When I started working on my startup a year and a half ago, I realised quickly that to have a successful startup, I needed to solve really hard problems, and it felt like cracking nuts. Looking back, I identified 4 nuts to be cracked: User Acquisition, User Activation, User Retention and User Conversion. They are represented below:

The startup nuts

For the purpose of simplification, they all look the same, and at first I thought they were, but I found out quickly that it wasn’t the case, some nuts are harder to crack (user conversion is harder to crack than user activation for instance). I called them supernuts on the drawing above.

After a few months trying to crack nuts, I understood why taking a startup off the ground takes a few years;- the nuts are not normal nuts, they are Russian nuts (like Russian dolls but with nuts). You have to crack one to crack the next one. Here is what it looks like (also through an X-Ray machine for your convenience)

Russian Nut and its X-ray representation

On top of that, a nut cracker is not enough, you need to use a jack hammer for each nut (and the right one), and that what I spend most of my time, looking for jack hammers and testing them on the different nuts. Here is a few examples of what I tried and what seemed to work for me:

So if you are looking for me, I am in the only entrepreneur in Melbourne, Australia trying to crack a Russian nut with a jack hammer.

Cyril