3 Lessons from a Millionaire YC Founder
Yesterday I chatted with a YC founder who just took a multi-million exit.
Here are 3 pieces of advice he gave me:
Growth is Everything
I asked him many questions about strategy, legal, VC, partnerships.
The answer to all of them?
Growth.
With growth and traction, many problems you thought you had automatically resolve themselves.
As Sam Altman says, "Momentum is everything in a startup. If you have momentum, you can survive most other problems. If you don't, nothing except getting momentum will solve your problems."
Avoid Funding from Family Members
Family often has a lower bar for investing in your idea.
It prevents thorough thinking of your business plan.
It risks wasting time and money on non-viable projects.
It takes away valuable opportunities to build a network and form connections crucial to your business's future.
This is what "old money" people do for their family:
They connect you with VC investors, but the pitching is up to you.
Set Concrete Targets
Decide on one or two metrics that define growth for your startup.
For PressPulse.ai, my target is 10k signups in 6 months.
Then aim for a 7% week-over-week growth rate. (The YC rule of thumb)
It means you should 34x your business in one year.
Hold yourself accountable to this target.
Every. Single. Week.
Got questions I should ask this founder? Comment below.
Great job SolarFlare on sharing your lessons from a Millionaire YC Founder point of view. You have achieved an incredible success and we're proud of you! Well done!
100% - came here to say the same thing.
What advice did the YC founder give regarding the process of securing VC funding, especially for those who are new to navigating this landscape?
Growth :)
More specifically you can bootstrap or get angle investment for early early state, but then you need growth to secure VC
So much times I see people saying things like "Then aim for a 7% week-over-week growth rate.", "Growth, growth and growth" and things like this, but not so much times how to do it. It's only marketing stuff? Paid ads? What's the way? I'm a good SWE but don't know how to make my product goes to people.
There's something called the bullseye framework for finding your best marketing channel. But a prerequisite for investing in growth is you find PMF.
Reading this is honestly terrifying. I launched a month ago. Today GPX hit 25 downloads, but our active user count is negligible. I'm running Google ads, but not effectively. The best communication channel I have is the Twitter/x account. That gets some visibility but nothing special. Getting users to know about the product, download it and then try it out on their actual run is a big challenge right now.
What I'm doing is okay, but looking at the numbers in this article it seems inconceivable. I definitely need to rethink the growth strategy....
People still focus too much on the product and not enough on the consumer. You need to see the product through the user's eyes for it to work, remember consumer consumer consumer. Solve their problems don't try to give them something.
It sounds like you haven't found PMF yet, spending money on ads is way too early because you don't even know who you should target.
Instead try to use that budget to find a couple users, pay them for a user interview (might be able to do it for free too), understand the problem, or the absence of it, would be a good move at your stage.
100% - came here to say the same thing. Early on, chase problems not solutions. You might have an idea of the space you want to be in, but you need to be open to different variations of a problem and really under what the market looks like for each one. Get super specific when you interview users or potential users and you will know the variations that exist, how painful they are, how big the market is you are going after, and hopefully where to find more users like the ones you have talked to.
Put on the user's shoes, not yours. Delve into their world, learn about their quirks, and watch the magic happen. Before spending money on advertising, let's pinpoint the audience hungry for our solution. The early days were about listening, not shouting.
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This comment was deleted 2 years ago.