4 unexpected lessons I’ve learned after going through Y Combinator this year
Hey all!
I've been reflecting on 2018, our experience of launching OpenPhone and going through YC.
Wanted to share my 4 most unexpected lessons learned. I wish someone shared them with me a year ago.
Here they are:
1 - Focus on customers who “have their hair on fire”
2 - Get to the point
3 - Learn to have level 3 conversations
4 - When you take time off, actually use it
I go over each one of these in detail, explain why they were unexpected (to me) and share real examples of our pre-YC and post-YC 1-liner in the post:
https://medium.com/@darynakulya/4-unexpected-lessons-after-y-combinator-bd5f036a1c55
Hope it's helpful. Would love your feedback!
Happy Holidays!
Daryna, thanks for sharing! Love your writing style.
Sounds like non-realistic expectations. "Hair on fire customers," for example: we're bootstrapped 100%, profitable, doubled our active customers this year. On the other hand, I have yet to encounter even one user or customer who was anything near that ecstatic about any of our four SaaS products.
Perhaps this would qualify as "level 3" convo - you know, real talk?
Thanks for reading!
I used "hair on fire" to illustrate customers with a lot of motivation for solving their problem. Those customers tend to be most receptive to using early stage solutions with imperfections.
They are also the easiest & cheapest to acquire since they're aware of their problem + looking for solutions.
As the product matures and the team grows, the team can move on to the more difficult task of acquiring customers with less motivation.
This advice helped us stay focused throughout YC as a tiny team with an early product.
It's awesome that you've been able to grow so fast without external capital. It seems that your company and products are more mature and have outgrown the phase when this advice is relevant :)
Great read, thanks for sharing! Especially the part about finding the ideal customers - I need to learn how to do that pretty quickly in the new year :)
Glad it was helpful! All the best as you do that and feel free to reach out if I can help!
Love the bit about #3 in your post. :) Thanks for sharing!
Thanks John!
Great write up. #2 really resonates. It's hard when you've got a big vision to distill a product down to it's simplest value.
Thanks James. Glad it does! That's exactly the challenge and something we've struggled with (as I illustrated our pre-YC and post-YC pitch)
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Thanks Manuel, glad it resonated! Yeah, sometimes we all need a reminder :)
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Thank you! Glad it was helpful. You as well!