exceptionally frugal myself, learning the difference between cheap and smart is tough. Instead of saving money compare costs: the time you lose is a cost, the stress acquired is a cost, and so on. Hire people that can do a job exceptionally well, get equipment that will make your business work exceptionally well, etc. That doesn’t mean you get to justify spend wads of cash in the persuit of excellence. It means first focus on what you truly NEED and what will make you successful and THEN figure out frugal ways to attain those things. Find out what costs are you incurring unnecessarily and cut it. Then, re-invest those saving into the more important things. Spend smart, but don’t get trapped in a death by a million paper cuts pinching pennies across the board. Always aim for the best and then figure out how to make it work in your budget.