How I Fix Broken Products For Struggling Startups

A common-sense guide to building your product based on your vision

Joe Procopio
6 min readNov 22, 2023

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Every startup’s product has its genesis in the primordial ooze that is the company’s vision, mission and product position.

Whenever I get called into a company because their growth got stuck, their vision, mission and position are the first place I go. I could make many and severe changes to the process, the org, the feature set, etc. but it’s all guessing until the high-level stuff gets straightened out.

This Is Straight Out Of My Product Playbook

Getting stuck in the growth phase happens a lot with startups, especially product startups. I found I was answering so many questions so often where the answers came straight from my product playbook, I eventually just documented that playbook in the most concise, common-sense and plain-English way I could.

Then I published it piece-by-piece in Teaching Startup, my startup to help founders build better startups, using Teaching Startup itself as an example in the playbook, because I built Teaching Startup on my own in my spare time using only no-code.

Founders loved the playbook. I have since given an overview as a talk at one startup’s annual meeting…

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Technologist. Innovator. Humanist. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com