David Rusenko (co-founder of Weebly) explains the typical pattern of press coverage spikes for early-stage startups during a Y Combinator Startup School talk.
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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 …”
Insight
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.”
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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…”
Insight
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.”
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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…”
Insight
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.”