From a Mailchimp email and Wufoo form to $25k in 3 months — ooomf labs. We had just gotten out of a meeting with our lead investor.
After reviewing our progress for the last few months, something wasn’t right. We were trying to build a way to help mobile developers better market their apps so they wouldn’t disappear in the App Store but after looking at our data, it was clear — we were missing the mark. Although we had over 15,000 app developers signed on, what we were building wasn’t the solution to the real problem in app discovery. After the meeting, my co-founders and I sat in our office thinking, “so what the hell do we do next? Do we keep going down a rabbit hole knowing that there probably won’t be a light at the end of the tunnel?” We ended up spending the next week re-thinking everything we thought was true, resulting in one of the most stressful times in our company’s life.
After peeling back the layers of our company, we realized that no amount of marketing can save a poorly constructed app. A product from Day 1 Here’s the first version of ooomf: Start. 57 startup lessons. I am a cofounder of RethinkDB — an open-source distributed database designed to help developers and operations teams work with unstructured data to build real-time applications.
There are already very good lists of startup lessons written by really talented, experienced people (here and here). I’d like to add another one. I learned these lessons the hard way in the past four years. If you’re starting a company, I hope you have an easier path. People If you can’t get to ramen profitability with a team of 2 – 4 within six months to a year, something’s wrong. Fundraising If you have to give away more than 15% of the company at any given fundraising round, your company didn’t germinate correctly.
Markets The best products don’t get built in a vacuum. Products Product sense is everything. Marketing Product comes first. Sales.
Startup Genome - cracking the code of innovation. Do Things that Don't Scale. July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale.
A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. [1] Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. Recruit The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one.
Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the other companies we've funded, and none took better advantage of it than Stripe. There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. Fragile Fire.