The Ledger
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Migicovsky: Oculus' iterative hardware approach beat Magic Leap's secretive, mega-funded R&D
“Magic Leap raised lots of money and spent just 11 years working on a product, versus Oculus, which raised two million dollars on Kickstarter, shipped a, you know, an early development kit that was not amazing, but they iterated and they got through, and now th…”
Migicovsky: Pivot to building end products if customers won't buy your technology
“If you're in a situation where you're building something that's, like, mind-blowingly cool and revolutionary, but you're finding that customers don't want to buy it, pivot your company so you're actually doing what your customers would have done, and just use …”
Migicovsky: Patents are not a critical initial step for startups
“This is, like, one of those things that people who are not in the startup world think is a critical piece of starting a business, because they may have heard of, like, someone else who got screwed out of their idea or something like that. But if you're startin…”
Graham and Andreessen's product-market fit definitions are lagging indicators
“Paul Graham's definition for product market fit is when you've made something that people want. Marc Andreessen also has an amazing blog post about product market fit where he describes it as when the product is just being pulled out of you, when you no longer…”
Migicovsky: Overhyped hardware crowdfunding campaigns usually fail to ship
“Most of those campaigns, even if they do succeed at raising money, usually fail to produce and actually ship their product.”
Migicovsky: Early hardware startups cannot pay contractors enough to care like founders
“Some of the most painful moments of my early career were, ah, not having full-time co-founders, and having to work with contractors or consultants who, honestly, like, you can't pay someone enough to care. I mean, firstly because you probably don't have that m…”
Migicovsky: Hardware startups should hack existing products instead of hiring design firms
“Don't hire, like, An industrial design firm to build you some new design. Don't hire, like, an engineering firm that promises to do a custom design for you, because that'll cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it probably will be the wrong product, versu…”
Migicovsky: Startups rarely build successful moats using patents outside biotech
“So it's very rare that startups build a successful moat using patents. This happens much more in, like, biotech”
Migicovsky: Top investors prefer startups targeting small initial markets
“Honestly, the best investors will want to see a small market, because a small market at the beginning means you can identify who's in that market very cheaply, versus having to boil the ocean, saying, well, there's like, Two percent of all people in the world …”
Migicovsky: Startups should test hypotheses by layering MVPs on existing products
“One of the hacks that I like to use at this stage is to actually layer the MVP onto the existing product. So for example, if there's already some software that your users, not your users, like the people in the community are already using to track their compet…”
Migicovsky: Target problems customers are already actively attempting to solve
“Those are usually the problems that I like to start with because Like the person's already trying to find a solution. So they're primed when you come to talk to them, like to be excited and to try it versus you having to like pitch them hard and like changing …”
Migicovsky: Top hardware startups begin by assembling off-the-shelf components
“Some of the best hardware companies that I've worked with, even though they now make their own hardware and they build a bunch of custom stuff. They started using, they started by using off-the-shelf systems like Raspberry Pis, cameras, just existing technolog…”
Migicovsky: Startup one-liners should explain current product rather than all-encompassing visions
“Here's actually a problem that a lot of founders run into, is they think that their one-liner or their short description has to encompass, like, everything that they'll ever do under the ends of the earth, because they think that, like, investors only will get…”
Migicovsky: Build MVPs around the smallest action with outsized impact
“The way that I would start building an MVP is kind of like what we mentioned at the beginning. It's taking what you already do on a regular basis, like maybe you go to meetups, maybe you, like, are on Reddit for the subreddit of that city, and, like, think cle…”
Migicovsky: Founders should iterate on target market before adding features
“Instead of iterating on the product, like building more features, they actually iterate on the market.”
Migicovsky: Early startups need unscalable feedback because founders do not know what questions to ask
“The reason in this case is actually you don't know the questions to ask yet, and so you want a really high bandwidth A really wide, broad way of collecting feedback, because you don't know the questions that you want to ask yet”
Migicovsky: Developers prematurely shoot down ideas before evaluating potential upside
“I think too often, especially, like, developers, we're already internalizing the, like, How difficult things are going to be to build when we might not have understood, like, the potential benefit from building this, and it's always a trade-off. So, like, go b…”
Migicovsky: Starting a company requires only building product and talking to users
“At the core of kind of YC's teachings, there are only two things that you must do in order to start your company. You need to code or build your product and talk to users.”
Migicovsky: Asking users hypothetical feature questions yields bad data
“Second mistake that we pretty much all make is we talk about hypotheticals. We talk about what our product could be. We talk about features that we want to build. We ask questions like we ask questions like, if we built this Feature. Would you be interested in…”
Migicovsky: Customers Not Seeking Solutions Won't Care About New Products
“If customers, if potential customers are not already exploring potential solutions to their problem, it's possible that the problem that you're trying to solve is not a burning enough problem for customers for them to be even interested in your better solution…”
Migicovsky: Ask for user phone numbers at signup to clarify data anomalies
“Ask your users for the phone number during signup. Because oftentimes you'll be looking at the data and you'll be wondering, you know, why did, why is the data showing this particular Kind of learning about our customers. And you may be like thinking in aggreg…”
Migicovsky: Compliments are the worst feedback because they lack actionable specifics
“Some of the kind of worst bad data that you may encounter is compliments. People may say, oh, I love the new design, or man, this thing is really useful. You may love that during the course of your user interviews, but they actually are not useful information …”
Migicovsky: Hand-assembling early hardware units limits catastrophic loss from manufacturing bugs
“It was a really good thing that we were making them one by one, or else we could have potentially made, like, hundreds with that same problem right at the beginning and had lost, you know, basically everything.”
Migicovsky: Pebble spent its entire post-YC $250k funding round on inventory
“We raised a bit of money about 250,000 dollars including this kind of large check that we got from, ah, one investor. And I took all that money and invested in inventory, because I thought at the time the biggest constraint on us growing was we didn't have a r…”
Migicovsky: Pebble sold around 1,500 watches before launching Kickstarter
“Most people don't know this, but when we launched our Kickstarter campaign, we had already made and sold around 1500 of our first watch.”
Migicovsky: Hire for trust, dependability, and general intelligence over deep domain expertise
“I actually opt for in the early days and pretty much all days trust and dependability and kind of, Smartness over very specific, deep, domain-specific knowledge in who I'm looking to hire.”
Migicovsky: Pebble might have succeeded by operating as a frugal, hits-driven business
“I don't think we ever Reached escape velocity to a hit with any of our later products, and I think if we had built a more frugal organization, if we were able to build products cheaper, and then launch them and test to see if they were successful, and if they …”
Migicovsky: A Medical Device MVP Requires Peer-Reviewed Science and Clearance Roadmap
“For medical devices, I think the MVP is successfully peer-reviewed science that supports what you're working on, that, that there's an, that there's some sort of opportunity here, and a kind of understanding of what your path to clearance is.”
Migicovsky: Relativity Space's thesis was that 3D-printing eliminates integration testing costs
“Their thesis was it's not actually rocket assembly that costs a lot of money, it's the testing phase of integration, where if you have hundreds of different systems that have to work perfectly with each other, when you assemble and build the final rocket, you …”
Migicovsky: Hardware startups should trade unit margins for shorter component lead times
“Sometimes it's in your best interest to pay more for the product, pay more for the bomb, the bill of materials, pay more for the components, if The lead times are shorter because you may not actually have a margin problem. Maybe like you actually have quite a …”
Migicovsky: 9GAG bootstrapped early content by scraping memes from other sites
“A lot of the best user-generated content networks, like, Ninegag, which is now this, like, massive Meme, meme website was started by, like, scraping memes from other sites.”
Migicovsky: Autonomous trucking startup Embark began with a camera-rigged golf cart
“So, we've had companies that are now off building, like Embark, which builds, ah, self-driving trucks. Like, literally, they're running on the streets and the highways in Nevada. They started with a club car. I think, like, at demo day, they had a golf cart th…”
Migicovsky: User interviews must extract data, not pitch or sell
“The goal of a great user interview is to extract information from the person that you're talking to extract data that will help you improve the product, or improve your marketing, or improve your positioning. It is not to sell them on using your product.”
Eric Migicovsky pitched Pebble at CES in coffee shops without a booth
“I remember that when I was working on Pebble we actually went to CES, which is this large consumer electronics show in Vegas. We didn't have a booth. We just went in gorilla style. We just like randomly started setting up in setting up meetings with potential …”
Migicovsky: Seven of Pebble's first 10 watches broke apart during shipping
“We screwed up everything you could possibly screw up. In the first 10 watches we had a lot of problems, but we had a problem with RF. We couldn't get the signal out of the watch, because it's like a Faraday cage sitting on your wrist. And so we said, well, may…”
Migicovsky: Pebble hand-manufactured 700 to 800 units before full automation
“We continued to manufacture hand by hand, one by one by hand, up until around 708 hundred units.”
Migicovsky: WhatsApp first launched on the FlyerTalk travel forums in 2009
“You know where the WhatsApp guy posted his app first in back in 2009?
[2266] Adora Cheung: No.
[2266] Eric Migicovsky: He posted it on FlyerTalk.
[2268] Eric Migicovsky: Forums, which is, like, a whole bunch of, like, geeky business people who fly a lot.
[22…”
Migicovsky: Early scooter startups began by gluing modems onto Alibaba Xiaomi scooters
“A good example of this would be kind of the scooter companies. They took Xiaomi scooters, you know, nine-bought scooters, and they just glued on cell modems. That's it. That, that's how scooter sharing started. It's like cell modems in GPS plus scooter. They d…”
Migicovsky: Pebble Recruited Seven College Friends in Days Post-Kickstarter
“Right after we kind of hit on Kickstarter, we were only two people at the company. Two full-time people and two interns, and so we had, like, nobody, and all of a sudden we needed to hire people, and we could have spent, you know, three to six months hiring a …”
Migicovsky: Xiaomi managed inventory by only selling phones on Tuesday mornings
“Xiaomi, up until two or three years ago, sold their phones on Tuesday mornings. Like, they had a, once the, you couldn't go on the website and buy Xiaomi phones. You could only buy them, like, Tuesday mornings, and so it was like a thing. Everyone would be at …”