1/ Come for the Content, Stay for the Community. A thread.

The best way to know if people like your product is NOT:

- Have a lot of emails in the waiting list
- Become #1 on PH
- Become #1 of HN or Reddit
- Have people that saing "I'll pay"
- Have a lot of free users

The best way to know if they're actually pay for it.

The only thing that matters is your product providing a value, and you can't know this until people will pay money for it.

We can have a first signal of a product/market fit after the launch by check how many sales we've got in the first 24h. Some scale:

200+ This has a high potential.
100+: This has a potential.
50+: Some people need it.
10+: People almost don't need it.
0+: People don't need it.

This is for a single time payment product. For a subscription probably it should be less because people hate subscription.

And obviously, you should have a lot of traffic like 3-5k+.

Here is a stat for my products (macOS apps) for the first 24h after the launch:

For those of you asking me if I bought my wework equity—I did not. But, not because I didn’t choose to buy it. Despite joining the company very early on, I was not offered options. Here’s a thread about what happened and my feelings about it now. /1

I joined wework in 2011 as the ~17th employee when we had 4 buildings. I was 23, naive, and didn’t know what equity or options were—I certainly didn’t know how much it could impact my financial future. When I, and the first hundred or so joined the team, /2

equity options weren’t a part of the deal and I thought nothing of it. As the company grew and we brought in more funding, the executive team decided it was time to allocate equity to its employees. It was mid-2013, about 4 years after the company started. /3

We had ~120 employees and I had been there for ~2 years. I don’t know much about what went on behind the scenes to determine who would get equity and how much, or quite frankly, why they did it at all. /4

In the process, they did a couple of things: First, the way in which they chose to allocate equity, to whom, how much, etc. was… interesting. I’ll get into that more soon. Second, for the people who were given equity options, wework made the choice *not* to backdate. /5

Things you don't need to launch your product: a great name, a one-word domain, a beautiful logo, an ever better website, brilliant copy, perfect code, custom illustrations, shiny buttons, optimized CSS…

Things you do need: a product that solves a problem for someone. That's it.

If you solve a problem for someone, you will be surprised by how much you don't need.

If you don't solve a problem for someone, you'll be surprised by how much won't help.

A few things I've learned this year from building a small, profitable internet business from zero to $100k ARR in 8 months.

Ride the wave:

People often ask what we do for marketing, and I don't really have a good answer. You don't have to push your product as hard if you're building for a vocal community of passionate people within a growing market. They'll do most of your marketing for you.

Scratch your own itch:

If you don't experience the problem you've set out to solve, you’ll have a slight disconnect between what your problem actually is, who’s experiencing it, and how to reach them. I’ll probably never do another user test in my life.

Get specific:

The web hosting space may be crowded, but the web hosting space for Notion is not. I used to think a niche would limit the total size of my business, but If we capture 1% of all Notion users, we'd be making at least $720k/month—far beyond what's enough for me.

Use side projects as marketing:

Some of our record signup days came from one of my side projects. The only mention of it was a link to it in the footer of the page. Your side projects don't have to be clearly correlated in order to still correlate.

1/ Does this exist in VC?

I'm constantly running tests on ad platforms and cold outreach to gauge market interest in specific products/solutions/pain points.

2/ Seems like what some people try to accomplish with an EIR, but from
what I can tell, that's usually focused on a single venture.

We are constantly uncovering new potential ventures through our outreach, and we aren't even a fund.