Introduction
After the phenomenal $2.4 billion initial public offering (IPO) of Just Eat, an online food-ordering startup, Ash kept being asked about the “secret” to success in business.
Ash was there at Just Eat from the start, and he was the one who headed up their growth. He was their first marketing director in London and took them all the way to their Series A funding of $17 million and their first TV ad campaign. To answer this question, his mind spun in different directions, trying to think of an accurate answer. Was it the idea? The technology? The “growth hacks”? The team? The timing?
Maybe it was just the sheer hard work and hustle that they’d put in?
What really led to one of the largest tech startup IPOs the United Kingdom has seen in almost a decade?
Just Eat is touted as an extraordinary success story and is now so big that they’ve even acquired Grubhub. However, every answer Ash gave about the cause of their success felt as if it were missing a crucial piece of the puzzle … and he could never quite put his finger on it.
The beginnings of a theory for startup success began to brew in the back of his mind as he moved on from Just Eat and started a few other companies: first founding his own fully bootstrapped (without external funding or investment) startup called Fare Exchange, a private hire taxi platform, then venturing abroad to start Washplus, an on-demand mobile laundry app—the first of its kind in Dubai.
With Fare Exchange, Ash, his co-founder, and his team developed smart software and digital marketing systems that took taxi bookings before Uber entered the scene. Ash grew Fare Exchange at blinding speed, from $0 to $40 million in bookings revenue in just three years—with only five full-time staff. Then his next startup, Washplus, became Dubai’s fastest-growing laundry and dry-cleaning startup.
So he developed the reputation for being a “growth hacker,” someone who’s good at growing a startup really, really fast. And he never stopped, with his latest venture being Uhubs, an upskilling platform that visualizes a team’s needs for business growth.
Meanwhile, Hasan had built his strategy and marketing business from his bedroom at his parents’ house, and had grown and automated it to the point that he was making a significant passive income. While his friends were complaining about their day jobs and dreading their Monday mornings, he was having fun traveling and making enough money every month to start investing and looking for other projects to work on.
It was during this time that we—Ash and Hasan—met each other. Both at a loose end, we decided to start investing in and advising technology startups together. We had a lot of compassion and affinity for startup founders and really enjoyed helping them.
We continued to travel and work with startups all around the world, from Europe to America, the Middle East to Southeast Asia, and we both pondered this unspoken secret to starting successful businesses. We noticed that founders and investors all over the world were running into the same issues and asking us the same questions. Everyone we met was working really hard, but some startups were succeeding while others were failing.
The Myth of Meritocracy
If we have learned anything on our entrepreneurial journeys, it is that the media narrative on startup success can be very misleading. Around every corner, you’re bombarded with endless myths, hero worship, PR, and hype around successful entrepreneurs who are heralded as living testaments to the power of hard work, meritocracy, and the American Dream.
Silicon Valley and the startup world loves to present itself as a progressive, meritocratic place—with those talented and hardworking enough inevitably rising up above the parapet and reaping the rewards for all the blood, sweat, and tears they have put in. But you know what? For all its progress and supposed flat hierarchies, it still suffers from the same problems as other industries.
Meritocracy means those who “merit” it are the ones who achieve it. In other words: those who deserve to get rich, get rich.
At the core of these narratives, you’ll find a fallacy: We can all become billionaire entrepreneurs on the cover of Forbes, if only we pulled our socks up. If only we wanted it badly enough. If only we got up at 4 a.m. and hustled hard enough. We read articles and watch news segments about these superstar startup founders, and we read books that tell us we can all be like them if we simply get our shit together.
Bullsh*t.
At a time when inequality is at an all-time high, and as two guys who have “made it” and can now be considered very privileged, we want to relieve the world of the delusion that we’re living in an actual pure meritocracy.
Because over our two decades in the startup game, we have begun to see distinct patterns emerge as to which startups succeed and which ones fail. And we’re ready to answer the question: “How does a startup become so successful?”
In this book, we want to break down the factors of success in a way that is both eye-opening and brutally honest, but still ultimately very empowering.
Yes, over the last hundred years we have made leaps and bounds in becoming more meritocratic and fair, and that’s fantastic. America definitely is a land of opportunity. However, our experience in the startup scene tells us that we still have a long way to go. The reality is that there are still problems, barriers, and unlevel playing fields too numerous to count.
As insiders who’ve been on all sides of the table: from poor to privileged, from employees to entrepreneurs, startup founders to angel investors, and mentees to mentors, we’re more convinced than ever of the fact that the path to success is not just self-discipline, belief, and hard work.
We see it every day; plenty of hardworking, dedicated, passionate startup founders come to pitch to us at our central London office. Unfortunately, like all investors, we have to say no far more than we can say yes.
Why? Often it’s because they don’t understand a simple truth. A truth that defies almost every book title or business headline you see today: Success in the startup world is not awarded to the hardest workers. It is awarded to those who develop and use their unfair advantages.
By “unfair advantage” we do not mean an unethical or illegal advantage (although there are many of those). An unfair advantage is a competitive upper hand, and your set of unfair advantages is unique to you. It’s more than a unique selling point; it’s a fundamental leg up over the competition, and often it’s one that is not “earned” or worked for.
Let’s take a very simple example from sports. Being tall is a plain and significant unfair advantage in basketball. It doesn’t matter how hard a short basketball player works; they have less of a chance of becoming a professional. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there has never been a short professional basketball player; it just means they’re much less likely, regardless of the amount of effort they put in.
Startup businesses are not physical sports, but similar rules still apply: if you’re privileged, educated, richer, smarter, you’re more likely to win. But luckily, that’s not the full story, because unfair advantages can be found in a lot of unexpected ways.
Virtually everyone we speak to agrees with this radical new way of looking at success, in life and in business, whether or not they’d be considered conventionally “successful” or not.
This book is unique in that the primary focus is not the idea, the product, or anything else in the business. This book is about you, the founder, the entrepreneur behind the business (whether you’ve already launched your startup or are still thinking about it). The reason for this is that it ALL starts with you. A startup at the early stage has nothing to show, and it’s the founder or co-founders who set it up for success.
The business idea is important, and we will talk about it, but before the idea comes YOU.
Here’s what influential venture capitalist Eileen Burbidge, founding partner and investor at Passion Capital, had to say:
When we first meet a company or business seeking investment, we’re simply judging the people. Ideally, we want to assess the team, its tech … and any momentum the company has. But since we invest so early, we almost never find all three. Often the only thing we have to gauge is the team—the founders.
Likewise, that’s what we look at before investing in a company and what any investor worth their salt will look at, too.
The Goal of Traction
Now, we mention investors and venture capitalists (VCs) not because every founder should be looking to raise money from them. Far from it: some businesses are better bootstrapped without investors and kept lean (keeping costs and overheads low). But preparing to pitch your startup, putting together a “pitch deck,” and figuring out how to concisely sell your idea and why you’re the person or team to do it is an incredibly useful way to make you think about your unfair advantages, the things that sell you, and how you should highlight them.
In reality, it’s very rare to raise funding without having any sales (or at least users). This “traction”—more and more people using your product—shows that you’re making progress with your startup, that you’re actually making something people love, rather than just “spinning your wheels” getting nowhere.
Whether or not you intend to get investment into your startup, a big question to address is this: How do you attain that elusive traction in the first place? After all, most startups fail not because they can’t build a product but because they can’t get enough customers or users.
We’re often invited to talk about startups and growing a startup. We always like to start with this slide:
Most startups fail, not because they can’t build a product.
But because they can’t get traction.
To get that momentum, growth, and subsequent success in your startup, you need to have strong unfair advantages as your foundation. By knowing, developing, and leveraging your unfair advantages, you will work on the right idea, partner with the right co-founders, and start from a place of strength.
Starting a company from scratch and then growing it is one of the hardest things you can do. But with the right unfair advantages, and the right mindset, you can be in with a shot.
The Book
When we started speaking about the Unfair Advantage concept onstage, it resonated in a way we weren’t expecting. At the end of each talk, we’d have a long line of attendees—founders, aspiring founders, investors—all lining up to ask us to help them find their unfair advantages. And guess what, they were often the people who thought of themselves as the underdogs, just like us. That’s why we decided to write this book.
Here were our first impressions of each other.
Hasan: We met each other at a business dinner in London. Despite his success and experience, I found Ash to be extremely down-to-earth. I marveled at his ability to make everyone he meets feel at ease in his presence. He was the kind of unpretentious man who had the self-assuredness to continually ask questions about something if he didn’t fully “get it.” His intellectual curiosity was always apparent, and he always found a way to throw in some humor, no matter the situation.
Ash: Hasan came across as an astute and humble young entrepreneur who was generating a good passive income for himself with his boutique digital marketing agency. While I had a more intuitive inclination to entrepreneurship from a young age, Hasan’s journey began with him investing in an online course. He explained how he got into it for the freedom and independence, and he got it straight away when I began to explain my Just Eat journey and my early theory of unfair advantages. We became friends and we soon started investing together, sitting through hundreds of startup pitches in which founders were trying to get investment. The insights we were able to glean together developed into our investment thesis and formed part of a tech startup we began working on. Subsequently, we’ve worked together to develop this concept and put together this book.
We have since advised, mentored, and consulted with hundreds of founders at the early stages of their startups. We’ve each presented the Unfair Advantage model in TEDx talks and at top business schools around the world. We’ve spoken to corporations looking to maintain their dominance, launch new products, or enter new markets by applying lean startup and Unfair Advantage methodologies.
Now we want to share what we know with you. We want to help you find your own unfair advantages to succeed in your startup, whether you already have one or are planning to start one.
By reading this book, you’ll walk away with:
Copyright © 2020 by Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba
