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The words are almost identical in meaning. Restrain means hold back from behind, constrain means hold back by setting barriers in the way ahead. A dog on a leash is restrained, a dog in a cage is constrained. LouiseT on EnglishForums

Startups often make progress when constrained. The most common constraint is lack of resources, usually money. But there are other common ones too: lack of experience, lack of connections, lack of knowledge, to name a few. They overlap of course.

For the last month, I've been running at, over, or near capacity. I hate this state of being, and am glad it is over for a while (I think!). I try hard to avoid it, though it is not always avoidable in the short-term without consequences.

I get a lot of questions around how to get into startups. Here's my advice:

We're in the middle of putting together Traction (the book), and have been experimenting with different email auto-responses when people sign up for the mailing list.

To: $email

Subject: Traction Book Question

Thanks for signing up for Traction book updates! 

We're in the thick of it right now, and would appreciate your reply all to the following question:

What question about Traction would you most like answered?

Gabriel, http://ye.gg/

Most startups don't fail at building a product. They fail at acquiring customers.

The biggest mistakes I see over and over again when startups try to get traction are as follows (in order of importance).

When you're just starting out, a lot of things can move the needle. That's why I think the right approach to getting initial traction is to intelligently try a bunch of traction verticals, see what looks promising, and focus there. When I first launched DuckDuckGo, I showed up at a local Philly startup event and pitched it. There were perhaps a hundred people there, but it was enough to move the needle for me at the time.

The premise goes something like this: if software is indeed eating the world, then big cos in pretty much every industry are threatened. In reaction, they need to embrace software, and in so doing they face traditional build vs buy decisions. Yet not being software companies themselves, there is more bias towards buy because building is so much more difficult given their lack of core competency in software.

Getting out of acqui-hire stage is a watershed moment for any startup. That's where your reserve price is higher than $xM per founding team member. Usually reaching this stage is driven by traction.

Blake Master's class notes for Peter Thiel's startup class have been great, which is why I immediately was intrigued by the PandoMonthly event with him. One of the more interesting things to me that was said was his pointed questions to ask startups.

People often ask startups how many employees they have. I'm not entirely sure why they do or why I care, but something about this perpetually asked question bothers me.

Every now and then I start using a service that really changes my life. I don't mean just because it's awesome, but that it literally effects my behavior so significantly that it makes noticeable changes in the way I conduct my life. Here are a few examples. 

I believe that ambitious startup ideas have similar success probabilities to their less ambitious counterparts, if not higher success rates. No, I don't have any real evidence. Call it a highly educated guess.

There is a startup proverb that says you have to be 10x better than your competition to get people to switch. A related one is that you should concentrate on being a painkiller as opposed to a vitamin.

I watched Moneyball last night and saw a lot of parallels to startup land, but tying them all together was the notion of competing effectively by changing the game. In the (true) story the Oakland A's competed against big money teams by leveraging undervalued players to achieve real world gains (focusing on runs instead of wins, though which of course correlate with wins).

I few weeks ago someone asked me how early does a decision start to form about whether I would make an angel investment or not. Thinking back and looking at prior nos and yeses I have to say a lot happens when reading that very first email.