Startup advice

Some lessons I learned while building General Folders

From my time at Techstars SDSU.

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

Build a team. Bring along co-founders, but for the right reasons. Two can outperform one. Building the first team is your most important task.

People first. Technology second.
— Biz Stone

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

Define the MVP. A startup has limited resources, so the scope of the first version matters. Customers expect quality demos, regardless of a company's size or stage. Determine the minimum amount of product or visuals required to get 1) customer buy-in and 2) relevant feedback.

A successful MVP is tied to a very particular use case with a well-defined customer profile. This is why it’s ineffective to define an MVP without a detailed understanding of the unique use case it covers. Having a well-defined use case is what ultimately results in successful distribution.

As it turns out, this is an exercise that a company repeats over and over. There’s never an infinite budget, and building products in a vacuum is rarely a good idea. You can easily bankrupt a company as you spend to develop an upcoming version.

The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out.
—Aaron Levie

Talk to customers. Nothing benefits a company more than customer feedback. Never lose sight of it. Feedback saves products and companies from veering off the tracks into irrelevance.

You’ll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.
—Aaron Levie

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

Follow the crowd. Tried-and-true practices are popular for a reason. It pays to follow the crowd if you know when and where 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. Following trends makes you more likely to get noticed, talked about, and funded.

Hire an accountant. While it pays to follow trends, plan for the dry season. New trends always give way to newer trends — it’s funny how that works.

Stand out. Further, while following trends can be rewarding, sometimes it pays to focus on what you uniquely believe to be true. You can’t expect a significant return without taking on a risk nobody else wants to take.

Most of the big breakthrough technologies/companies seem crazy at first: PCs, the internet, Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, 140 characters.. It has to be a radical product. It has to be something where, when people look at it, at first they say, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t understand it. I think it’s too weird, I think it’s too unusual.’
— Marc Andreessen

If you’re waiting for encouragement from others, you’re doing it wrong. By the time people think an idea is good, it’s probably too late.
—Aaron Levie

Hustle. Aside from being a function of big risk, a big return is also an outcome of hard work. There are no shortcuts. Pick up the phone. Knock on doors. Get in front of customers.

There is no royal road to geometry.
— Euclid

Make the call. Running a business involves endless decisions with incomplete information. Indecision is a decision. Make the call. Use every decision to learn more about your business.

Action produces information.
— Brian Armstrong

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

There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.
— Ben Horowitz

Move fast. Faster is better, but only when the goal is to serve customers and tend to their needs. Rushing for PR reasons comes at the expense of quality, ultimately tarnishing the brand.

My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.
— Marc Andreessen

Note that moving fast doesn’t just mean writing more code, sending more emails, and doing more busy work. It also doesn’t mean skipping the critical thinking and planning steps. Building requires clear thinking and planning. It requires coordinating with customers at every step. Skipping steps creates tech debt, ineffective plans, and underwhelmed customers. Rarely do products fail because there isn’t enough code and artifacts, but rather inadequate thought. Don’t skip steps. And don’t settle for busy work.

Keep learning. In every scenario, assume you don’t have all the answers. Learn and evolve to become the leader the company needs at each stage. 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.

Go after capital. Raise capital to accelerate growth. Bring on investors who are already sold on the vision and ready to champion the company. If it’s a hard sell, it’s not a good fit.

Believe in yourself. Be kind, especially to yourself. Self-confidence is the only thing you have going for you for a long time. Things won’t ever be perfect, and that’s okay.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.
—Margaret Atwood

Keep going. People (mainly yourself) will tell you that what you’re doing is not enough and that if it were to work, it would have worked by now. They will tell you to give up. Don’t. Opportunities will come around.

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. Focus on your customers. Focus on your collaborators.

I learned the value of focus. I learned it is better to do one product well than two products in a mediocre way.
— Reed Hastings

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

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