Founders don’t fail from lack of advice.
They fail from drowning in it.
Founders today drown in advice.
Investors. Advisors. Peers. Podcasts. LinkedIn.
Everybody has something to say.
But more advice doesn’t create more clarity.
It usually creates the opposite.
You end up with a long list of opinions and no direction.
The worst part is that most of the loudest advice doesn’t come from lived experience.
It comes from people repeating things they’ve heard somewhere else.
“Do this.”
“Try that.”
“Just launch something and see what sticks.”
This is how founders burn runway in the name of “movement.”
If I got a penny for every founder who has been told to “fix the brand,” “post more on LinkedIn,” or “follow the YC playbook,” I’d have a glass full of pennies. :-D
It sounds clever.
It feels energising.
But it’s often disconnected from the actual bottleneck inside a Nordic early-stage company.
Because here’s the part many forget.
Much of the startup advice circulating in Norway and the Nordics is imported—without context—from Silicon Valley.
We treat YC essays, growth-hacker slogans, and whatever the latest hyper-growth founder said on a podcast as universal truth.
But your world is not that world.
Your access to capital is tiny fraction compared to theirs.
Your customer behaviour is different.
Your market size is different.
Your hiring pool is different.
Your margin for error is smaller.
So when someone says, “just do this or that and see what works,” they may not realise that your version of “seeing what works” costs you three months of runway.
Listening too closely to customers can mislead you too.
Customers talk in features, not needs.
“Build this.”
“Add this.”
“Make it work like X.”
They describe the tool they imagine, not the problem they need solved.
If you follow everything, you end up with a Frankenstein product nobody truly wants.
This is where strategy comes in.
Not the corporate-deck version.
The real version.
The argument for how you win your game with the reality you operate in.
It is your filter.
It tells you what matters and what doesn’t.
It saves you from chasing every idea dropped into Slack.
Your job isn’t to solve every problem your customers mention.
Your job is to solve the right problem in the right way for the right customer.
Everything else is noise.
A moment from Tørn burned this into me.
During the rough periods, we were bombarded with “advice.”
“Visit more stores.”
“Post more.”
“Run a pricing campaign.”
“Try influencers.”
Everyone had a theory.
Everyone had a suggestion.
Everyone was confident.
I ignored most of it politely, because I knew this much.
But when you’re desperate, you start listening.
That was the mistake.
The problem wasn’t the advice.
The problem was that we didn’t have a strong enough strategic argument to filter it through.
So everything felt urgent.
Everything felt important.
And everything pulled us in slightly different directions.
Good advisors don’t give you more ideas.
Good advisors help you sharpen your own.
They reduce noise, not add to it.
Here’s the simplest filter I know:
Does this advice strengthen our strategic argument, the way we intend to win the game?
If you can’t answer that, the problem isn’t the advice.
The problem is that your strategic argument isn’t clear enough yet.
Clarity restores judgment.
After that, advice becomes useful—finally—because you know what to keep and what to discard.
Next week I’ll write about why strategy is not a democratic process—and why this matters more in Norway than people think.
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Previous posts
If you missed my previous posts in this series, here they are:
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