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Before You Grow

blog.ycombinator.com

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151–160 of 175 posts

Re: Before You Grow

#151

Post by mck- »

qwrusz wrote: post #77

This is good advice but on a practical level isn't clearly compatible with other advice like "fix the plane while it's flying". Also I was under the impression YCombinator focuses on helping companies grow and organizes a demo day 3 months later to help them raise money from VCs. The pg article even mentions growth targets during YC. If this is true then companies accepted to YC should already have a product people l…

There is indeed a different YC program for early-stage startups working on product. It's called the YC Fellowship.

https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-fellowship/

Re: Before You Grow

#152

Post by mck- »

quickConclusion wrote: post #143
danieltillett wrote: post #51

What do you do if you make a B2B product that gives your customers such a big competitive advantage in the market that they won't talk about your product, actively hide that they use it, and refuse to let you tell others that they use it?

Then you want to bargain a discount, a faster delivery, a whatever, for being a public reference. In other words, if they want something, and want it badly, instead of monetizing it with $$, monetize it with a case study. Personal favor also. You go the extra mile for one user/infleluencer/decision maker in a customer company. Then ask to return the favor: "could you spend 15 minutes talking to this prospect of mine,…

We also encountered some customers like that - true evangelists but refuse to partake in public endorsement for fear of losing competitive advantage. We even offered discounts, but to no avail.

On the contrary, we found the European and Australian customers to be completely different; competing companies in the same local markets seem to be quite chummy and will share such information freely.

Obviously not to be generalized. We have North American evangelists too.

Re: Before You Grow

#153

Post by jayjay71 »

mck- wrote: post #151
qwrusz wrote: post #77

This is good advice but on a practical level isn't clearly compatible with other advice like "fix the plane while it's flying". Also I was under the impression YCombinator focuses on helping companies grow and organizes a demo day 3 months later to help them raise money from VCs. The pg article even mentions growth targets during YC. If this is true then companies accepted to YC should already have a product people l…

There is indeed a different YC program for early-stage startups working on product. It's called the YC Fellowship. https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-fellowship/

The YC Fellowship got axed. From what I understand, they're replacing it with an online course (similar to their startup videos/lectures) and it does not include any funding.

Re: Before You Grow

#154

Post by seanhunter »

danieltillett wrote: post #51

What do you do if you make a B2B product that gives your customers such a big competitive advantage in the market that they won't talk about your product, actively hide that they use it, and refuse to let you tell others that they use it?

Have you considered changing your pricing model so you get paid some % of their "success" however defined?

Edit: to explain my thinking - the idea here is it may actually be that if you're getting paid alongside them that you don't need to grow to other customers. You can get all the revenue you need from getting this one customer to dominate their market.

Re: Before You Grow

#155

Post by statictype »

pinky07 wrote: post #26
statictype wrote: post #23

I'm curious about how this maps to enterprise products? Can you create an enterprise-targeted product that users truly love? Any examples of this?

Yes: https://www.Odoo.com But we did not follow Sam's path. 1/ we made resellers and developers happy (being open source played an important role early on) 2/ we grew 3/ we made end users very happy 4/ we grew much faster The reason we took this part is that it takes a lot of time to both build the enterprise features, and make it great. We built the scope first and made it great after, which is not an usual path. Di…

Nice.

How do you grow your reseller network?

I would presume that reseller's interests don't always align directly with end-user interests?

Re: Before You Grow

#156

Post by nostrademons »

calchris42 wrote: post #125
coffeemug wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't get funding from clueless VCs Usually if people put money down and there is an entire industry around it, the collective mindset of that industry is close to optimal. They might be wrong on a couple of important issues. They also might be very wrong, but they're still close to optimal by definition because nobody's doing it better. TL;DR: calling entire world-class industries clueless implies naiveté.

In finance this is called efficient market hypothesis. And as I understand, generally considered false. From Efficient Market Hypothesis: Is The Stock Market Efficient? | Investopedia http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/04/022004.asp#ix... "Conclusion It's safe to say the market is not going to achieve perfect efficiency anytime soon. For greater efficiency to occur, the following criteria must be met: (1) un…

I wouldn't say it's generally considered false, considering that the company founded on this assumption - Vanguard - is now the largest fund in the U.S. and second largest asset manager in the world.

Markets are interesting, though, in that the more people believe they are efficient, the more inefficiencies creep in, and the more people believe they are inefficient, the more they become efficient. When everyone assumes everyone else has found all the opportunities, nobody bothers to look, and so there are lots of undiscovered opportunities to cash in on. When everyone assumes they can get rich finding opportunities, they bid up prices to very close to their "true" value, and the profit opportunities disappear. It's a self-correcting system.

The question of how widely believed the EMH is itself suffers from selection bias. People who believe markets are efficient don't enter the financial industry, they give their money to Vanguard to manage. That means that everyone in the financial industry, by definition, believes that they can make better-than-average returns, otherwise they wouldn't be in the industry. And then by returns, most of them are wrong, but that also doesn't matter because the few who are right are the ones who survive to play the next round.

Re: Before You Grow

#157

Post by dang »

logicallee wrote: post #25

Comment withdrawn. I've withdrawn this comment, but per site policy / encouragement I'm leaving my original comment below the lines. Pre-edit: --- I liked your comment but you won't believe how I felt about one part: >Iphone app companies do this one neat trick for this. I'm sorry, I just found it very distracting... like you use clickbait title interspersed in your writing. I tried to replicate the effect for you at…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13016485 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Before You Grow

#158

Post by duncanawoods »

rsp1984 wrote: post #119
qwrusz wrote: post #77

This is good advice but on a practical level isn't clearly compatible with other advice like "fix the plane while it's flying". Also I was under the impression YCombinator focuses on helping companies grow and organizes a demo day 3 months later to help them raise money from VCs. The pg article even mentions growth targets during YC. If this is true then companies accepted to YC should already have a product people l…

I'm not affiliated with YC in any sense but trying to clarify some things: " fix the plane while it's flying ". This is typically advice for startups that have found product-market-fit (i.e. have a product people love) but there are a million other things broken. In that case the advice is often to fix these things "while flying", i.e. while simultaneously growing sales and the company in general. " organizes a demo…

>> Seed and Series-A are two entirely different games.

Are you actually in a position to offer advice? What you say seems outdated - seeds grew to multi-million figures such that "seed is the new series A" was a thing back in 2013 - firms now offer "pre-seed" funding and "second-seeds" seem increasingly common.

The assumption today seems to be that if you have no connections, you must self-fund / bootstrap / FFF your way to traction to even attract angel interest and for you, seed is for growth. However, if you have prior exits and connections then you play a different game and can probably raise a MM seed without even an idea of what your new business might be.

Re: Before You Grow

#159

Post by duncanawoods »

trg2 wrote: post #48
jot wrote: post #11

I recommend using https://www.promoter.io/ to measure NPS. It's a brilliant starting point for getting useful feedback too. I've ended up using it for the conference and coworking community that I run as well as for a software product.

I would love to see a comprehensive list of all of these tools to measure NPS. Does one exist?

Serious question - why does anyone use a 3rd party service to request a 1/10 score from a customer? Kind of feels like it should be table stakes for a business. If they can't do that then wtf can they do?

The difficult design aspects seem to be when to ask and choosing what other supporting information to gather about who they are, where they came from and how they used your product/service - you can't just hook in an API.

Re: Before You Grow

#160

Post by morgante »

beat wrote: post #84
downandout wrote: post #52

Building something users love is, of course, the challenge. 99% of startups are unable to do this, and some of those that can't still manage to raise money because someone involved went to Stanford or is otherwise well-connected, only to inevitably fail later on. Generally speaking, these days if you don't have rabid fans of your product almost immediately among some group of users - however small - the product as yo…

VCs are optimizing for something other than love. They're optimizing for potential scale. You can build a product that customers love, but with a low ceiling for the market (like, say, building a really awesome surfboard). VCs want to see billion dollar market potential. So they may invest in something without real proof of customer love, or even customer need, just because the market potential is great.

That might be true at the seed stage, but no competent VC is going to keep funding you if you've launched and aren't able to demonstrate that some people love your product.

Of course, product/market fit is not a sufficient condition for success. You also need the market to be big enough.

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