The Wisdom Wall

“When startups get funded, every single dollar, every single energy effort should go towards trying to find product market fit, which usually is The two founders or the three founders, their computers, their apartment, and maybe one more engineer who's also probably an engineer that you hire. Like that's basically it.…”

“Most really big companies didn't use all of those channels. They use one or two channels.”

“VP of marketing is like notoriously high churn job because, and it's not because the VP of marketing folks aren't good. It's because the founders have the wrong expectations of what those people do, and they haven't been curious enough to learn about that job.”

“It just feels natural that I should have an office manager, or I should have, um, a really nice big office, or maybe two offices, or maybe a chief of staff, and there's, like, all of the things that, that just, like, you can look at other companies that are successful, and you kind of attach yourself to the things that…”

“Like, maybe if I know you, I know you're a great founder, I would want to work for you, but like, for most people, this is not interesting to work for, which means the time it takes to hire will be very long, and if it goes really fast, you probably hire the wrong people.”

“If you don't know how to sell, don't worry. You can learn. It's probably the easiest job to learn in startup.”

“Um, but you should not offer free trials and B to B sales. Go for a money back guarantee and go for the ability to opt out instead.”

“Increasing your price until your customers are complaining, but still paying is the right way to go.”

“You can't learn from users if the first thousand or first hundred customers are brought in through Google and Facebook. Those people are not the kind of people that you can easily get on a 30 minute phone call with.”

“Well, you can just Google the best products and best companies in the world. They all have bad net promoter score. Like the iPhone, Apple, all of them have bad net promoter scores. Like it doesn't necessarily correlate with good products. Correlates with perceptions of companies.”

“I think there is a fundamental problem sort of like with, with the, uh, driving the attention and then sort of like having advertising as a monetization engine. If you change that, and you say, actually, I am the, I'm the customer, I'm paying for the product, then you get different outputs, because now you're…”

“most companies that go really, really large, they do it on figuring out one platform. So they are really good at online marketing, they're really good at SEO, they're really good at reality, or the Facebook platform, or something like that. It's rare that you have, like, I figure out all the platforms.”

“There are not that many countries in my experience that are dramatically different. There are maybe five or 10 that are quite different than the US, but most countries are not that different.”

“if you have a website, and you have people come to your website, and you have accounts, don't log them out. Just like, keep people logging for as long as you can. There's really no benefit in automatically logging people out after, after a couple of months, after a couple of days in terms of growth”

“And if I was to say a CSA investor, and that would mean one of these companies, I actually care more about the trajectory of the automation rate than the overall revenue.”

“A lot of founders try to think of, like, segment before qualification, and I think sometimes Just the right person is more important as long as they are empowered.”

“it's much better when you're pivoting to have a range of different ideas exploring. So, sort of like, you can find conviction around something and be fine with throwing out a few of them.”

“Like, like, I have a great idea is not something that founders would have great ideas say generally.”

“If you have a lot of time to think about this question, it's probably too early. If this is something that comes to mind every day for you, it's probably too early because It's the right time to hire when, like, things are so busy that you can't even find a slot in your calendar to do an interview with a candidate.”

“Hiring is not a success metric at all. It's sort of like a way to not go under or have a functioning company fail.”

“It's sort of like a secret playbook that a lot of YC companies, some of the best ones are all following is that the first people you want to hire all former founders.”

“Normally I say people don't wait, like wait until you have like maybe 14 or 12 months left and do your first attempt at fundraising or like test the waters maybe. And if it doesn't go well, you have another two shots actually. And then you can change things and improve things in that time.”

“One of them is to send an investor updates every month. Because accountability really matters. Having someone else looking, looking at, at this every month actually forces you to be more accountable.”

“And the second thing is to have two bank accounts and you put half of the money in the other one, pretend like you don't have it. And then like you look at your bank account and be like, oh, I actually only have half the money that I raised.”

“Companies win early stage by being much better at customer support than big companies. So you have to be much better at customer support than big companies.”

“Once you hit Series B, the companies that don't make it are the ones that don't actually understand The quality of their revenue. And the people that have high quality revenue, they'll, they'll make it.”

“All ad span is either one or two categories. It's either experimental and small, or it's ROI positive. And then it's a payback time in months, and you know exactly how many months you get the money back, and you know that every single month. Those are the only two categories of ad spans that should exist.”

“Most people, when you see a new launch or a new thing, and it wasn't that great, just don't have time to care.”

“As a result, you should not hire a sales team until you know how to do sales yourself. Only then will you know what good looks like.”

“It should be short, max six to eight sentences.”

“Four, do not use any HTML formatting. Write your email in plain text only, like you would written it to a friend.”

“And I've seen a lot of YC founders that when they are getting to a thousand of these, they're like, oh, this is a very simple task. I can actually outsource this. And I think that can work if you know exactly what it is you're outsourcing.”

“selling to startups is the easiest category. And I've, I've learned this on and on again. With YC companies, specifically the ones that sell software, it just turns out that bigger companies have more bureaucracy, more processes. They even have a specific department that is in charge of negotiating with you, and that…”

“Most people are not early adopters, and I keep saying this to the YC companies I work with all the time. The reason you have to sell, send hundreds of emails is not that Most of those people get really upset and be like, I can't believe you emailed me, like, I really love this alternative product, but I hate your…”

“The biggest mistakes that most founders do is they don't do enough outreach because they don't work backwards from the goal.”

“Great founders talk to future customers before they even have a product. In fact, the very best founders in the world learn directly from their users throughout the life of their company.”

“Users and customers will keep you honest. They are the only stakeholders actually paying you anything. If anyone will tell you the truth, it will be them.”

“You can learn a lot more from a five minute video interview than 500 or 5000 survey responses.”

“Remember, their job is to tell you about the problem. Your job is to think about what features to solve that problem. So, ask, asking them about your job isn't really gonna help you.”

“users don't have incentive to say no to really any additional features. If you ask for this feature or this feature, this feature, they'll probably say yes to everything, right?”

“For example, selling to plumbers or contractors is notoriously difficult compared to selling to startups. The first two groups just don't change their tools or the software very often versus startups are open to trying new things all the time.”

“Most startups don't have product market fit. Founders tell themselves that they do, and they try to convince themselves that this is working. But the truth is, for most companies, it's not working.”

“And if you went to school and you learned they should only work on things that really scale, you're gonna have to unlearn that skill. Because when you start your company, the most important thing is going to do things that don't scale.”

“I think that the best way to figure out if product market fit is to use data, unbiased data, um, to understand if you basically have made something that people want.”

“And finally, Lyft. You might want to think it's rides here. The rides is the best metric here. It's actually riders. Like, the people that are taking the rides are the ones that matter. Because, um, it's the individuals, um, that we want to measure here, and we not necessarily want to measure the, the action that they…”

“Every week, it eventually flattens out, and the people that stop using the product stop, stop using the product. And eventually here, week eight, nine, 10, we have a flat line of people that continue to use the product every single week. That means that they are retained. I, they, you have product market fit for those…”

“something that should be a paid product, you're giving away for free, is not a good sign of product market fit. Like, you want to figure out if people are willing to pay for it, because price, if someone says, I love this, if it's free, but if it costs money, I'm not going to use it. That's pretty bad. Like, then…”

“Look at the best websites in the world. Look at Pinterest. Look at Airbnb. Look at some of those sites. They have teams optimizing these, these, these flows, um, the authentication flow. Copy what they do. They probably figure it out. They spend a lot of time optimizing.”

“If you can make a list of all your customers, even if that list is a 100,000, or 500,000, if, as long as it's not mainstream enough, they'll be in the tens of millions, you're probably gonna do sales.”

“The biggest mistakes founders make is to start working on online marketing when they don't have people paying for the product.”

“First, who's the sender of the email? If it's just Airbnb, I probably have never heard of Airbnb the first time I get this email. If it's Gustav that sent the email, and I sent it to my friends, they have heard of me, that's the reason to open the email.”

“Well, I could sign up, which is a undefined thing that you can do sometime in the future, or I can do what we did here, was accept my invitation. This sounds more exclusive. It sounds like something that is just for me. It doesn't sound like something I can do anytime in the future.”

“The best thing startups can do is don't wait eight months. Just have a much lower Like a much lower target on what your CAC is going to be. Maybe one month, two months, three months, first, first transaction, something like that.”

“if you are going to rely on search engine optimization to grow, um, you're going to have to Be as good as a Pinterest or a TripAdvisor. Eventually. Not right away, but eventually. Because, ah, it's so competitive to win in this, like, large world of SEO.”

“Most of you guys don't have to focus on A-B testing at all. It won't matter for a long time. It is a great decision making tool later on.”

“So I would say that the story of Airbnb was basically, um, we had, uh, probably one of the best market fits that I've seen, uh, but not necessarily thanks to, like, an amazing user flow, an amazing onboarding, or even an amazing acquisition channel. It's just, like, a really good experience.”

“The thing you want to decide early on is who, sort of like, what is the thing that you're controlling the experiment on, and I would recommend that it's going to be user accounts. If you're doing it on visitors or something like that, it's going to be typically much harder. But even on user accounts, it's like…”

“The early wins are often in the high intent flows. So like where people actually thinking about booking or actually about to book. So search conversion is important one. Um, signup conversion is important one. Um, sort of like online marketing traffic was an important one for us versus for example, homepage is super…”

“Uh, in the Middle East, uh, and many of the more emerging markets, the ads are actually quite, quite a good arbitrage for some of these countries, uh, companies, because, um, there are not a lot of premium services to charge for things, and, and a lot of the, The brands have actually not gone onto these platforms yet,…”

“growth kind of becomes important when they have new platforms. So you have Facebook platform, you have the mobile platform, you have Google, SEO, there's a bunch of larger platforms that makes people actually care about investing in them.”

“predicting product decisions are really, it's really tricky. Um, so I would say this happens all the time, and if it doesn't happen, then you're not taking big enough risks. You should be seeing things that are counterintuitive.”

“Unfortunately, most founders still don't build personal connections with their users today. They hide behind info ad emails or do not reply emails.”

“the most, most, most important thing here is to not introduce your idea till maybe at the end of the call or maybe not at all. Doing this too early can bias them in their answers.”

“You want to deeply understand their behavior, not just what they're saying, but what they're doing, um, because changing the behavior will be hard.”

“Will you use our product? They're probably going to say yes, but they're not going to mean anything to you in that answer.”

“Don't over-intellectualize this process. Really, you just want to start designing the MVP as fast as you can, but you want to make sure you have accurate information when you decide the MVP.”

“To move someone off Excel or Google Spreadsheet, You need to make the experience of your solution dramatically better. They're not going to pay you hundreds of dollars a month for something they can almost as easily do in Google Spreadsheet or Excel.”

“The key thing, if you're doing this tactic, is to not tell them what to do. Do not tell them what to do. Just watch them play around with it. You can tell them a specific goal, like try to make a booking at Airbnb, or try to do a search with dates on Airbnb, or something like that. But do not tell them exactly how to…”

“Reacting to things that they're saying, you can ship a new, a new screen with a new version of the product, um, and that builds trust with them. They now know that you react to their feedback very fast.”

“It's because working on growth before you have product market fit and good retention is not a good idea.”

“One is translation. So, absolutely key to have a way that you can translate content across languages that's often overlooked, and it's like a huge growth driver.”

“It's always easy to interview people that you know, or people who are on your network. They're simply the most likely to respond, but perhaps can be less honest in their answers to, um, not offend you.”