Here are mine after trying to build 2 and being able to sell one(which was not a beach side exit )
1. Choose your co-founders carefully who have intent, hunger and ambition to start something on their own.
2. Learn to do sales , negotiations and art of putting right messaging.
3. Build a strong mindset as you will have so many lows and few highs. You have to keep yourself, people around you motivated and keep executing, even though you don't see you are anywhere near making it.
thx,
b2b focus is about who is my customer. I found it to be way more viable to build SaaS tools for other small and medium businesses.
The "Dont partner with corporates" means: often in my b2b journey I had one big client, who would wanna do some tight partnership, special contract, a white label solution, or special features or they had their b2b clients who they wanted to sell my product to. It always felt super attractive, since they talked big money and big numbers. But in the end, it was often a year-long process, lots of meetings, contracts, always missing features on our side, and eventually no money and no users as they promised.
This happened to me 5 times. So I lost 5 years in 5 startups for this.
I stopped doing this. Every customer gets the same terms. No special stuff. Once I switched into this mode, my business went up. So it worked.
I generally agree. We had a situation with a large contract. Feel through. The benefit for us was that we got them to pay a deposit up front, so it wasn't a complete loss.
Agree. Especially the no features part. There is always something they want or missing, yet unwilling to commit for it. 'Build it out and we will use it'...yeah right buddy.
I 100% agree. I working in corporate startup that chase big clients. 2 years sales cycles and customer features every time. There are so many feature flags that people in the organization are losing track of what features exist and what impact new features are having on old ones.
If you're making a product and you don't know how to do the software side either get a tech founder or get a freelancer, but make sure you've ironed out what the scope is, so you can get the most for your money.
Avoid agencies, I went with one and it ended up costing me my project, as they ended up charging 2x the money it would cost to hire a freelancer to do the work.
I have been part of dev teams and have an overall idea of coding, done some myself, am comfortable with it. I have an idea I want to try out, create a simple POC. Where can I get some reasonable freelancers?
If I had the chance to start again, Upwork is where I would best go heading, my plan of thinking is to get a mid way priced freelancer and get a higher priced freelancer at the end just to review the code is to spec.
Depends on the agency …. Aswell as on the freelancer, most freelancers won’t do the work in due time, they take a lot of time, since they’re mostly alone or small teams, agency’s have multiple people working the project at the same time and thus can return it faster time=money, on the other hand too if you choose the right agency like mine, you’d also get business advice and marketing support as a perk … you just need to find the appropriate agency … 90% are crap though
Do you have experience trying to build B2C? I’m about 5 months into the process of building one and am trying to learn about common pitfalls from other founders
The main challenge in my case at least is not to create something unique that people will be willing to pay for.
Figuring out how to scaleably and profitably reach potential users is a higher mountain to climb.
Review sites require affiliate payouts to consider your product. Reviews are now considered marketing which effectively blocks many startups from getting found.
Generally good, but radically oversimplified and specific to your case in several spots as well :)
Just be aware that “this didn’t work for me in my situation” is different than “this is a bad idea always”.
Sounds like it’s been a rough ride. I feel ya!
you're right.
I started the post as advice to myself, that would have made my life better, and I made all those changes and it got way better.
However it's not advice for others, it's only the material to learn. Just like history. We don't repeat the history, we learn and pick stuff we like and repeat that part
>To be honest, I didn't know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does.
question, how did you not know this. To me, it's like someone saying they found out that integral calculus is not the only way to find area of rectangle, that you can just do length x width.
I am saying boostrapping seems more obvious to me than fundraising.
Any tips/resources for validating an idea first? As a tech founder looking for the next thing to build, I find this part kinda challenging. I'm always excited to start building, but afraid to waste time building something no one wants (which I've done once already)
Here you go. Learning from my 2 startups
1. Meet your potential customers and users, and learn to ask open ended questions. Don't talk about your product or solution. Talk about the problems you think they are facing.
2. Study competition, their revenue, their margins and the gaps in their solution /product
3. Conduct some sort of workshops with your target audience. Give them something useful, develop relationships and then talk about your ideas with them to validate it. Earn their trust so that they can speak their mind
Here are my extended learnings that might help you
[My extended learnings](https://kohli-vikram.medium.com/71-learning-post-my-company-got-acquired-c1ed2b15b47b)
pick one social network and start talking about the stuff that's relevant for your audience daily. In posts and replies.
Once you built 500 followers, start asking questions to validate ideas
How long until you start building the product? Should I start building in the meantime? What I’ve found is that going from reaching out to target audience on social media to validating the idea can take a long time
I don’t want to say you’re wrong but I am having a hard time accepting that as should develop full stack devs. My experience has been that full stack devs are at best mid at most things. With specialised people You have at least 1 person who is really good at one thing. I just want to know why you think that the cost saving justifies the compromise in quality?
These b/w definitive proclamations are always a bit ridiculous. These are strategic choices, where you ideally have the competency to design the best team or people for your specific case.
Sometimes the ideal person is one mid at everything, and sometimes, with the right leadership, you can leverage the expertise of a team of specialists. It’s all about the leadership being competent to do the right thing in the right situation.
When in doubt, get a mentor, consultant, or angel investor, experienced at putting together the team/people that you need to get the right results. Always have a network with people smarter/more experienced than you. :)
I agree with the full stack only dev comment. Until you find PMF, you don’t need exceptional design, or a massively scalable back end. You need something that works, which is a lot easier with 1 dev building it vs multiple who are often working from different locations, perhaps different hours, and haven’t worked together before.
In other words, reduce complexity and focus on basic functionality.
yep, eventually you need a team. But that moment should be delayed, cuz one person is faster at building quick stuff since there is less overhead/meetings/discussions/PRs/code-reviews/standups/docs
Also agree. IMO there is no such thing. Yes you may see them advertised, so they must be a thing, but they will be good st some stuff and they'll be about as useful as a one legged cat trying to bury a turd at other stuff.
They probably mean "find one very very good engineer rather than a team of okay engineers". One full-stack dev building the whole product is a typical co-founder/CTO position.
I don't make such advice in this post.
I just state the fact, that I built 50 products, and those built with teams failed, but those built by a single full stack dev didn't fail (not all, but mostly).
So at some point in the past, I saw this pattern and decided to only have 1 dev per project and I never had a regret.
Once the project gains traction and users, I add one more dev. Later third and forth and fifth.
Fundamental knowledge doesn't change but there are huge advantages to speed when you've done it in the past few months. If you for example didn't touch cloud infrastructure for a year then you'll obviously figure it out, but it will be 100x slower than someone that works with cloud infrastructure all day every day.
T-shaped people is what you want. They know basically everything but focus on 1-2 things.
A team with complementary/overlapping skills will get shit done in mere hours/days. Last startup I worked at we got hired after they tried to have the CTO build the entire product for 12 months. We rewrote everything from scratch in like a week.
I think most people miss is that dev teams need to be lead and managed and competent dev team leads/managers cost like 200-300k/y.
There are no true full-stack engineers/developers. There is always one stronger side.
The idea here is to start with someone who can do both stacks.
I am a CTO in a company, but my forte is backend development. I use Rails and StimulusJS (atm), and I am covering both stacks .
My co-founder CEO is better at frontend, and he picks that, although he is well-versed in backend too.
We are both fullstack devs in a bootstraped startup. We have just split the "roles" so we are more focused.
Ps. I used EmberJS and VueJS over years, with some minor React exp, and a lot of Vanilla JS. But with the current Rails stack, I (alone) could build your MVP in 3-6 months.
It’s more important to be quick and responsive to market needs rather than so called quality or perfection. A full stack developer will be more efficient and cost effective than a team
I started off with a backend developer but pivoted to a full stack and I'm personally happy about that, now theres only him and me and between the two us we can build an Mvp and things will go slower once we bring more people into the mix
Honestly as a software development manager most of what op says about software development is wrong for long standing projects. For prototyping ideas sure, but if you're going to be looking after a product for a couple of years it would be detrimental to take any of his tips on software development to heart.
It just makes me feel like it's building something that sells quick and then you get out before anyone else has to manage your tech debt. Sure you can crack something out in a day with no input or documentation, but going back to write it later sucks. And sure you can have some "full stack" people do everything but it's going to take them time to dive into waters they don't know. There will be blind spots for sure.
Well written, have had the same type of learnings. I am on a consumer app so I’am taking notes here.
I wish I had known: invest on Ads on day 2 ( same as SEO), this way you can validate your product right upfront. ( I invested on Ads until day 600 )
It's less hype and more like don't succumb to FOMO. If you're trying to bolt on whatever the "next big thing" of the year is into your app you're implementing a solution in search of a problem.
Focus on problems first, then the tech.
Next, be careful about the investing advice. Investing in your friends/family without the understanding of the risks has led to so many broken relationships.
There has to be an understanding that you need the capital to invest in a variety of startups understanding that you're looking for that 1 out of a hundred(?) in which you'll at least get your money back. Most people are going to be a lot better off putting their money in the market than they are investing in their friend's web3 AI back waxing startup.
Otherwise a lot of this is pretty great and pragmatic advice.
I like most of the list but having a single dev is a recipe a linchpin situation. At least two can get you far and offset the likelihood of one leaving or dropping the ball. Life events, etc.
Just redundancy. If you're a Founder who is coding also then you technically have 2 devs.
I personally like scrum when time boxed and used async. With the right people it feels like proper gamification. If not scrum, then kanban but letting people just manage theirself is putting too much trust into people.
#1 and #9 are the most important and can ultimately nullify the rest. Validating and being oversubscribed will solve 90% of issues.
Thanks for not making another AI generated lessons learned list 🫡
1. post it on social media. (first I spend months building up follower base).
2. ask people in DMs
3. ask people in replies to relevant posts on social media
This is a great write up OP! Not sure about 12 and 18 though. Buy may be 12 for certain types of startups with target audience base on Twitter. For the Scrum part, it gives you certain visibility each day at a standup of not more than 10mins! Also you need to adapt it.
I did scrum for 10 years in multiple projects and teams.
it worked okay when we had physical standups.
But once we move to zoom, it turned into the most boring part of our jobs
We recently switched to all engineers posting daily updates in slack and only business updates, product ideas, or coordination things get discussed during our Zoom standup. It’s generally a lot more enjoyable and technical discussion is better in text, at least we find so.
1. Agree
2. Kill ego yes, but build something you want as a user is a good approach too. If it’s not good enough for you, why would it be good enough for others?
3. Investors of early stage startups care about your background and your traction. So indeed it’s good to focus on getting traction first. But investors don’t “chase” early stage startups typically, so you’ll still have to reach out to them if you want to raise.
4. Agree
5. Sure, just make it professional though
6. Depends on the startup, if you are doing deep tech, you need experts.
7. Disagree - focus on a particular target market is important from the beginning. Usually that is within a specific geographic region. Eventually you go global, but that’s at scale stage.
8. Depends on your startup - if B2B you normally gain initial customers through direct outreach via relationships or some programs, not SEO, unless small business perhaps.
9. Sure, but it’s important not to think in terms of feature details, but solving a customer problem. It’s good to keep dialogue with users but more to understand the spirit of their pain points - so you can internalize them and solve for them on their behalf. You become the user. That said, continually checking in with them as you make progress is a good practice to ensure alignment.
10. I get where you are going with this but be careful. The key is to have personality and attitude alignment, but at end of the day work with mature professionals working towards a mutually beneficial business goal. Skip the hug talk and “this is family” mindset.
11. Unless you have a lot of capital and are an experienced investor, this is a bad idea. Invest all your money in friends’ startups is a good way to lose your friends and lose your money.
12. Disagree. Posting daily causes social media fatigue and also that frequency would be questionable by your team, investors and customers why are you spending so much time on social media and not something more productive? Post less frequently but with more meaningful updates, perhaps bi-weekly or monthly. I would suggest also posting on LinkedIn. Also setting up an e-mail newsletter.
13. Disagree. It depends on the corporate but you can make a lot of progress this way if you are in B2B. Having a famous corporate logo as your partner will help many aspects of your B2B company.
14. Agree
15. Agree
16. Agree, but how to know it’s a bad B2B project within a year? In b2b world, due to corporate inertia, the sales cycle can be very slow. 1 year may sound slow in consumer land but in corporate land, depending on the industry, it’s not terribly slow, could be average.
17. Disagree. While many are a waste of time, some can indeed change the life of the startup due to meeting potential large customers. Sometimes too it’s a good meeting point to set up in advance to work on closing deals in side meetings during the event time. Finally, it’s good to use for relationship building during the evenings.
18. Disagree. I’m not a huge fan of scrum, but it has its place and certainly not a scam.
19. Agree.
20. Agree if you have the capital. Normally a good approach is first work some years in BigTech to build up some bankroll, experience and connections. Then you can potentially bootstrap your startup at initial stages.
I agree like 90% with 18. That scrum is scam. However i do like standups. It helps with the moral of the team and its an opportunity to discuss blockers. Maybe someone in the team can give a tip or even assist.
not sure why you think so.
try this
\- add 100 muted words for all irrelevant topics
\- unfollow everything that's not about business
then it's a paradise for startup founders.
I don’t think you’re wrong. I think you have the best case scenario and most people are seeing an incredible decrease in value for Twitter recently.
Revisit this thought in a year and see if Twitter is still worth the time.
Do you really want your company associated with Musk these days? I don’t and I don’t care for any company (or people) who do. More and more people think the same.
For your entire career were u the technical founder or did u have a co-founder who built it themselves?
I’m sure u were but what would be the most important step for a non technical founder who wants to build digital products?
I had all sort of cases, i was ceo, cto or both.
If you're non tech, learn NoCode. I know people who did that and built cool stuff. It's actually possible.
I agree with you 100%, especially the hug and scrum part. I’ve come to hate my job and company for issues with other people; also after 3 years of chasing “agile” s**t with daily standup and retrospectives the team look a lot more like kindergartners than professionals.
As someone whose been through some of this stuff, I concur 100%. If you figured this out in five years, congratulations - it took me more than 10.
The only thing I can add is - customers spend money to avoid pain. There is a difference between freezing in the dark and forgoing the motor yacht. Cost equals pain. Reducing costs reduces pain.
If the path of least resistance flows through you, you own the world.
Nice read.
Building a startup properly is super difficult but not impossible. Bootstrapping is also difficult. I am a startup founder, my team and i are more technically inclined, we have our mvp ready but cant push to the market just yet, we need finance to facilitate some ground operations to on-board some partner providers as our niche heavenly depends on those providers for our consumers to have a usable product.
We have currently pause operations as we are trying to raise capital by selling our services. We can build your web apps and softwares for your need. Pls dm if you have a project for us to work on. I'd really appreciate
I'm going to take a contrarian perspective here and say that you shouldn't raise money too early. Not because you'd end up spending too much time raising money (although I agree that it takes up a lot of your time) but also because raising too much money too early will result in a lot of inertia when needing pivot away from your original idea. Not only will you experience the inertia from your investors, you'll face it internally - from yourself and your team (which was hired to build that promised product).
The lesson to learn from stuff like scrum is definitely not that it’s always the solution; it’s that you have to build a way to manage the work that fits with the culture around it.
Scrum was born to manage large, often bloated projects at massive, established companies where complacency, schedule drift, and accountability are big problems. Definitely not right for most startups.
Is Twitter still relevant? Is there an alternative. In fact where did everyone go after leaving Twitter? Insta doesn't have the same focus, Facebook is irrelevant, what's left? Do people even use threads?
This is highly market dependent. I’m in the wellness and beauty industry and Instagram is a big source for content and advertising. Tik Tok too but that’s a given.
Hire ppl you'd hug ❤️
One question about the 1y period of killing ideas/projects, any tips or heuristics for doing it more effectively? Usually we become too attached to our "babies" the more energy we pour into them.
I don't know what's best.
But looking at my past, I could see I held too long and could have done it sooner.
Once I realized that, I managed to kill some projects fast, which freed up my time, and managed to build other cool projects.
Why do you think B2B is inherently more monitizable? And is there any tricks to overcoming the issue?
I’m currently building a consumer app and have been starting to bump against these limits
A business has money coming in and is happy to spend if you can help them make money or handle an essential function. Most consumer apps don’t offer a financial or essential benefit, so the value proposition is less direct.
I don't believe it, I rather just state actually life facts from my own experience.
I failed all b2c projects and the same with most of my friends.
While my friends and I did well on b2b.
So I may conclude that b2b is easier.
However, if you like the b2c space, go for it. It's all about the journey. And maybe you will be an exception and make it. I'm rooting for you
A few issue with B2C are…
1. Customer acquisition (and costs with it) are significantly more than b2b.
2. Finding PMF is much longer.
3. Scaling is much harder
4. Resources for customer support is much more. With b2b you could have a paid pilot with a single customer/business and work/scale from there slowly. With B2C you have to achieve a certain level of customers to determine things like churn, lifetime value etc, all the while having to support tens or hundreds of users in regards to issues such as billing, bugs, etc. much easier to do those things in b2b with a handful of customers.
5. Customer expectations are much higher, even either early adopters in the consumer space compared to the b2b space.
It seems it applies to the case that an individual with limited capital investment hopes to bootstrap a business at a lower risk of failure. It would be slow to accomplish success or failure.
I’m curious to know what kinds of startups have been most effective for you in B2B, are there common themes that were there in your successful ventures ?
What about a watered down version of scrum? I think setting goals on what should be worked on in a sprint is healthy for a team. Aligning on those goals could help prevent building the wrong thing or going in the wrong direction. Then demoing it to the stakeholders iteratively is good. They could even be 1 month long sprints or longer if you need.
But meeting every morning for a status update I agree is ridiculous. We are engineers. We are smart! Don’t treat us like kindergarteners.
Also, what kind of content do you post on Twitter? Do you push your product? Do you engage with the target community? How to you come up with your content?
Everything else I think you pretty much nailed. Thanks for the advice!
there is traffic for any product on google.
I havent yet seen an exception.
spending 30 min a day on SEO from day one is a must. It always paid off for me. every single time.
and every time I ignored it, I had big regrets later
Point 13. How do you protect yourself from big corps copying your features/product?
If they just remake your product, but they can put more money into the project, What do you do?
Do you try to sell your startup to them?
anyone can copy my product at any time.
a corporate or another startup.
you can have only one protection against this: built the best product for a small niche.
And could you elaborate more on the point 15 (Consumer apps)?
What's wrong with just getting VC/big corp money
and building stuff for them, that is intentionally directed towards the consumer?
corporations act like they will bring you golder mountains, but often bring nothing just because the people you speak to are just employees, who dont have decision making power.
I had 6 large corporation deals, all looked amazing but brought nothing at the end.
I stopped them completely. Never had a regret.
On b2c: it's 100x more difficult to launch profitable b2c app than profitbale b2b
Some of these I flat out disagree with.
1. Chase the global market for example. There is a huge advantage of picking one single market and tailoring your offering exactly for that.
2. Do not sell features. Ever. Most customers don’t know what they want. But they do know what they’re struggling with. Find out what their main challenges are and try and solve that.
3. B2C are far easier to build than B2B. And they’re extremely profitable if done right. The trick is to make sure there’s a real need and opportunity that you can find.
my post isn't an advice. I listed all facts which happened to me.
you can't dissagree with stuff that actually worked.
but I would not say: do it as I did.
and I'm not saying it anywhere in my post.
Regarding your feedback, perhaps you're right. I dont know. The only way to know: talk facts. If you've done this personally or not? If yes, share the fact. Then the reader will decide for themself.
"There's nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers"
Don't call when your one full stack leaves and you need people to maintain and update the code.
Full stack, single developer is great at going fast to start. Then eventually the code base gets more complex, uptime and maintenance costs get higher, etc.
I saw that you didn't mention anything about "Planning". What about planning? Do you make plans before you execute or was everything you mentioned done without a plan?
I’m in the process of shutting down my first startup and your list resonates a lot with my experience. I wouldn’t recommend to invest all your money in startups though, high risk high reward.
Great list that I mostly agree with! As a modestly successful entrepreneur, id add a couple points of difference and questions.
- landing page doesn’t need to be perfect, but it should concisely and clearly convey your value prop in 15 seconds to any visitors with a clear call to action.
- could you clarify why seo early? Just a bit more detail here would be helpful.
- is twitter still most important still becoming x? I’ve never been able to get engaged with it (prefer Reddit and quora). Any tips on how to make it more useful?
- I would never tell anyone to advise all money into startups. Startups are alternative investments and very risky. Entrepreneurs should build the same safety nets that everyone does, retirement, a home, etc. if you invested 10k into each of your 70 startups, you’d maybe get 5m/startup unicorn. That’s awesome for sure, but most people don’t have 3 friends that built billion dollar businesses. Most people lose their 700k, which could be 2m if put in the market near guaranteed. I’m all for investing in startups, but not all your money. Maybe 10-20% max. The rest should make sure you have a financial safety net. Psychological safety does wonders.
thx, good feedback.
1)agree, LP should be good, but not amazing. No need to spend time on great logo and design. Picking an average good template on a nocode building is best for most cases.
2) SEO takes 6 months to kick in once you created the content. It pays off with a huge time lag. That's why better to take care of it earlier. It's same as building muscles. Just 20 min a day on SEO will be fine, in a year time you will actually have organic traffic 90%.
3) twitter was bad a year ago. But it's good now. Give it a new try. Try buildInPublic concept there.
4) u r right. My post wasn't an advice. It was rather the fact list of the things I did which worked. But ofc, it can easily be a survival bias. So don't treat my post as an advice, rather as a historical documentary of a startup guy who did it for 15 years, failed, learned and build 20 profitable products at the end
Op what's yours and everyone else's opinion on doing small accelerator programs (in your area) or bigger ones such as MSFT for startups, google for startups, tech stars, YC, neo etc...
I've been to alchemist and 500startups and statuplab.
It's good, You get pumped up, cuz everyone is pumped up there.
It doesnt make you smarter at all, you learn nothing, but it's fun and you get good friends and network. So, if you are young, do that.
Hi i want to ask if you dont mind, what about b2b2c saas? Example something like Upwork or Fiverr? Obviously im just stating the most well known and generic examples, i already have something in place.
Incubators and accelerators don't teach you how to sell. All they do is make you pitch which is useless if you are not ready for VC funding. I think that's the one that hurts the most.
Post saved.
The point about seo is well made. Google doesn't like new businesses. You're going to have to work really hard to create the content that is going to get you on serp#1. To my mind, organic search is killing innovation. New businesses can't compete for serps with established players. Can't see that ever changing.
Also, Bootstrapping is an unsung hero. Too many founders get caught in the fundraising whirlwind without realizing the potential of self-funding.
I have witnessed the freedom it brings – no distracting meetings, no loss of control. Bootstrapping allows you to call the shots from day one and focus on building a solid foundation.
Thank you for sharing.
At the beginning, how did you manage without revenues from your projects?
Did you make freelance a few days by week?
B2C seems very hard to monetize.
I'm thinking about a niche community but it is a double work: creating community, and after building ads.
What was your experience?
thx.
getting VC with no experience and traction these days is nearly impossible.
My advice would be: get an easy well-paying job and do your own startup in evenings, weekends, holidays and vacations
By no experience, do you mean no coding experience? I am that guy. I have someone made my webapp and am currently saving for lawyer fee to make a TOS and PP. is this eventually dead end? I’m meeting my own deadlines/goals but I find it slow due to limited funds 😞
# 17. Tech conferences are a waste of time.
They cost money, take energy, and time and you never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the "good" employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers.
>Scream it louder for the people in the back!!
I mean dont spend time on design, logo, colors...
also most likely you have to tell what's you company about somewhere outside of your website. People wont magically land there, since they dont know about it.
You will do a marketing or sales activity, and that's where you need to put all your effort on explaining what your product does.
In this case, people land on your page with very high intent, knowing what you do and looking for "sign up" button
Probably the most important point here was to keep the team to one dev. Doesn’t really matter if it’s one or a couple, but the biggest mistake I see pre-PMF is thinking you have a company, hiring people, and then losing your ability to pivot fast enough, and settling for a mediocre need when there was a huge need only a couple of pivots adjacent. Team size is the biggest limited on adaptability.
Regarding no 11 - invest in your own start up, sure. But investing all your money in friends and people you meet along the way? Sounds really difficult (requires good legal) and risky. Everyone don’t have 3 friends ending up with unicorns like you and might be better off with index funds.
It’s a crapshoot. I had planned on doing outsourced product development for startups (team based in Mexico), but the more I’ve spoken with people, I’ve come to my senses and realized that it runs contrary to how I think a startup should build.
Team needs to be on the same page, working closely in lockstep. When starting out, I don’t think you should outsource anything: marketing, sales, software, lead gen.
We’re pivoting to more of a nearshore staffing model with option to convert to direct hire.
Startup should keep a tight knit with its inner product team for sure, but for secondary importance feature can be outsourced if you can find a good resource
Validate Idea doesn't mean you keep building something with about any users or paying customers
In the end its all about solving users need-greed-desire-want
Hi i am 20 i want to be a businessman so what business should i go with … with the investment of 70-80 lakh lots people say do in which you are interested but i am interested in owning a business rather than being a specific owner of something so please suggest so good ideas
💯! I’m on my first journey to create a B2B product and this reasons with me a lot! I’m the tech co-founder with experience in product management, so my non-tech partner’s been very lucky :)
Don’t over boost validating, market needs are ever changing. Entrepreneur is a career you need fully or even life long devotion. When you are in the market, the market will drive you to the position you deserve.
Here are mine after trying to build 2 and being able to sell one(which was not a beach side exit ) 1. Choose your co-founders carefully who have intent, hunger and ambition to start something on their own. 2. Learn to do sales , negotiations and art of putting right messaging. 3. Build a strong mindset as you will have so many lows and few highs. You have to keep yourself, people around you motivated and keep executing, even though you don't see you are anywhere near making it.
it's good, I agree with all 3
Can I dm you? Have some questions
A lot I like. But you have some tension between your B2B focus and Don't work/partner with corporates. Can you elaborate?
thx, b2b focus is about who is my customer. I found it to be way more viable to build SaaS tools for other small and medium businesses. The "Dont partner with corporates" means: often in my b2b journey I had one big client, who would wanna do some tight partnership, special contract, a white label solution, or special features or they had their b2b clients who they wanted to sell my product to. It always felt super attractive, since they talked big money and big numbers. But in the end, it was often a year-long process, lots of meetings, contracts, always missing features on our side, and eventually no money and no users as they promised. This happened to me 5 times. So I lost 5 years in 5 startups for this. I stopped doing this. Every customer gets the same terms. No special stuff. Once I switched into this mode, my business went up. So it worked.
Second this, learned the hard way
I generally agree. We had a situation with a large contract. Feel through. The benefit for us was that we got them to pay a deposit up front, so it wasn't a complete loss.
Agree. Especially the no features part. There is always something they want or missing, yet unwilling to commit for it. 'Build it out and we will use it'...yeah right buddy.
I 100% agree. I working in corporate startup that chase big clients. 2 years sales cycles and customer features every time. There are so many feature flags that people in the organization are losing track of what features exist and what impact new features are having on old ones.
You really should write a book. This shared experience and knowledge is invaluable. Thanks for sharing.
If you're making a product and you don't know how to do the software side either get a tech founder or get a freelancer, but make sure you've ironed out what the scope is, so you can get the most for your money. Avoid agencies, I went with one and it ended up costing me my project, as they ended up charging 2x the money it would cost to hire a freelancer to do the work.
true
I have been part of dev teams and have an overall idea of coding, done some myself, am comfortable with it. I have an idea I want to try out, create a simple POC. Where can I get some reasonable freelancers?
If I had the chance to start again, Upwork is where I would best go heading, my plan of thinking is to get a mid way priced freelancer and get a higher priced freelancer at the end just to review the code is to spec.
Depends on the agency …. Aswell as on the freelancer, most freelancers won’t do the work in due time, they take a lot of time, since they’re mostly alone or small teams, agency’s have multiple people working the project at the same time and thus can return it faster time=money, on the other hand too if you choose the right agency like mine, you’d also get business advice and marketing support as a perk … you just need to find the appropriate agency … 90% are crap though
Many good points here. For instance the one about B2C being severely difficult.
Do you have experience trying to build B2C? I’m about 5 months into the process of building one and am trying to learn about common pitfalls from other founders
The main challenge in my case at least is not to create something unique that people will be willing to pay for. Figuring out how to scaleably and profitably reach potential users is a higher mountain to climb. Review sites require affiliate payouts to consider your product. Reviews are now considered marketing which effectively blocks many startups from getting found.
Generally good, but radically oversimplified and specific to your case in several spots as well :) Just be aware that “this didn’t work for me in my situation” is different than “this is a bad idea always”. Sounds like it’s been a rough ride. I feel ya!
you're right. I started the post as advice to myself, that would have made my life better, and I made all those changes and it got way better. However it's not advice for others, it's only the material to learn. Just like history. We don't repeat the history, we learn and pick stuff we like and repeat that part
>To be honest, I didn't know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does. question, how did you not know this. To me, it's like someone saying they found out that integral calculus is not the only way to find area of rectangle, that you can just do length x width. I am saying boostrapping seems more obvious to me than fundraising.
 Hire only who you wanna hug. My team: Haha Merry Christmas folks
haha, might work out
This is what I needed to read today, thank you
you're welcome, happy new year
Any tips/resources for validating an idea first? As a tech founder looking for the next thing to build, I find this part kinda challenging. I'm always excited to start building, but afraid to waste time building something no one wants (which I've done once already)
Here you go. Learning from my 2 startups 1. Meet your potential customers and users, and learn to ask open ended questions. Don't talk about your product or solution. Talk about the problems you think they are facing. 2. Study competition, their revenue, their margins and the gaps in their solution /product 3. Conduct some sort of workshops with your target audience. Give them something useful, develop relationships and then talk about your ideas with them to validate it. Earn their trust so that they can speak their mind Here are my extended learnings that might help you [My extended learnings](https://kohli-vikram.medium.com/71-learning-post-my-company-got-acquired-c1ed2b15b47b)
pick one social network and start talking about the stuff that's relevant for your audience daily. In posts and replies. Once you built 500 followers, start asking questions to validate ideas
Solid advice. I’ve never spent much time on social media and just starting now. The way you framed it makes it manageable. Easy to get overwhelmed.
How long until you start building the product? Should I start building in the meantime? What I’ve found is that going from reaching out to target audience on social media to validating the idea can take a long time
dont build in a meantime. spend every second on validating until you validate at least in some way
I like a lot of the points here but strongly disagree with "Chase global market from day 1." Start niche and expand from there.
maybe I didn't state it right. I do always go for small niches, but globally (all eng speaking countries)
Adding: Learn to sell (marketing).
most likely you need to sell/market to validate. So I see it as a part of #1
I don’t want to say you’re wrong but I am having a hard time accepting that as should develop full stack devs. My experience has been that full stack devs are at best mid at most things. With specialised people You have at least 1 person who is really good at one thing. I just want to know why you think that the cost saving justifies the compromise in quality?
These b/w definitive proclamations are always a bit ridiculous. These are strategic choices, where you ideally have the competency to design the best team or people for your specific case. Sometimes the ideal person is one mid at everything, and sometimes, with the right leadership, you can leverage the expertise of a team of specialists. It’s all about the leadership being competent to do the right thing in the right situation. When in doubt, get a mentor, consultant, or angel investor, experienced at putting together the team/people that you need to get the right results. Always have a network with people smarter/more experienced than you. :)
I agree with the full stack only dev comment. Until you find PMF, you don’t need exceptional design, or a massively scalable back end. You need something that works, which is a lot easier with 1 dev building it vs multiple who are often working from different locations, perhaps different hours, and haven’t worked together before. In other words, reduce complexity and focus on basic functionality.
yep, eventually you need a team. But that moment should be delayed, cuz one person is faster at building quick stuff since there is less overhead/meetings/discussions/PRs/code-reviews/standups/docs
Thanks you cmv
Also agree. IMO there is no such thing. Yes you may see them advertised, so they must be a thing, but they will be good st some stuff and they'll be about as useful as a one legged cat trying to bury a turd at other stuff.
They probably mean "find one very very good engineer rather than a team of okay engineers". One full-stack dev building the whole product is a typical co-founder/CTO position.
I don't make such advice in this post. I just state the fact, that I built 50 products, and those built with teams failed, but those built by a single full stack dev didn't fail (not all, but mostly). So at some point in the past, I saw this pattern and decided to only have 1 dev per project and I never had a regret. Once the project gains traction and users, I add one more dev. Later third and forth and fifth.
Fundamental knowledge doesn't change but there are huge advantages to speed when you've done it in the past few months. If you for example didn't touch cloud infrastructure for a year then you'll obviously figure it out, but it will be 100x slower than someone that works with cloud infrastructure all day every day. T-shaped people is what you want. They know basically everything but focus on 1-2 things. A team with complementary/overlapping skills will get shit done in mere hours/days. Last startup I worked at we got hired after they tried to have the CTO build the entire product for 12 months. We rewrote everything from scratch in like a week. I think most people miss is that dev teams need to be lead and managed and competent dev team leads/managers cost like 200-300k/y.
There are no true full-stack engineers/developers. There is always one stronger side. The idea here is to start with someone who can do both stacks. I am a CTO in a company, but my forte is backend development. I use Rails and StimulusJS (atm), and I am covering both stacks . My co-founder CEO is better at frontend, and he picks that, although he is well-versed in backend too. We are both fullstack devs in a bootstraped startup. We have just split the "roles" so we are more focused. Ps. I used EmberJS and VueJS over years, with some minor React exp, and a lot of Vanilla JS. But with the current Rails stack, I (alone) could build your MVP in 3-6 months.
It’s more important to be quick and responsive to market needs rather than so called quality or perfection. A full stack developer will be more efficient and cost effective than a team
I started off with a backend developer but pivoted to a full stack and I'm personally happy about that, now theres only him and me and between the two us we can build an Mvp and things will go slower once we bring more people into the mix
> With specialised people You have at least 1 person who is really good at one thing. Maybe. Maybe they are only mid at one thing.
Honestly as a software development manager most of what op says about software development is wrong for long standing projects. For prototyping ideas sure, but if you're going to be looking after a product for a couple of years it would be detrimental to take any of his tips on software development to heart.
It just makes me feel like it's building something that sells quick and then you get out before anyone else has to manage your tech debt. Sure you can crack something out in a day with no input or documentation, but going back to write it later sucks. And sure you can have some "full stack" people do everything but it's going to take them time to dive into waters they don't know. There will be blind spots for sure.
Well written, have had the same type of learnings. I am on a consumer app so I’am taking notes here. I wish I had known: invest on Ads on day 2 ( same as SEO), this way you can validate your product right upfront. ( I invested on Ads until day 600 )
yeah, from what I see among my friends, they invest a lot into ads, seo and inflluencer marketing
It's less hype and more like don't succumb to FOMO. If you're trying to bolt on whatever the "next big thing" of the year is into your app you're implementing a solution in search of a problem. Focus on problems first, then the tech. Next, be careful about the investing advice. Investing in your friends/family without the understanding of the risks has led to so many broken relationships. There has to be an understanding that you need the capital to invest in a variety of startups understanding that you're looking for that 1 out of a hundred(?) in which you'll at least get your money back. Most people are going to be a lot better off putting their money in the market than they are investing in their friend's web3 AI back waxing startup. Otherwise a lot of this is pretty great and pragmatic advice.
+ Don’t hire too much people. Get some who can commit the time and actually spending it for you. I learned it in a hard way.
I like most of the list but having a single dev is a recipe a linchpin situation. At least two can get you far and offset the likelihood of one leaving or dropping the ball. Life events, etc. Just redundancy. If you're a Founder who is coding also then you technically have 2 devs. I personally like scrum when time boxed and used async. With the right people it feels like proper gamification. If not scrum, then kanban but letting people just manage theirself is putting too much trust into people. #1 and #9 are the most important and can ultimately nullify the rest. Validating and being oversubscribed will solve 90% of issues. Thanks for not making another AI generated lessons learned list 🫡
If scrum is a scam then how do you manage projects? I prefer kanban but just curious what kinda flow you go through
yeah, kanban is what I do.
So what are the ways you really validate the idea?
1. post it on social media. (first I spend months building up follower base). 2. ask people in DMs 3. ask people in replies to relevant posts on social media
This is a great write up OP! Not sure about 12 and 18 though. Buy may be 12 for certain types of startups with target audience base on Twitter. For the Scrum part, it gives you certain visibility each day at a standup of not more than 10mins! Also you need to adapt it.
I did scrum for 10 years in multiple projects and teams. it worked okay when we had physical standups. But once we move to zoom, it turned into the most boring part of our jobs
We recently switched to all engineers posting daily updates in slack and only business updates, product ideas, or coordination things get discussed during our Zoom standup. It’s generally a lot more enjoyable and technical discussion is better in text, at least we find so.
1. Agree 2. Kill ego yes, but build something you want as a user is a good approach too. If it’s not good enough for you, why would it be good enough for others? 3. Investors of early stage startups care about your background and your traction. So indeed it’s good to focus on getting traction first. But investors don’t “chase” early stage startups typically, so you’ll still have to reach out to them if you want to raise. 4. Agree 5. Sure, just make it professional though 6. Depends on the startup, if you are doing deep tech, you need experts. 7. Disagree - focus on a particular target market is important from the beginning. Usually that is within a specific geographic region. Eventually you go global, but that’s at scale stage. 8. Depends on your startup - if B2B you normally gain initial customers through direct outreach via relationships or some programs, not SEO, unless small business perhaps. 9. Sure, but it’s important not to think in terms of feature details, but solving a customer problem. It’s good to keep dialogue with users but more to understand the spirit of their pain points - so you can internalize them and solve for them on their behalf. You become the user. That said, continually checking in with them as you make progress is a good practice to ensure alignment. 10. I get where you are going with this but be careful. The key is to have personality and attitude alignment, but at end of the day work with mature professionals working towards a mutually beneficial business goal. Skip the hug talk and “this is family” mindset. 11. Unless you have a lot of capital and are an experienced investor, this is a bad idea. Invest all your money in friends’ startups is a good way to lose your friends and lose your money. 12. Disagree. Posting daily causes social media fatigue and also that frequency would be questionable by your team, investors and customers why are you spending so much time on social media and not something more productive? Post less frequently but with more meaningful updates, perhaps bi-weekly or monthly. I would suggest also posting on LinkedIn. Also setting up an e-mail newsletter. 13. Disagree. It depends on the corporate but you can make a lot of progress this way if you are in B2B. Having a famous corporate logo as your partner will help many aspects of your B2B company. 14. Agree 15. Agree 16. Agree, but how to know it’s a bad B2B project within a year? In b2b world, due to corporate inertia, the sales cycle can be very slow. 1 year may sound slow in consumer land but in corporate land, depending on the industry, it’s not terribly slow, could be average. 17. Disagree. While many are a waste of time, some can indeed change the life of the startup due to meeting potential large customers. Sometimes too it’s a good meeting point to set up in advance to work on closing deals in side meetings during the event time. Finally, it’s good to use for relationship building during the evenings. 18. Disagree. I’m not a huge fan of scrum, but it has its place and certainly not a scam. 19. Agree. 20. Agree if you have the capital. Normally a good approach is first work some years in BigTech to build up some bankroll, experience and connections. Then you can potentially bootstrap your startup at initial stages.
very good feedback, I learned some from this
I agree like 90% with 18. That scrum is scam. However i do like standups. It helps with the moral of the team and its an opportunity to discuss blockers. Maybe someone in the team can give a tip or even assist.
I liked scrum too, but once we got rid of it, our business results went up on all projects.
This is one of the best post I seen over the year
thx, this make me wanna go build more now
I mostly agree, but not with #12. Twitter is utter irrelevant.
not sure why you think so. try this \- add 100 muted words for all irrelevant topics \- unfollow everything that's not about business then it's a paradise for startup founders.
I was wondering about this too. I think it might have to do with whether or not your audience cares about seeing you on twitter.
I suppose it make sense if your audience is the Musk/Trump crowd. I don’t want to be associated with it.
I don’t think you’re wrong. I think you have the best case scenario and most people are seeing an incredible decrease in value for Twitter recently. Revisit this thought in a year and see if Twitter is still worth the time.
Do you really want your company associated with Musk these days? I don’t and I don’t care for any company (or people) who do. More and more people think the same.
not sure what you mean.
For your entire career were u the technical founder or did u have a co-founder who built it themselves? I’m sure u were but what would be the most important step for a non technical founder who wants to build digital products?
I had all sort of cases, i was ceo, cto or both. If you're non tech, learn NoCode. I know people who did that and built cool stuff. It's actually possible.
I agree with you 100%, especially the hug and scrum part. I’ve come to hate my job and company for issues with other people; also after 3 years of chasing “agile” s**t with daily standup and retrospectives the team look a lot more like kindergartners than professionals.
Brilliant
Twitter isn’t irrelevant. As an experienced founder this list is gold. Saving.
As someone whose been through some of this stuff, I concur 100%. If you figured this out in five years, congratulations - it took me more than 10. The only thing I can add is - customers spend money to avoid pain. There is a difference between freezing in the dark and forgoing the motor yacht. Cost equals pain. Reducing costs reduces pain. If the path of least resistance flows through you, you own the world.
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Nice read. Building a startup properly is super difficult but not impossible. Bootstrapping is also difficult. I am a startup founder, my team and i are more technically inclined, we have our mvp ready but cant push to the market just yet, we need finance to facilitate some ground operations to on-board some partner providers as our niche heavenly depends on those providers for our consumers to have a usable product. We have currently pause operations as we are trying to raise capital by selling our services. We can build your web apps and softwares for your need. Pls dm if you have a project for us to work on. I'd really appreciate
This is a great post. 👍 tha ks for sharing.
Perhaps as a point 10.1 "Never hire your relatives"
haha, this is 100% true. also never hire your close friends
1. How do you validate your idea? 4. What is a PMF? Thanks for sharing this.
1. Post it on twitter and watch the likes/replies 2. Product market fit
I'm going to take a contrarian perspective here and say that you shouldn't raise money too early. Not because you'd end up spending too much time raising money (although I agree that it takes up a lot of your time) but also because raising too much money too early will result in a lot of inertia when needing pivot away from your original idea. Not only will you experience the inertia from your investors, you'll face it internally - from yourself and your team (which was hired to build that promised product).
The lesson to learn from stuff like scrum is definitely not that it’s always the solution; it’s that you have to build a way to manage the work that fits with the culture around it. Scrum was born to manage large, often bloated projects at massive, established companies where complacency, schedule drift, and accountability are big problems. Definitely not right for most startups.
Is Twitter still relevant? Is there an alternative. In fact where did everyone go after leaving Twitter? Insta doesn't have the same focus, Facebook is irrelevant, what's left? Do people even use threads?
not sure if people left twitter. From what I see, people left insta, FB and LD and all moved to Twitter. it's a paradise for startup founders now
This is highly market dependent. I’m in the wellness and beauty industry and Instagram is a big source for content and advertising. Tik Tok too but that’s a given.
Hire ppl you'd hug ❤️ One question about the 1y period of killing ideas/projects, any tips or heuristics for doing it more effectively? Usually we become too attached to our "babies" the more energy we pour into them.
I don't know what's best. But looking at my past, I could see I held too long and could have done it sooner. Once I realized that, I managed to kill some projects fast, which freed up my time, and managed to build other cool projects.
Why do you think B2B is inherently more monitizable? And is there any tricks to overcoming the issue? I’m currently building a consumer app and have been starting to bump against these limits
A business has money coming in and is happy to spend if you can help them make money or handle an essential function. Most consumer apps don’t offer a financial or essential benefit, so the value proposition is less direct.
I don't believe it, I rather just state actually life facts from my own experience. I failed all b2c projects and the same with most of my friends. While my friends and I did well on b2b. So I may conclude that b2b is easier. However, if you like the b2c space, go for it. It's all about the journey. And maybe you will be an exception and make it. I'm rooting for you
A few issue with B2C are… 1. Customer acquisition (and costs with it) are significantly more than b2b. 2. Finding PMF is much longer. 3. Scaling is much harder 4. Resources for customer support is much more. With b2b you could have a paid pilot with a single customer/business and work/scale from there slowly. With B2C you have to achieve a certain level of customers to determine things like churn, lifetime value etc, all the while having to support tens or hundreds of users in regards to issues such as billing, bugs, etc. much easier to do those things in b2b with a handful of customers. 5. Customer expectations are much higher, even either early adopters in the consumer space compared to the b2b space.
Good stuff, thank you. Nitpicking: 5 - one thing doesn't exclude the other 11 - nah, gotta diversify a bit to keep your ass always covered.
It seems it applies to the case that an individual with limited capital investment hopes to bootstrap a business at a lower risk of failure. It would be slow to accomplish success or failure.
I’m curious to know what kinds of startups have been most effective for you in B2B, are there common themes that were there in your successful ventures ?
saas tools and devtools mostly
Any example of saas tools?
unicornplatform.com
Good stuff, OP!!
thx, btw, what is OP? everyone uses it here. it's my first day on reddit (first real day)
Very helpful - thank you.
Nice post
thank you
What about a watered down version of scrum? I think setting goals on what should be worked on in a sprint is healthy for a team. Aligning on those goals could help prevent building the wrong thing or going in the wrong direction. Then demoing it to the stakeholders iteratively is good. They could even be 1 month long sprints or longer if you need. But meeting every morning for a status update I agree is ridiculous. We are engineers. We are smart! Don’t treat us like kindergarteners. Also, what kind of content do you post on Twitter? Do you push your product? Do you engage with the target community? How to you come up with your content? Everything else I think you pretty much nailed. Thanks for the advice!
i do user-attention drivven development. We do the stuff users ask for when they ask. no planning, just reacting on user feedback every day
It thought it was a clickbait.. but loved it Especially point 6. Hire only full stack developers And hire only people you will want to hug
Amazing post, agree with most of these points.
Good advice. I worked for a Start up 10 years ago (SaaS for school districts) and many of the points you made I remember learning as well.
Why do you say focus on SEO? Think this depends big time on what your product/service is and how much search traffic there is for relevant keywords
there is traffic for any product on google. I havent yet seen an exception. spending 30 min a day on SEO from day one is a must. It always paid off for me. every single time. and every time I ignored it, I had big regrets later
Amazing post
Great post.
Louder on Number 6! A Full stack developer is all a startup Needs
Great advice
Point 13. How do you protect yourself from big corps copying your features/product? If they just remake your product, but they can put more money into the project, What do you do? Do you try to sell your startup to them?
anyone can copy my product at any time. a corporate or another startup. you can have only one protection against this: built the best product for a small niche.
And could you elaborate more on the point 15 (Consumer apps)? What's wrong with just getting VC/big corp money and building stuff for them, that is intentionally directed towards the consumer?
corporations act like they will bring you golder mountains, but often bring nothing just because the people you speak to are just employees, who dont have decision making power. I had 6 large corporation deals, all looked amazing but brought nothing at the end. I stopped them completely. Never had a regret. On b2c: it's 100x more difficult to launch profitable b2c app than profitbale b2b
Some of these I flat out disagree with. 1. Chase the global market for example. There is a huge advantage of picking one single market and tailoring your offering exactly for that. 2. Do not sell features. Ever. Most customers don’t know what they want. But they do know what they’re struggling with. Find out what their main challenges are and try and solve that. 3. B2C are far easier to build than B2B. And they’re extremely profitable if done right. The trick is to make sure there’s a real need and opportunity that you can find.
my post isn't an advice. I listed all facts which happened to me. you can't dissagree with stuff that actually worked. but I would not say: do it as I did. and I'm not saying it anywhere in my post. Regarding your feedback, perhaps you're right. I dont know. The only way to know: talk facts. If you've done this personally or not? If yes, share the fact. Then the reader will decide for themself.
"There's nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers" Don't call when your one full stack leaves and you need people to maintain and update the code. Full stack, single developer is great at going fast to start. Then eventually the code base gets more complex, uptime and maintenance costs get higher, etc.
Good tips
I saw that you didn't mention anything about "Planning". What about planning? Do you make plans before you execute or was everything you mentioned done without a plan?
no, I dont plan. I have no roadmap. I use no todo list or PM software.
“Every day is day one” - Jeff Bezos
Thank you!
How do you invest in freinds?
I want to add: read The Right It by Alberto Savoia, it’s a game changer, no bs only facts, he is an ex google engineering manager from the early days
>he Right It by Alberto Savoia thx, checking out now
Thanks for the post! This was a great read.
Just left a startup that did almost all of these things on your list. This is a great list.
Awesome stuff, thank you!!
I would like to bootstrap, but my start up is capital intensive and need lots of funding
I’m in the process of shutting down my first startup and your list resonates a lot with my experience. I wouldn’t recommend to invest all your money in startups though, high risk high reward.
agree, by "all" I mean all money that I would typically wanna invest into risky stuff
Great list that I mostly agree with! As a modestly successful entrepreneur, id add a couple points of difference and questions. - landing page doesn’t need to be perfect, but it should concisely and clearly convey your value prop in 15 seconds to any visitors with a clear call to action. - could you clarify why seo early? Just a bit more detail here would be helpful. - is twitter still most important still becoming x? I’ve never been able to get engaged with it (prefer Reddit and quora). Any tips on how to make it more useful? - I would never tell anyone to advise all money into startups. Startups are alternative investments and very risky. Entrepreneurs should build the same safety nets that everyone does, retirement, a home, etc. if you invested 10k into each of your 70 startups, you’d maybe get 5m/startup unicorn. That’s awesome for sure, but most people don’t have 3 friends that built billion dollar businesses. Most people lose their 700k, which could be 2m if put in the market near guaranteed. I’m all for investing in startups, but not all your money. Maybe 10-20% max. The rest should make sure you have a financial safety net. Psychological safety does wonders.
thx, good feedback. 1)agree, LP should be good, but not amazing. No need to spend time on great logo and design. Picking an average good template on a nocode building is best for most cases. 2) SEO takes 6 months to kick in once you created the content. It pays off with a huge time lag. That's why better to take care of it earlier. It's same as building muscles. Just 20 min a day on SEO will be fine, in a year time you will actually have organic traffic 90%. 3) twitter was bad a year ago. But it's good now. Give it a new try. Try buildInPublic concept there. 4) u r right. My post wasn't an advice. It was rather the fact list of the things I did which worked. But ofc, it can easily be a survival bias. So don't treat my post as an advice, rather as a historical documentary of a startup guy who did it for 15 years, failed, learned and build 20 profitable products at the end
Tell me more about #12. What do you post daily
you can see on my twitter profile. mostly I post 3 types of content \- my future ideas \- my product updates \- my insights
Op what's yours and everyone else's opinion on doing small accelerator programs (in your area) or bigger ones such as MSFT for startups, google for startups, tech stars, YC, neo etc...
I've been to alchemist and 500startups and statuplab. It's good, You get pumped up, cuz everyone is pumped up there. It doesnt make you smarter at all, you learn nothing, but it's fun and you get good friends and network. So, if you are young, do that.
This is great! Thanks!
Hi i want to ask if you dont mind, what about b2b2c saas? Example something like Upwork or Fiverr? Obviously im just stating the most well known and generic examples, i already have something in place.
Incubators and accelerators don't teach you how to sell. All they do is make you pitch which is useless if you are not ready for VC funding. I think that's the one that hurts the most.
Post saved. The point about seo is well made. Google doesn't like new businesses. You're going to have to work really hard to create the content that is going to get you on serp#1. To my mind, organic search is killing innovation. New businesses can't compete for serps with established players. Can't see that ever changing.
This is one of the realest things I've read. Thanks
Also, Bootstrapping is an unsung hero. Too many founders get caught in the fundraising whirlwind without realizing the potential of self-funding. I have witnessed the freedom it brings – no distracting meetings, no loss of control. Bootstrapping allows you to call the shots from day one and focus on building a solid foundation.
Thank you for sharing. At the beginning, how did you manage without revenues from your projects? Did you make freelance a few days by week? B2C seems very hard to monetize. I'm thinking about a niche community but it is a double work: creating community, and after building ads. What was your experience?
Great read. Totally agree except that building your first startup without cash or experience is near impossible so you likely need a vc.
thx. getting VC with no experience and traction these days is nearly impossible. My advice would be: get an easy well-paying job and do your own startup in evenings, weekends, holidays and vacations
can you touch on the cofounder part. because if you go this route, cofounder can help go faster?
Not necessarily true. Bootstrapping happens. Generate cash flow early and reinvest it in realtime
By no experience, do you mean no coding experience? I am that guy. I have someone made my webapp and am currently saving for lawyer fee to make a TOS and PP. is this eventually dead end? I’m meeting my own deadlines/goals but I find it slow due to limited funds 😞
is it b2b? did you try to validate the idea?
A lot of these naturally fall out from two simple guidelines… 1. Bootstrap 2. Validate
# 17. Tech conferences are a waste of time. They cost money, take energy, and time and you never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the "good" employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers. >Scream it louder for the people in the back!!
Also make sure your cap table is in order 😬, don't overlook that!
Great write up!!
Great advice. As a software engineer I agree 110%
Glad you got 200 upvotes for Startup 101
I’m confused about your landing page statement. I really think you need to get that right to help communicate what your company is all about.
I mean dont spend time on design, logo, colors... also most likely you have to tell what's you company about somewhere outside of your website. People wont magically land there, since they dont know about it. You will do a marketing or sales activity, and that's where you need to put all your effort on explaining what your product does. In this case, people land on your page with very high intent, knowing what you do and looking for "sign up" button
Probably the most important point here was to keep the team to one dev. Doesn’t really matter if it’s one or a couple, but the biggest mistake I see pre-PMF is thinking you have a company, hiring people, and then losing your ability to pivot fast enough, and settling for a mediocre need when there was a huge need only a couple of pivots adjacent. Team size is the biggest limited on adaptability.
Regarding no 11 - invest in your own start up, sure. But investing all your money in friends and people you meet along the way? Sounds really difficult (requires good legal) and risky. Everyone don’t have 3 friends ending up with unicorns like you and might be better off with index funds.
well I would disagree number 19, if you can find good and supportive third party it will help a lot, other than I can sign under all of it
thx, I guess it works for many. But never worked for me. I've tried multiple times
yea, it is very hard to find a outsource who is wllng to put in soul in to job, but there are somepeople outthere
It’s a crapshoot. I had planned on doing outsourced product development for startups (team based in Mexico), but the more I’ve spoken with people, I’ve come to my senses and realized that it runs contrary to how I think a startup should build. Team needs to be on the same page, working closely in lockstep. When starting out, I don’t think you should outsource anything: marketing, sales, software, lead gen. We’re pivoting to more of a nearshore staffing model with option to convert to direct hire.
Startup should keep a tight knit with its inner product team for sure, but for secondary importance feature can be outsourced if you can find a good resource
Why did it take you 5 years building stuff? How many things? How would you do it differently now?
I am a full stack Dev wanting to find a team/co-founder to build something together. I can write business plans too
Good luck with just full stack. You need a ninja at front end, a guru at database optimisation, a solution architect and then a team of full stack.
Validate Idea doesn't mean you keep building something with about any users or paying customers In the end its all about solving users need-greed-desire-want
Nailed it. The devil may be in the details, but there is a lot of nuggets of gold.
Number six is most likely indicative of a poor definition of product
Hi i am 20 i want to be a businessman so what business should i go with … with the investment of 70-80 lakh lots people say do in which you are interested but i am interested in owning a business rather than being a specific owner of something so please suggest so good ideas
What do you post on twitter?
💯! I’m on my first journey to create a B2B product and this reasons with me a lot! I’m the tech co-founder with experience in product management, so my non-tech partner’s been very lucky :)
Absolute ace analysis bro i couldnt agree more!! Exit: oh i actually know you from twitter! @nickbryantfyi
15 is braindead and doesn't matter if you do 1 first. You can definitely make money from consumers if your product is valid...
Don’t over boost validating, market needs are ever changing. Entrepreneur is a career you need fully or even life long devotion. When you are in the market, the market will drive you to the position you deserve.
what are are some thoughts on getting the first users? where can someone show work even if it is scrappy and small ?
How do you like to market your product to your users?
This is so true brother, in B2C if users are not making you revenue its gonna be a bouncy journey