198 engineering seats were available for every 1 lakh peopl…

1/23: One #startup trap to avoid (founders and VCs) is to fall in love with a value prop that can’t be delivered IRL now. Good diligence will surface disconnects but they’re often brushed under the rug by #VCs who believe fixing delivery over time will be fine. Unpacked:

2/23: The foundational reason why this matters from day 1 is that building a franchise of loyal customers is difficult for any #startup to pull off but the challenge is amplified if the #startup has to rebuild its franchise as it scales.

3/23: Broken or unfulfilled promises lead to customer behaviors that have real consequences. Poor ratings and reviews. High customer service costs. High complaint volume. Low engagement. High attrition/returns/cancelations. Low organic growth.

4/23: Undoing damage takes time and sometimes is nearly impossible. Convincing inactive customers to “retry” your product isn’t easy. Overcoming bad reviews can be a Herculean task. And resources will be thrown at fixing past sins at the expense of new functionality.

5/23: And guess what happens when #VCs dig into questionable early performance numbers? These conversations tend to revolve around caveats, apologies and synthetic analysis that bakes in significant improvements (many of which are still “unknown” in nature).

Olabinjo
@binjoadeniran

People who want to switch on growth for their startups or marketing professionals ask me what to read to get their thinking up. Here's a thread of some books and blogs I read

When you read these, it's important to focus on the principles and not the exact strategy. Copying and pasting what someone else has done is not a guarantee that it'll work

Books:

1. Nir Eyal - Hooked: How to build habit-forming products.

Nir writes about the psychology of human behaviour with digital and physical products and shares real-life examples of how you can engage, nudge and encourage your customers to keep using your product

2. Ryan Holiday - Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Ryan writes how boring simple advertising is and what growth hackers need to do/take advantage of to be truly unique and to switch things up

3. Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares - Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers.

Gabriel and Justin focus on channels you can lever to acquire and retain customers. This book is a guide if you have no clue how to approach customer acquisition. It's an inexhaustive list tbh

Justin Kan
@justinkan

I just gave a talk to the W2021 YC batch. It's my favorite startup audience to talk to. Here are some of the highlights:

Finding product market fit is the critical thing to do in a startup.

Everything else: demo day, what investors you get, how much you raise, what press covers you -- it is all window dressing.

Many founders don’t want to talk to their customers because it makes them vulnerable, because it's hard work, because it's scary. Creating a tight feedback loop with customers is the one thing that will help you discover PMF.

If a customer isn't one of your cofounders, try to create a customer panel that allows as tight of a loop as possible. Call them daily. Put them in your Slack.

My Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear has a great analogy on PMF here: it's like rolling a boulder downhill.

1/ What is \u201cproduct/market fit\u201d? I\u2019m not sure I can give you a definition. But maybe I can share what the subjective difference is in how it feels when you have it and when you don\u2019t. Founding a startup is deciding to take on the burden of Sisyphus: pushing a boulder up a hill.
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) July 27, 2019