The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Hariharan: Founders should only hire sales reps after demos become boringly predictable
“You hire a salesperson when your sales call and demo calls become extremely boring and repetitive because that's when you've figured out what your go to market motion is.”
Hariharan: Slow growth after hiring sales leadership usually stems from product deficiencies
“The most common mistake is you hired a VP of sales, they've cranked up your team, you have all these sales accountants, but your growth is slow. And the root cause of that is not that the sales motion isn't working, your product is not appealing enough.”
Hariharan: Startups with $5M-$10M in ARR should be default alive
“I usually say if you have hit five to ten million ARR, you cannot get killed. You should be default alive.”
Hariharan: Fast hiring before PMF creates resistance to product changes
“If you hire too fast before you have product market fit, now you have a bunch of people whose jobs depend on you not changing the product.”
Hariharan: Startups lack PMF if under 40% of users would be very disappointed
“And if at least 40% of your customers don't say very disappointed, you probably don't have a good enough product. It's just moderately appealing. So we say a rule of thumb is at least 40% of your customers will be very disappointed if your product goes away.”
Hariharan: True self-serve PMF overwhelms a team's inbound response capacity
“If your product is really good, you probably are not gonna be able, you don't have enough people on your team to respond to inbound queries. That's when you have strong product market fit.”
Hariharan: Nearly 100% of YC startups underprice their products
“The second mistake, which we've seen pretty much hundred percent of YC companies do, including the founder who's going to talk after me, which is Josh and Gusto, you should ask him, is they all underprice.”
Hariharan: Raise prices 30% to test whether customers are underpaying
“The best way I often tell you, tell founders to test is increase your price by 30%. And if your customer's not blinking twice, then you probably have underpriced a lot.”
Hariharan: Gusto finished year one with 100 customers and 80 NPS
“So for the first entire year, I was actually shocked at the stat. Can anyone guess how many customers Gusto had? Any guesses? Two thousand? 50? That's a wide range. What's that? One million. Okay, from your mouth to God's ears, we still have to hit a million. …”
Hariharan: Adding features to capture new segments fails 80% of the time
“If you assume that just adding a feature will help you scale to the next segment, that doesn't work. That doesn't work eight out of 10 times. You may get lucky with a one or two, but that doesn't work eight out of 10 times.”
Hariharan: Founders need 100 to 200 customer calls to validate product quality
“You have to do a hundred to 200 customer calls, customer conversion to know whether your product is good enough.”
Hariharan: PostHog converted only 30 of 30,000 signups when launching paid tier
“There's another company that went through YC called PostHog. It was one of the most successful open source product analytics launch that they did through YC. Top number one on Hacker News. 30,000 signups. James was extremely confident that when he turns on the…”