Startup advice

Some lessons learned while building General Folders

It’s been quite the journey building General Folders so far. I learned things I wish I had known before starting the company. There were also things that I had learned at past jobs that proved helpful with company building. Below is a list of these lessons. I hope that you find them useful on your company-building journey!

Build a team. Bring on cofounders but for the right reasons. Two can be better than one, but you can’t rush building the first team.

Be genuinely passionate. The secret to hiring the best people is to be knowledgeable and passionate about the product and business. Passion is contagious, and expertise is hard to fake. The same holds for sales. Don’t underestimate the impact of stoke on selling a product.

Get to a yes before you build. Enthusiastic customers are willing to pay for a future product or feature. Don’t build before you get customer buy-in.

Follow the crowd. Tried and true methods are popular for a reason. It pays to follow the crowd if you know the time and place to apply a technique.

Business is very situational. Rules of thumb are good, but they have to be applied to the right situation. Sometimes the old maxim that you should stick to the knitting is correct, but sometimes it’s wrong. And a senior leader’s job is to figure out: Which situation are you in?
— Jeff Bezos

Follow trends. Don’t ignore market trends. As mentioned in the last point—it pays to follow the crowd. Following trends makes you more likely to get noticed, talked about, supported, and funded.

Embrace change. Don’t get obsessed with a certain decision or plan. If customer feedback is anything but stellar, update your strategy.

Hire an accountant. While it pays to change lanes or ride the new wave, save for the dry season. Change is expensive. And new trends always give way to newer trends; it’s kind of funny how that works.

Stand out. Sometimes it pays to ignore trends and focus on what you uniquely believe to be true. You can’t expect a significant return without taking on a risk nobody else is willing to take.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.
—Wayne Gretzy

I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable.
—Dolly Parton

Hustle. Aside from being a function of big risk, a big return is also the result of tireless work. There are no shortcuts.

There is no royal road to geometry.
— Euclid

Make the call. There is no single way to run a successful company, and there are endless decisions to make with incomplete information. Remember that indecision is a decision. Use every decision as an experiment to learn more about your business.

Action produces information. You got to put a lot of shots on goal to get one to eventually work.
— Brian Armstrong

Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.
—Drew Houston

Move fast. Faster is better, and nothing beats momentum. (I’m great at physics.) But remember that speed is only a virtue when the intent is to serve customers and tend to their needs. Speed, for the sake of signaling, comes at the expense of quality, which ends up tarnishing the brand.

Be humble. In every scenario, assume you don’t have all the answers. This becomes even more important as you grow the employee and customer base and take on more responsibilities.

Keep learning. Evolve to become the type of leader that the company needs at each stage in its journey. Can you hire yourself every day?

Ask for help. Ask for things and get help. The startup community is more generous, welcoming, and helpful than expected.

Believe in yourself. Be kind, especially to yourself. Self-confidence is the only thing you have that you can rely on for a long time.

Keep going. People (including yourself) will tell you that what you’re doing is not enough; that if it were to work, it would have worked by now. They will tell you that you should be embarrassed and give up. Don’t. Stay on the path, and the right opportunities will present themselves.

It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.
—Babe Ruth

Keep focused. Don’t compare your startup to other startups. Don’t read into startup news. You can’t judge deals from the outside. Building a great company takes more than an idea, money, or early deals. Focus on making your company better every day.

Talk to customers. Nothing benefits a product more than customer feedback. Don’t lose sight of it. Feedback will save the product from veering off the tracks into irrelevance.

Carpe diem. Seize the day. You might not have achieved all the milestones, but you’ll never be this young ever again.

What are some of your experiences from working at startups? I’d love to hear from you!