Startups ​

Take something that people do, and remove a step (or make that step very very easy). That's the key to a successful startup.

The best startup book is one you never open because you're too busy marketing and building your product.

YC Startup Directory is a nice thing to go over to get inspired for things to build. Need to be bold with trying all kinds of ideas.

Try many ideas. Many will fail, some will succeed. The goal is to find the right mix of successful changes to ensure the long-term health and growth of the business.

Wish more startups did calendar timelines with big events like Amie.

I personally believe that eventually all of the greatest companies will be fully open source and transparent. You can out execute any company by being more focused and building what you truly think customers want.

Great management together with being able to make thoughtful decisions fast with fast rollbacks makes a huge difference whether startups succeed or not.

Try to be mindful of tools I use for my startups. Reflect's stack is nice.

Liked this episode as it goes over many elements on what makes startups succeed.

One of the things I've learned no company should ever do is not pay on time. Salary should hit employees accounts at same day every month.

Cal.com Handbook is nice. Open Guide to Equity Compensation is good read.

Notes ​

• Put a price on it. And sell.
• Another way to think about this, and the way we talk about this internally, is that we prefer to communicate through our products.
• I wake up every morning and think about how I can put myself out of business. By that, I mean I think about every way another business can disrupt my profit margins and my current successes. By thinking about what they could do, I can do it myself and innovate my own business.
• I need a higher level of certainty than investors do because my time is more valuable to me than their money is to them. Investors place bets in a portfolio of companies, but I only have one life.
• The most important thing you can do is to get into an iteration cycle where you can measure the impact of your work, have a hypothesis about how making changes will affect those variables, and ship changes regularly. It doesn't even matter that much what the content is - it's the iteration of hypothesis, changes, and measurement that will make you better at a faster rate than anything else we have seen.
• Ask your users how they’d feel if they could no longer use your product. The group that answers ‘very disappointed’ will unlock product/market fit.
• When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist. Which means you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.
• In theory this sort of hill-climbing could get a startup into trouble. They could end up on a local maximum. But in practice that never happens. … The maxima in the space of startup ideas are not spiky and isolated. Most fairly good ideas are adjacent to even better ones.
• This batch of not disappointed users should not impact your product strategy in any way. They’ll request distracting features, present ill-fitting use cases and probably be very vocal, all before they churn out and leave you with a mangled, muddled roadmap. As surprising or painful as it may seem, don’t act on their feedback — it will lead you astray on your quest for product/market fit.
  • Politely disregard those who would not be disappointed without your product. They are so far from loving you that they are essentially a lost cause.
• If you only double down on what users love, your product/market fit score won’t increase. If you only address what holds users back, your competition will likely overtake you.
• To increase your product/market fit score, spend half your time doubling down on what users already love and the other half on addressing what’s holding others back.
• It is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.
• If you don’t have product-market fit, your startup is fucked. You probably don’t have it if: You aren’t growing. You have high churn. Your product is hard to sell. Customers don’t seem to care that much. Here are some simple steps to find product-market fit.
• Speed matters because frontier people like it and will go to the places where speed is possible. It maximizes their comparative advantage. If your field ceases to support speed, you’ll lose frontier people and stagnate.
• Under-valued skills of good startup founders: 1. Ability to create process 2. Writing clearly 3. Delaying gratification 4. Knowing when not to talk 5. Saying no to almost everything, but yes when it truly matters
• Things that founders often regret
• Few founder superpowers: Knowing which questions to ask. Listening before talking. Speaking in analogies. Being able to take feedback. Uninterested in what competition is doing.
• The reason you don't see more startups in the hard sciences is not due to the lack of hybrid talent as this article surmises. It's because:
  1. VCs are reluctant to fund capital intensive startups that have time horizons for exits that are significantly longer than software based startups
  2. The product lifecycle is so much longer, which makes it inherently much riskier. In many cases it can be years before you even get to the point where you can get real feedback on the business model.
  3. There are often other considerations e.g. regulations or interactions with existing products, that are entirely outside of the control of the company that can significantly alter the likelihood of success.
• Produce an infoproduct (book, course, newsletter, etc) in domain X prior to a SaaS in domain X. Much quicker time to money. Gets your name out there and starts attracting happy customers. Teaches you business mechanics while paying you.
• Startup advice:
  1. Focus. You're a small team; just do one thing well.
  2. Weekly cadence. Build a growth team that meets weekly, instead of biweekly or quarterly.
  3. Talk like your customer. Use their language, not yours.
  4. Use less data. When you are small, obsessing over data is pointless.
  5. Replace important debates with experiments and unimportant debates with decisions.
• Margins matter, even in the early days. $24k/mo sounds good, but we never evaluated the COGS of this and how much it really cost us to produce our content. If we realized how low our margins were, we would have made many decisions differently. Watch your COGS.
  • Don't hire people you don't have a absolute need for or people you don't know how to train. People are expensive, so if you hire them, make sure you have something for them to do, and you make sure they do it well. If either of those two are absent, you're wasting money.
  • Your own emotional state will be thrusted onto your company whether you want it to or not. My emotions were the companies emotions. I should have had a wall, between what I felt and what people saw, but they were equal. This crushed the moral of the company, as well as my own.
  • If things are too easy, look harder for problems. Business is not easy. It isn't meant to go smoothly. If it is, try to find the reason it's so easy, and give yourself reasons something could go wrong. Because, something always goes wrong eventually.
  • Love what you do, and if you don't, be self aware. I didn't have a deep passion for PubLoft. Content was not my life's mission. We let Jason invest, and he wanted a huge outcome. but I knew pubLoft was not my life's work. Be self aware about this before you take money.
  • Keep going. It's only a failure if I don't get back up and try again.
• The point of vesting is to exchange shares for value as the value in the form of work is provided over a period of time. In my company we just split all the shares evenly on day one with no vesting schedule.
• If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We launched 3 times. - Brian Chesky
• Customer service is a big differentiator for a startup. Especially in the very beginning, when you have so few users that you can deliver extremely personalized service, and it's the CEO doing it.
• Product research is valuable, but if you can ship an MVP in the a similar time frame, do that instead. Real product data > everything else.
• The faster a space is moving, the more you need to bet on the people than the product.
• Startups never get faster over time, only slower. Your accumulating advantages & inevitable success need to kick in before entropy swallows you.
• Startups are awesome because even if you fail, you’ll still succeed by way of getting one of the best learning experiences of your life.
• Clerky or Stripe Atlas are top choices to make LLC
• Startups should use their capital to eliminate risk. Pick the biggest problems and eliminate them one at a time.
• You are not your startup. Whatever happens to your startup will happen. But take care of yourself - you are important.
• The public is never wrong. When people don't respond to what you do, they're telling you something loud and clear. You're just not listening.
• You do everything differently when you're an owner.
• The market you’re in will determine most of your growth.
• Startup founders should prioritize mental health over 'growth at all costs'.
• Two key areas to optimize for efficient SAAS: 1. Self service. 2. Managed hosting.
• Much of a startup's success comes down to distribution. If an investor can give you money AND distribution.... that's super compelling.
• Letting people go sucks but it’s part of the job for startup founders. Always show respect here. While it may not feel like it at the time it’s almost always better for both parties. Every employee I’ve ever let go moved onto a new role where they were more suited to succeed.
• Work very hard but sustainably with as little stress as possible.
• B2B startup: its better to build for self-service from day 0. a) Forces you to make UX intuitive. b) Allows you to get bottoms up growth. c) You can access lower ACV use cases. Its harder than it seems to build out self-service post launch when you have live user demands.
• MVP should be usable (functional and reliable).
• Starting a company is just taking something that used to annoy you every once in a while and spending every waking minute thinking about it.
• Does this get better or worse as more people use it? Better? You're building a product. Worse? You're building a service.
• Do whatever you think is right; if you end up successful you were right. Everything else are just opinions, ideas or noise. Take them, use them, ignore them. Your choice. You will only win in your own way.
• The longer you’re in the startup game the more you realize how big the gulf is between people who talk and people who execute.
• When a business model is well understood, we should be able to spend our time on what drives the metrics, not what they are.
• Startup ideas framework: What do you want that money can't buy?
• Jeff Bezos’ advice for startups on how to spend their money: Pick the biggest problems and eliminate them one at a time.
• One excellent use for competitors: send your horrible prospective customers to them. When people ask me again and again (rudely) for a discount, after establishing we are not a good fit, I list out a bunch of Bannerbear competitors and tell them to take a look. Having awful customers is like death by a thousand cuts. Don’t tolerate abusive or passive aggressive BS in your customer support. Life is too short!
• Most impactful product advice: use your own product.
• Go slow until you have a great product. Then go fast. The economic efficiency gains from a great product compound everywhere. If you go fast too early, you will fail. Once you have nailed product, go so fast that it scares everyone. If you don’t go fast enough, you will fail.
• If you don’t have the right founders at the start, you’re dead. If you do and you doubt them when things get hard, you’re dead. Work with founders in which you have absolute faith and then back them no matter what — win or die, together.
• If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.
• Many young companies are slow/late to implement regular performance reviews - I always recommend they do sooner vs later.
• Success in startups is directly proportional to the number of hard conversations you are willing to have.
• Many aspiring entrepreneurs get stuck trying to invent a new product to sell. It's a trap. 99.9% of successful businesses sell an established product in a new way.
• Entrepreneurship isn’t about having the right idea. It’s about having an idea and not running out of money until you figure out what makes it right.
• Once you’ve found product market fit, delegating almost everything to people way smarter than you should be your main goal as a startup founder.
• Be bold and do many experiments.
• Winner-take-all effects are a lot rarer and more ephemeral than people thought. Not just gig companies either -- Facebook, Netflix, and many others didn't have invincible network effects.
• Job of a CEO is: 1. Setting company direction. 2. Hiring and retention. 3. Making sure the company doesn't run out of money.

Links ​

• Stripe Atlas - Everything you need to start an internet business.
• Think about Equity
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• Run less software
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  1. Segment to find your supporters and paint a picture of your high-expectation customers.
  2. Analyze feedback to convert on-the-fence users into fanatics.
  3. Build your roadmap by doubling down on what users love and addressing what holds others back.
  4. Repeat the process and make the product/market fit score the most important metric.
• Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company (2019) (HN)
• Startup CEO Reading List
• Steve Jobs on Apple Customer Experience and Innovation
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• Founder's Field Guide for Navigating Crisis (2020) (HN)
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• Startup Ideas (2019)
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• Term sheets explained
• Ask HN: Learning the business-side of things as a developer? (2020)
• How to sell a B2B product (2020) (HN)
• Funnels for Startups: A Primer
• Startup financial models – Templates compared for SaaS (2020) (HN)
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• Surprising Things About Working at Well-Known Tech Unicorns (2020)
• Starting a company in Norway (2020)
• Markets Are 10X Bigger Than Ever (2019)
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• Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enterprise markets? (2020)
• YC Startup Library (HN)
• Anti-A/B-Test Framework
• Start Small, Stay Small book notes
• 10 Tips for Startup Founders (2020)
• How to turn an important spreadsheet into a SaaS business (2020)
• Top company flywheels
• How Uber grew so quickly (2020)
• How to think about building a business from things like dev tools or OSS projects
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• Capbase - Streamlines and automates many parts of your business, freeing up your time and capital to focus on growing your startup.
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• Awesome Startup Deals
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• The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn (2006)
• Startup Stock Options – Why A Good Deal Has Gone Bad (2019)
• Founders of VC backed startups, are you genuinely happy? (2020)
• Ask HN: Is frugality underrated in startups? (2021)
• The Minimalist Entrepreneur - Four-week cohort-based course.
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• 8 things startups can do early on to optimize for focus & productivity (2021)
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• Ask HN: Startup employees getting nothing after acquisition, is this normal? (2021)
• Will it make the boat go faster? This question could also be vital for your early-stage team & company (2021)
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• Ask HN: How do I learn more about entrepreneurship/startups? (2021)
• Paul Graham advice to startup founders (2021)
• Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally (2021) (HN)
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• How we grew Transistor to million dollar revenue (2021)
• Qualities of great CEOs
• Advice on building efficient startups
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• Startupy First Friends
• Non-obvious signals your startup is hitting an inflection point
• The SaaS Org Chart (2021) (HN)
• Ask HN: How did you establish and maintain relationships with your first users? (2021)
• Greatest Hits: Mike Maples on Building Successful Startups and Venture Funds (2021)
• Eric Migicovsky - How to Talk to Users (2019) (Transcript) (Tweet) (Summary)
• The rise of the one-person unicorn (2021) (HN)
• How a big company might crush a startup (2021)
• Alex MacCaw, CEO of Clearbit: My Path as a Founder (2020)
• The five most common mistakes founders make in trying to find Product Market Fit (PMF) (2021)
• AMA: I make $100K+ ARR from my microstartups (2021)
• I started SaaS companies in 2013 and 2021 – how things have changed (HN)
• Compound Manual - Curated library of wealth planning resources for startup founders and employees.
• Compound - Wealth Management for Startup Founders and Employees.
• Five worst mistakes founders do when trying to find product market fit (2021)
• What early business mistake will you never make again? (2021)
• What niche industries still need much better software? (2021)
• On Risk and Imagining the Future (2021)
• What's the best SaaS starter kit? (2021)
• How to Evaluate Startup Offers (2021)
• My Emotions as a CEO (2021) (HN)
• Preferred tools and tech for running a startup
• The SaaS Metrics That Matter (2021) (Tweet) (HN)
• Dividing equity between founders (2009)
• How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder (2021) (HN)
• Cloudflare for SaaS for All (2021) - One-stop shop for SaaS providers looking to provide fast load times, unparalleled redundancy, and the strongest security to their customers.
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• Interviuu - Mock Interviews for YC and ODX.
• Founderkit - Reviews and Recommendations from Leading Startup Founders.
• How to turn chaos in startups into repeatable processes (2021)
• Resources for growing SaaS startup (2021)
• Ask HN: What HN threads most influenced your thinking about startups? (2021)
• Startups people are working on (2021)
• How I helped build a profitable MVP over a weekend (HN)
• Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders? (2021)
• Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs (2021) (HN)
• Technical Co-founders' Guide to Equity Negotiations (2021)
• How to go from being a super hot company to lucky to get acquired in less than 24 months (2021)
• CEO’s job
• CEO's job 2
• Roam's CEO mistakes (2021)
• Deel startup 2021 learnings
• 70 First Co-Founder Dates (HN)
• The Manual by Compound - Curated library of wealth planning resources for startup founders and employees.
• Importance of direct sales in growing revenue (2022)
• Focusing on go-to-market to grow startup (2022)
• Connecting People (2022)
• Startup tech stack I used to automate most admin
• My Notes on the Lean Startup (HN)
• Ranking YC Companies with a Neural Net (2022) (HN)
• Elon Musk's 2003 Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture
• The Things We Did Not Do While Reaching $2M ARR (2022) (HN)
• What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast (2022) (HN)
• On Deck’s Top 100 Companies of 2022
• YC Vibe Check - Semantic search over every YC company ever. (Code)
• The Startup of You Book
• We Need a Middle Class for Startups (2022) (HN)
• How startup employees can protect themselves in a down market, questions to ask and metrics to know while evaluating startups to work at
• I spent two years launching tiny projects (2022) (HN)
• Startups: Instead of thinking about whether you are “default alive” vs “default dead”, think about whether you are “default investable” vs “default uninvestable.”
• How We built a $1M ARR open source SaaS (2022) (HN)
• Launch YC - Launchpad of YC startups.
• MicroFounder - Build a Startup as a Solo Developer.
• Tom Blomfield: Monzo Growth (2022) (HN)
• Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees? (2022)
• Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup (2022)
• Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories? (2022)
• A development process to ship features fast (HN)
• Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO? (2022) (HN)
• SaaS 4 Devs - Awesome collection of content for developers trying to bootstrap their SaaS.
• Playbook of the Incompetent Leader
• Being on a board as an employee (2022) (HN)
• Product Market Fit (HN)
• The Cadence: How to Operate a SaaS Startup (2020)
• Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage? (2022)
• Startups are an act of desperation (2022)
• Startup Restructuring 101 (2022) (HN)
• The Marketplace Library (2021)
• Europe's Youngest Billionaire (2022)
• Startup Lessons from 2 Years Building Airplane.dev (2022)
• Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise? (2023)
• If I asked you about startups, you'd probably give me the skinny on about every book and blog post ever written
• My Fifth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder (2023) (HN)
• Ask HN: Are Paul Graham's Classic Startup Essays Outdated? (2023)
• Reflect's startup stack (2023)
• What I Learned at Stripe (2022) (HN)
• Startup Decoupling & Reckoning (2023)
• Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey? (2023)
• Things you think as a first time founder that just ain’t so
• Startup Incorporation for Founders: A new handbook (HN)
• What I learned as a 2x startup founder of Clearbit & Reflect | Alex MacCaw (2023)
• How a startup loses its spark (2023) (HN)

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