1/ Today I prepared for talking about common mistakes startups make (founding -> growth stages) by writing it in tweet form. I ramble too much when public speaking and hoped it would make the core ideas clearer in my mind and more concise. Think it worked. Here are the tweets
-
-
3/ If you launch, next mistake is chasing top-line vanity metrics (sign ups) instead of growing the number of users who *really* love you.
@paultoo advice - better to have 10 users who depend on you than 100 who a lukewarm. This requires patience and killing your ego.Show this thread -
4/ If you raise a seed round, it’s tempting to ignore retention. With money, there are always ways to grow top-line (buy ads, launch a new location). Strong fundraisers can do this for multiple rounds (though investors are more savvy to this now). Eventually, the bottom falls out
Show this thread -
5/ Once you’re growing without churn, you find you have a diverse set of customers and can’t make them all happy -it’s easy to fail trying. Commit to a long term strategy for going public and build for the users who get you there, even if you lose the others. You have to focus.
Show this thread -
6/ With growth, retention, and focus - now you have to scale team. Two types of mistake, hiring too slow and too fast. Product focused founders likely to hire too slow (don’t want to delegate, like the details), business-minded founders likely to hire too fast.
Show this thread -
7/ Hiring too slowly doesn’t kill you, it just caps your upside. Your competitor builds a team faster and signs up more customers with a slightly worse than yours but still good enough product. You’re left with a nice, small business.
Show this thread -
8/ Hiring too fast kills you via bad decision making. You lose rigor in hiring process (bad people -> bad decisions), there’s no effective onboarding/setting people up for success (good people -> bad decisions), growth stalls, conflict rises (good people leave)
Show this thread -
9/ Avoid all of these...and there's still myriad other ways you could fail so don't attach too much of your identity to the outcome of your startup :-)
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
... and this is the mistake I made
Guilty!Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
Harjeet, you mean values-aligned or goals-aligned, or both? Values are things like honesty, love for the journey x the end result, etc. Goals are making the world's largest company, or getting rich.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.