From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 8
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- “I define things that don’t scale as things that are sort of fundamentally unsustainable.”
- “companies that from the outside look like they’ve had this dream growth curve-the reality is those first users were impossibly hard to get”
- “When you first launch a company, just by virtue of the fact that it’s a new product, you’re going to be bad at selling it.”
- “It’s your responsibility as a founder to do whatever it takes to bring in your first users.”
- “Founders need to spend personal time and effort, a lot of personal time and effort to bring those users in themselves.”
- “For those first users, you just cannot focus on ROI in the sense of time.”
- On first users “…those users are going to take a lot of hand holding, a lot of personal love, and that’s okay. Thats essential for building a company.”
- “Cutting costs or giving the product away is an unsustainable strategy and I wouldn’t recommend.”
- “You need to make sure that users value your product.”
- “A champion is a user who talks about and advocates for your product.”
- “I’m a firm believer that every company with a great growth strategy has users who are champions.”
- “The easiest to turn a user into a champion is to delight them with an experience they’re going to remember.”
- “I cannot stress how important it is that you spend a large chunk of your time talking to users.”
- On talking to users — “You should do it constantly, every single day, and as long as possible.”
- “You’re never going to get a better sense for your product, then actually listening to real users.”
- “The product’s you launch with and the feature set you launch with, is almost certainly not going to be the feature set you scale with.”
- “Run customer service (yourself) as long as possible.”
- “Proactively reach out to current and churned customers.”
- “When a user actually leaves your service, you want to reach out and find out why.”
- “Social media/communities — you need to know how people are talking about your brand.”
- “What’s important is to always make it right. To always go the extra mile and make that customer happy.”
- “One detractor who’s had a terrible experience on your platform is enough to reverse the progress of ten champions.”
- “The customers that are often originally the most frustrated, tend to turn into the biggest champions and longest term users.”
- “Your job in those early days of a startup, is to progress and iterate as fast as possible to reach that product that does have market fit.”
- “You need to optimize for speed over scalability over clean code.”
“In a startup, you live in dog years — a month is a year.” - “A great rule of thumb, is to only worry about the next order of magnitude.”
- “You’ll end up with all these pain points, and all this technical debt and regret, but it’s worth it just to get to that end goal.”
- “You want to do these things that don’t scale for as long as possible.”
Image Credit: Walker Williams of Teespring — YCombinator Posthaven
