How much money did you make though?
enough to be financially independent and self-fund my startup to the rest of my life
If only someone told me this before my first startup
51–60 of 88 posts
Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup
#52Actually very good points. Thanks!
ur welcome
Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup
#53"Ask existing users if they want this feature" is a bad idea because users are going to say "yes" to everything, especially in a B2B SaaS app. It means nothing.
Depends how you ask. If you ask people whether they would pay extra $ for a feature, they might be more hesitant.
Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup
#54> 6. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers. Huh? And those "fullstack devs" will do everything alone or what? Maybe if you are building a proof-of-concept prototype with a useful half-life of 6 months before you sell the company to someone else (and let them deal with the mess under the carpet) but not once you actually start selling the product - and mainl…
I don't disagree, because you're mostly talking about mature startups and corporations.
My experinece comes from early stage startups and small saas companies.
Where scrum and dev teams aren't helping and having just one dev doing the whole thing is actually very productive.
But your points are good, if the reader is coming from a bigger company
Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup
#55"Ask existing users if they want this feature" is a bad idea because users are going to say "yes" to everything, especially in a B2B SaaS app. It means nothing.
There's some very obvious ways to prevent that. One way is "here's a list of ten candidate features we might prototype this week/month/quarter/release, but you can only pick one". Or ask users to rank them, and only pick the consensus #1-ranked. The ensuing dialog can be informative.
Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup
#56Almost every point has a counter by a different startup. The lesson is why didn't that circumstance work for you, not that it doesn't work.
this angle suggests that no experience of other person can be useful, since it's a subjective experience. Yes, it's my subjective experience, I didn't say: "do as I did or follow my advice".
I said: I wish I knew this from before and didn't make these mistakes.
Why do I think these are mistakes?
Because I did it one way, then another way and things got a lot better. It made me think that the old way was the problem in cases where I reproduced it multiple times.
However the reader should take everything in my post as my subjective experience which they should make up their own mind upon
Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup
#57Oh geez I’m building an app for B2C: StickerDocs.com. I don’t necessarily want to go big with it but I sure as hell have point 5 on lockdown.
did you try testing the idea? pitching to friends, or creating a waitlist or buying ads?
Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup
#58The marketing focus and pitfalls of corporate "partnerships" and the destruction of momentum that comes from shifting focus to chasing VCs all resonate strongly. If I could go back in time, I'd have put 100% of the energy I put into fits & starts around partnerships (that unanimously went nowhere useful) into more baseline marketing around awareness and discoverability. I'd also have gone about fundraising significan…
yeah, one of my biggest regrets
Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup
#59This is a good list (except for 11, survivorship bias means that investing in startups is not as universally profitable as investing in VTI). All of these though have been covered extensively in lots of books over the years that I'd assume even a cursory search of "how to get started with entrepreneurship and startups" would uncover, like Lean Startup, Mom Test, etc, for those who don't want to learn the hard way as…
I'm pretty sure there is survival bias in some of my points.
Some I've replicated many times, so I'm pretty confident
Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup
#60Good list but I don’t agree with all of them. For example, post on Twitter everyday. It might have worked for some people before but I always found Twitter as noise and pointless. You can see startups getting likes for dump screenshots of revenue or milestones but it doesn’t really get you customers or real users. The corporate one is spot on, I’ve had lots of interest from large companies but I couldn’t close any as…
try using "muted words" on twitter.
I added 200 words and it's so good now.
If you dont like "MRR" posts for exampple, you can mute them