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Nobody talks about failure in Silicon Valley, yet 90% of startups fail.

Why?

3 yrs ago, @neerajberry and I shut down @Sprig, which raised $60M from @GreylockVC + @socialcapital & grew to $20m revenue.

Then, it all fell apart.

For an honest story about failure,

**Read on**

In 2013, I was @lyft, envious of how fast it was growing!

What about @lyft for food?

We looked @Postmates + thought:
- the food arrived sloppy / restaurants don't care about delivery
- it took forever (1hr)
- too expensive

We struggled through product iterations until we found "magic":

3 taps and $15 for a healthy meal delivered in 15 min

To make it possible, we had to run the restaurant ourselves; it would be expensive but worth it

We recruited @n8keller, Morgan Springer + @mattkent as founders

We launched and had immediate success. The buzz was unbelievable. Within months we were on track to do $1M revenue/year.

Our Series A was a hot round. I did 4 partner meetings on the same day. Raised $10M.

Great investors, great team, off to the races - @omal and @simonrothman

2 challenges arose:

1) Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. We had to bribe officials ("lobbying").

2) Gross Margins (GM). As we grew, our burn rate grew too. We were losing money on every meal. If only we could get to critical mass.

Pat Walls
@thepatwalls

I'm doing an AMA on @IndieHackers.

Drop some questions in there! Happy to answer anything, esp around building side projects with a full-time job :)

https://t.co/da4Ael9TnE

My high level plans for Starter Story.

On almost quitting

cc: @daviswbaer

@daviswbaer How I find so many businesses to interview

@daviswbaer On balancing different projects

Jon Yongfook
@yongfook

Candid and potentially controversial series of tweets coming up... (I hear twitter is good for that sort of thing 😅) read 👇🏻

Here’s what it feels like to launch something to the indie maker community:

Launching a free, open source tool:
“This is awesome! You’re awesome!”

Launching a commercial tool:
“TWO DOLLARS? You are literally Hitler”

I’m exaggerating for comedic effect of course. But there’s a lesson here...

I knew before I started working on Promomatic to be very wary of building a utility tool for makers. Makers are by definition problem solvers and their favorite hobby is finding a better / faster / cheaper way to do what your product does.

It’s so tempting to build things for makers because they seem accessible (thanks to PH, IH, Reddit etc) and you get an immediate feedback loop.

Dayton
@daytonmills

What I learned from raising my first seed round.

This isn’t a how-to guide, that may come later. This is just a story and observations from my own experience.

See, I didn’t know what I was doing at all...

We had a built a prototype, people seemed to like it. Investors seemed to like it. Not because I showed it to them, I wouldn’t know how to do that.

But I got a lot of inbound asking about the product and found myself stumbling into meetings with people with no real goal.

We decided it was time to raise and I had to figure out how to do that.

I’m not from SF. I’m from small town Missouri. I didn’t have connections.

But I did spend a lot of time making internet friends. It’s what I’ve done my whole life. In particular friends in @genzmafia

It was here I had some help from @nhuebecker on the first pitch deck I ever made. It went a long way btw - Thanks nick!

And met a lot of connected people thanks to @ItzSuds. He also got me on clubhouse.

In there I started talking to people and met @YousifAstar

Yousif taught me the game. I cannot stress this enough he taught me everything. Pitching, materials, intros, down to the verbiage of my emails.

He taught me how to be intentional with raising instead of stumbling into meetings.

I blocked off two weeks and got started.

Jan-Erik Asplund
@janerikasplund

.@zapier built a $140M ARR business on $1.4M in VC that has become the logic layer of the no-code industry.

But it has the potential to be something even bigger: the Netflix of productivity.

Our report and a thread 👉

We believe @seqouia and @steadfast got a good deal buying into Zapier at $5B.

We value Zapier at $7B based on:

- 30-50% YoY growth over the next five years
- Zapier’s monopoly status in the solopreneur/SMB market
- 30-40% YoY growth of no-code TAM

No-code is huge and growing, but as @edavidpeterson has written, no-code is about more than tools: it’s about a philosophy that emphasizes interoperability and customizing your software to your needs.

https://t.co/UJY6BRtXwl

Trying this on for size\u2026

\u201cNo code\u201d isn\u2019t a coherent category. It\u2019s a design philosophy.

But tools built with this philosophy in mind will be the biggest winners of the next decade.

Let me explain what I mean by way of analogy.
— David Peterson (@edavidpeterson) January 14, 2021

.@zapier enabled interoperability by building a solution to one of the intractable problems in SaaS: APIs that don’t talk to each other.

The product took off and hit $100M ARR in just 9 years, comparable to companies that have raised 100x as much money.

https://t.co/0Thk42eRpJ

Ever notice that Zapier is doing $100m+ and has no direct competition? Found their niche and crushed it \U0001f44c
— Tyler Tringas (@tylertringas) November 7, 2019

Zapier was riding an explosion in APIs that started the same year they were founded—2011.

Suddenly, every SaaS business wanted to offer its users extensibility, but not spend time figuring out what integrations to build or building them.

That’s where Zapier came in handy.

Say hello to VSCode Tinder aka VSinder:

stop swiping on bodies and start swiping on code :)

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Say hello to VSCode Tinder aka VSinder:stop swiping on bodies and start swiping on code :)

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Say hello to VSCode Tinder aka VSinder:

stop swiping on bodies and start swiping on code :)