BC STARTUPS
Saved by @zmbnski
Suhail
Suhail
@Suhail 9 months, 2 weeks ago 1223 views

1/ The first 18 months of starting a company is often life or death. I must've made 5 different companies that each failed within 9 mo. 😭 Each time the company failed I figured out what I could do better. Eventually startup #6 got to $40K/mo by month 18. Here’s what I learned...

 2/ Stay focused! Ignore things that are a waste of time: meetups & conferences, meetings with no clear agenda, fundraising if you're not fundraising, reading lots of tech media articles, etc. Every week should feel like significant progress in the first year.
3/ Your first 5 hires will be the difference between life or death. Choose carefully. Be picky. Many of the things we do at the company still are a result of those early hires' legacy. Have fun as a tight knit team. It will change & evolve as you get bigger so enjoy this moment.
4/ Growth may be flat for the first 9 months. It's gonna be okay. Almost every company has experienced this: Airbnb had to sell cereal in-between, Slack failed as a gaming company first, Tesla sold only 147 cars after 6 years! You probably won't be an overnight success either.
5/ In the beginning, do customer support yourself. You will learn a lot about why your product sucks. I did 5,000+ support tickets when it was the two of us. Delight customers & fix things fast while you learn. It will help you build an amazing intuition about your customers.
6/ If your competitor made something your customers love: remove your ego & build it. But, make sure you understand why. Don't blindly copy things either. Learn why first. This was invaluable for me & helped us win critical battles over the years. Nobody cares who built it first.
7/ Positioning matters. Spend time figuring out how to explain your product. If it's easy to do, figure out how to explain why it's different as simply as possible. If not, keep experimenting. We bombed this in the first year. It can often be the diff between success & failure.
8/ Your mantra should be: "Be scrappy." Save money. Don't waste. Ignore status. Focus on building. Make people think you're bigger than you are. Do things the larger company won't do because they move slow. You don't need ping pong tables to win, you need grit & resourcefulness.
9/ Pick roles as co-founders to divide & conquer. You both can't be in charge of all engineering, product, design, & business decisions. This often blows up companies! Debate vigorously but make a call. Opt to test ideas vs throw them away though--especially if it's cheap to do.
10/ Truth is, you're going to be using your gut a lot because you lack data. To compensate: talk to customers, meet people who will play a devil's advocate, & understand the tech from 1st principles. Meet people live tho. It will make a meaningful difference in what you'll learn.
11/ Research the history of your market. It will help you identify old & long-standing assumptions, challenging obstacles you too will face, and critical features it took old players a decade to realize to build. I failed to do this until we were 6 years in & it hurt us.
12/ If you have bad customer retention, you're probably not ready to scale the company. Fix that first, then focus on growth. The #1 reason I've seen 100s of companies fail is by becoming addicted to a clever distribution strategy before their product was good. It's a trap!
13/ If this is your 1st time, consider something like @ycombinator. Having a crew of ppl to commiserate w/ in the early days can help you overcome existential moments. During the '09 recession, we all struggled to raise money. Going through it together made us more resilient. 💪
14/ Stay laser focused on solving a narrow set of problems. I failed to do this around the 18 mo mark & got behind because shiny new things excited me. It hurt us & we lost customers. We spent the next 2 years focused on 3-4 major things & significantly surpassed our competitors.
15/ Finally, realize that this is one of the most exciting phases: building the company from scratch. Figuring out what works & what doesn't. Building things that haven't existed. You're starting to cement your company culture too. Have fun, excerise, & take a pic of the team 📸.
If you haven't read it already, here are lessons I learned when becoming "CEO" for the first time: https://t.co/m77U25VDbg

More from Startups

Advertisement
Shekhar Kirani
Shekhar Kirani
@skirani
Lots of startups get stuck
before they get to Product-Market-Fit.

What would be the reasons?

Here are some, I see on a daily basis. They are related to issues with founders or market (in no particular order):

1) Founders haven't studied or trained on basic things of startups: idea validation, market validation, customer value-proposition, team-building, product building, basic finance, and total money required to do few iterations.
A: Work for a startup for a few years and learn.

2) Founders are solving a problem that they face in their daily life at home or work and start solving for themselves before checking whether there are others who care about the same problem. After building the product, they realize the market issue.
A: Idea validation failure

3) Too headstrong and think every potential customer can't imagine the value unless they experience the product. Hence, start building the product.
A: If you are deep and know you are at the same league as in Steve Jobs, this makes sense

4) Founders talk to few friends and colleagues and start building a product. After building the product, they realize there is no high demand for the product.
A: Spend month(s) on the problem and not on the solution.
STARTUPS
Justin Kan
Justin Kan
@justinkan
With @ycombinator #demoday kicking off, @atrium gathered advice from past YC founders.

.@jaltma from @latticeHQ says “Don’t confuse investor interest with product-market fit. You’re about to be on the receiving end of a lot of hype and FOMO - use it to your advantage by taking the money and then keep your burn and ego low.”

.@typesfast from @flexport says “I like to remind myself that even Bruce Springsteen still gets nervous before his concerts. Remember that, and then try to focus on what investors want: First, not to be bored. Second, to get rich(er).”

.@collinmathilde from @frontapp says “Leverage your data to tell a story about what the business has achieved and where it is going. Metrics are necessary, but they are too often shared without a narrative arc.”

.@drusenko from @weebly says “Make it relevant. Investors can live in their own world, so try to find an angle that they can relate to.”
STARTUPS

You May Also Like

Steve Stewart-Williams
Steve Stewart-Williams
@SteveStuWill
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less. https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)
LIFE
Zach Weinersmith
Zach Weinersmith
@ZachWeiner
Hey, for people interested in this stuff, here's a thread about a change we made to running our facebook account:

So, about 5 years ago, we got on facebook. Why? Well, facebook has a big audience and they like to consume on facebook. So, we started posting comics there, even though we got paid nothing and facebook made money off the free content.

Why? Because back then, once in a while, you would say "also hey, I sell books" or "hey, I'm going to be signing at this event" and your facebook followers would actually see it.

Effectively, the implicit old arrangement was "facebook lets me reach readers efficiently, and I supply facebook with free content they run ads on."

Over time, like a bad business partner, facebook basically made it impossible to reach your audience without *paying them*. Thus, you supply them free content on which they run ads, and you get nothing in exchange.
MARKETING
Advertisement
Advertisement
Guillaume Chaslot
Guillaume Chaslot
@gchaslot
The YouTube algorithm that I helped build in 2011 still recommends the flat earth theory by the *hundreds of millions*. This investigation by @RawStory shows some of the real-life consequences of this badly designed AI.


This spring at SxSW, @SusanWojcicki promised "Wikipedia snippets" on debated videos. But they didn't put them on flat earth videos, and instead @YouTube is promoting merchandising such as "NASA lies - Never Trust a Snake". 2/


A few example of flat earth videos that were promoted by YouTube #today:
https://t.co/TumQiX2tlj 3/

https://t.co/uAORIJ5BYX 4/

https://t.co/yOGZ0pLfHG 5/
TECH
Shaun Russell
Shaun Russell
@_ShaunRussell
"I really want to break into Product Management"

make products.

"If only someone would tell me how I can get a startup to notice me."

Make Products.

"I guess it's impossible and I'll never break into the industry."

MAKE PRODUCTS.

Courtesy of @edbrisson's wonderful thread on breaking into comics – https://t.co/TgNblNSCBj – here is why the same applies to Product Management, too.


There is no better way of learning the craft of product, or proving your potential to employers, than just doing it.

You do not need anybody's permission. We don't have diplomas, nor doctorates. We can barely agree on a single standard of what a Product Manager is supposed to do.

But – there is at least one blindingly obvious industry consensus – a Product Manager makes Products.

And they don't need to be kept at the exact right temperature, given endless resource, or carefully protected in order to do this.

They find their own way.
TECH