building in stealth
CSO @ Montage Business Financial
Previously: Founder @TMMnano; Co-Founder @IndieLabRVA; Founding Member @BloodSweatHoney, @ZincoVerdeX
Imagine a hydraulic torture chamber designed to violently tilt and shake a fully firing Porsche flat-six engine just to see if it breaks.
This legendary test rig uses real telemetry data from the grueling Nürburgring circuit to replicate the extreme G-forces experienced during hot laps.
By simulating these intense track conditions, engineers can ensure the engine's oiling system prevents oil starvation and catastrophic failure during hard cornering.
This developing story about Dario's failed communications with the White House confirms everything I've ever believed about the enormous power of the Sales Chad.
You can be the smartest, most hard working, well-meaning guy around, but if you can't get people to like you, it's all for nothing.
When the time comes to send one of your own to meet inside the Halls of Power, you don't send the Geek Squad. You must send the affable, beer-drinking, golf-loving Sales Chad.
It literally doesn't matter if he understands the product half as well as everyone else. You send him. It's what he was put on Earth to do.
We went from 0 to 2,200 paying customers in under a year by following @ycombinator's 15 rules:
1/ Do things that don't scale. Get your first 10 customers by hand.
2/ Launch now, not when it's "ready". A mediocre product in front of real users teaches you more in a week than 6 months of polishing in the dark.
3/ Charge from day one. If nobody will pay, you don't have a startup, you have a hobby.
4/ Talk to users every single day. The roadmap you need is sitting in your customers' heads, and they'll hand it to you for free
5/ Always hunt the 90/10 solution. For almost any feature there's a way to capture 90% of the value with 10% of the effort.
6/ There are only two real jobs: write code and talk to users. Everything else (conferences, press, VC coffees, corp dev calls) is fake work.
7/ You pick your customers as much as they pick you. 10 users who love you beat 1,000 who kind of like you.
8/ Growth is an output, not a strategy. Grow before product market fit and all you're buying is churn.
9/ Do less, really well. Pick one or two metrics and judge every task against them.
10/ Know if you're default alive. Paul Graham's question: on current growth and current burn, do you reach profitability before the money runs out?
11/ Don't hire until it hurts. Headcount is not progress, it's burn. Every great startup was embarrassingly small for embarrassingly long.
12/ Momentum is the only real moat in year one. Ship something every week, even something tiny.
13/ Every great startup is badly broken at some point. The game isn't avoiding fires, it's how fast you put them out. Again. And again
14/ Ignore your competitors. Startups die of suicide, not murder. In year one, the only company that can kill yours is your own
15/ Startups rarely die from running out of money. They die because the founders fall out. Brutal honesty with your cofounder is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy
Good luck !
@karrisaarinen You’ve basically explained why @sequoia and @Accel stay in the top five VC firms, but I also think you played your hand exceptionally well.
@humfhuang@ycombinator I actually stated Thursday that I was pretty sure Friday there would be a mass decline dump from YC that would be automated. Sad to see I was right, but hey, the fact you were in the top 10% is pretty awesome. My decline letter did not mention that, lol.
@AroraBhavyam@ycombinator I’m in the same boat. I have a sinking feeling everyone who hasn’t gotten an interview yet will be part of a mass sweep of auto-decline. Tomorrow is apparently the deadline.
Crossing my fingers for the both of us.