David Rusenko
Founder & Managing Partner, Leap Forward Ventures · 1 appearance on the record.
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David Rusenko is the co-founder and former CEO of website-building platform Weebly, which was acquired by Square for $365 million in 2018. Following his time as General Manager of eCommerce at Square, he founded Leap Forward Ventures to invest in early-stage climate and clean energy startups.
27statements → 6claims → 1claims resolved → 3.85/5average certainty → 2.07/5average debate potential → 1said about them ↓
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 4 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
6 assertions · 18 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how David argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Everything David Rusenko said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Meetup founder Scott Heiferman called Weebly the stupidest idea in 2006
“Well, in, in the summer of 2006, after writing that first line of code I went and pitched Weebly at the New York Tech Meetup, and it was a thousand people. It was, we were kind of alpha stage at that point, and it was in front of a thousand people, and I gave …”
Rusenko: Building high-demand products is much harder than monetizing them
“It is usually a lot harder to build a product that a lot of people really, really want than it is to figure out how to make money from that product.”
Rusenko: The best startups create new markets, rendering market research useless
“The best companies will create a market. So if you look at sort of what Weebly's done, if you look at what Airbnb's done, if you look at what Dropbox has done, all, all companies have created their own market. I say this because by definition here, market rese…”
Outsourcing early-stage development fails because iteration requires dozens of attempts
“This is, I think, one of the primary reasons why outsourcing The coding in the early days generally doesn't work. It's because when you outsource a project, that's one shot. Well, if it's going to take you 20 to 30 shots, not going to work.”
Aim for a 'minimum remarkable product' rather than a standard MVP
“I don't really like the word viable, because it's kind of insinuating that you're gonna put like the, like, just the least crappy thing you can out there. I much prefer the word remarkable. So minimum remarkable product. Ah, the product that is the least you c…”
Rusenko: Flat Startup Structures Break Down Around 23 to 25 Employees
“Around 20 people, it's usually between about 23 and 25, is when everything breaks in a startup. Because you can no longer be, ah, just, you know, completely flat.”
Rusenko: Startups Should Never More Than Double Headcount in a Year
“I think that you should probably never more than double the size of your company in any given year. So I don't think I know of an example of hypergrowth That works out of companies that go from 20, you know, 20 employees to 300 in a year, and that works out.”
A South African competitor raised $40M and blatantly cloned Weebly's UI
“I remember one of our competitors, I won't name them but they're from South Africa and they had raised forty million bucks and we had raised 650 K and they things were not going that great for them. And so they completely ripped off our interface. And they jus…”
Rusenko: Half of the US population visits a Weebly site monthly
“And probably one of my favorite stats is that half of the US population visits a Weebly site every single month.”
Rusenko: The only two hard startup challenges are PMF and hiring
“And I'm convinced that there's basically, ah, only two hard things. Number one is finding product market fit. It's really, really, really hard. Most companies will not be able to find product market fit. It's incredibly challenging. Number two is hiring and bu…”
Rusenko: Founders should double down when users hack products for unintended uses
“When you find people hacking your product to do something it wasn't intended to do, pay attention to that and double down on that.”
Rusenko: Listen to customer problems, but ignore user-proposed solutions
“Listen to their problems, not their solutions. So customers will tell you the pain that they're facing. Listen to that. When they talk about the solutions, their proposed solutions, you could just completely ignore that. Because they generally aren't that grea…”
Rusenko: Founders only need three to five UX testing sessions
“You only need three to five testing sessions. I think you really only need three to be able to tell the most critical and important UX bugs, if you will, that you have.”
Rusenko: Founders must ignore conferences and news until reaching product-market fit
“Number one, there's only one thing that matters. Think about that startup journey from idea to growth stage. Focus only on the thing that gets you to that next stage. Don't focus on anything else. Don't go to conferences. Don't like write blog posts. Don't rea…”
Rusenko: Prioritize resolving major unknowns over standard cost-benefit task rankings
“When you're trying to make continuous improvement, that's actually a pretty good approach when you're trying to make discontinuous improvement optimized for learning. So basically ask yourself, what is my biggest unknown right now? What's the number one thing …”
Rusenko: An NPS above 50 likely signals product-market fit
“Your NPS, some people say 40, I think about 50. If it's above 50, then you probably achieve product market fit.”
Rusenko: Cohort renewal rates are vastly superior to standard churn
“I don't like the churn metric for looking at this. A lot of people use that because it's easier to calculate. But basically churn is not cohort based. Renewal is cohort based.”
Rusenko: Direct Sales Requires Charging At Least $200-$300 Per Month
“If you're going to have a sales force, you're probably going to charge people at least Two, 300 dollars a month to be able to afford the Salesforce, and if you aren't gonna have a Salesforce, then you should probably charge 25 dollars a month or less.”
Rusenko: Great brands are built on the same core insight as the product
“Great brands are built around a fundamental insight, a consumer insight that some truth that's just not really acknowledged out there. And ideally this is the same one that your product is built on. So it's really, really powerful if you can identify that insi…”
Rusenko: 2008 Silicon Valley consensus was to actively avoid charging users
“In 2007 and 2008, the prevailing thinking in Silicon Valley was that you should actively not charge money. You should actively be not making money. That was the prevailing thinking. It sounds really, really crazy now. But at the time, the logic went that Twitt…”
Rusenko: Comparing startups via feature checklists makes catching up impossible
“Don't look at your product in terms of like a feature grid, like a feature checklist. If you think about it like that, you can never win because you're behind and you can never catch up.”
Rusenko: Weebly reached 50M users and sold to Square for $365M
“Grew the company to fifty million users and around 350 employees. Sold the square in May of this year for three hundred sixty five million.”
The other half of the tape: David Rusenko's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →
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Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit · Y Combinator | Sep 5, 2018 | 48m |