Why Geoffrey Woo of Anti Fund is telling startups to stick to the fundamentals

What do WhatsApp, Groupon and Uber have in common?

They all started during the 08/09 recession.

Geoffrey Woo, Co-founder and Partner of Anti Fund Investment Fund, believes a great business doesn’t need perfect economic conditions to launch: “it all starts with a core problem that you solve for your ideal customer.” 

In this episode of Recession-Proof, Geoffrey shares his fundamental startup principles that every entrepreneur should learn and how business owners can create an appealing narrative that will grab people's attention.

In this episode, Geoffrey and Kimia discuss:

• Startup fundamentals
• How your business should prepare for a recession
• Why your business needs an appealing narrative
• How Geoffrey de-risks new business ventures

Focusing on business essentials

An early-stage business operator should not bother with macro. It's impossible to track all market changes and come up with precise scenarios for each outcome. Better to focus on building a product people want and getting your first customers. Also, make sure you offer a product or service that is better and or cheaper than anyone else in the market.

“Just focus on making something people want and just focus on the fundamentals”

Create your narrative

Your product might be a game-changer. But if you don’t choose the right market and tell a story that will appeal to the emotions of your ideal customer, you won’t grow. Find the core narrative of your business that you want to share with the world and use tools to help you amplify and disseminate that message in the most efficient way possible.

“The core of marketing is just a scale of positive word of mouth”

Grabbing attention

All companies need two basic resources to grow: capital and attention. You could theoretically raise an endless amount of capital. But attention is scarce. The max attention cap of humanity is around 8 billion people, 24 hours a day. So anything that can wield attention is increasingly powerful.

“You want your customers to pull products from you versus you pushing products towards them”

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