Vaillancourt: Five years of unpaid founder suffering rarely yields massive success
Darius Vaillancourt · He raised $250K, had thousands of users—but here's what he'd do differently next time. | Darius V... · PMF Show · Jan 16, 2025 · at 26:46
Darius Vaillancourt warns founders against relying purely on unvalidated grit instead of market signals.
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“You have people, everybody says like, determination, look at the person that went through this five years and like, you know, paid themselves nothing and, you know, slept on their friend's couches, and then they emerge with like, fifty million ARR. And the reality is like, one, that rarely, rarely happens.”
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“These companies are still charging the same amount, 10 K for a coding bootcamp or whatever, but the experience is like significantly degraded.”
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“We had very smart angels and advisors. You know, I had like the former VP of product at LinkedIn learning and other vets that had been coming, you know, come out of Silicon Valley that basically said, don't charge the schools anything. Like you're effectively …”
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“And so that wound up, I mean, it varied across courses. So if you like use 95% as a benchmark, we were seeing in cases like 80, 75%.”
Vaillancourt: Howdy should have cut off non-paying elite university pilots sooner
“In retrospect, we should have pulled the plug, like, maybe taken the device out and said, hey, listen, sorry, like, you see the numbers going down. We really love to support you, but we also have a business to run.”
Vaillancourt: Elite universities prioritize full-tuition students over MOOC learners
“At the end of the day, their priority is their traditional business, which is the core university, the people that are going there, you know, spending 80,000 dollars a year to get a degree, undergraduate, whatever, like, that's really their core constituency.”
Vaillancourt: Howdy could have used LLMs as automated facilitators before shutting down
“I could have pivot now, like right around a year before we shut down the company, we could have integrated large language models into the peer-to-peer sessions to basically be an automated facilitator for these different topics.”