Nobody says I wish I talked to less customers.
There aren’t any hacks or shortcuts to this.
Go talk to your customers.
Startup life can be summed up in three steps:
1. Find problem
2. Fix problem
3. Go back to step 1
Works for every thing you need to do in a startup.
Growth is determined by a combination of how fast you can go through the steps successfully and how long you can keep at it.
Nobody says I wish I talked to less customers.
There aren’t any hacks or shortcuts to this.
Go talk to your customers.
You don’t have time, money or people to throw at the problem.
You have to go deep, dig for the details and think very creatively about solutions.
Then experiment like there is no tomorrow.
This skill comes from practicing jumping into the unknown.
You don’t usually get time to prepare for what’s coming next.
You’ll have to learn how to figure it out along the way.
This is why I say, nobody knows what they are doing.
We’re all just jumping from problem to problem expecting to figure things out.
Hopefully our past helps us not crash and burn.
More from Startups
1/ Tuesday was my last day as CEO of @CircleUp. I’ve been CEO since starting the co. in 2011 with my co-founder @roryeakin.
This is a thread about what happened, why and my emotions about it. For more detail:
https://t.co/vYImcm1bTM
Much of this I have never talked about.
2/ My goals: I hope it helps founders feel less lonely than I did. Little public content about the challenges of transitioning exists, but I longed for it. I’m not here to provide a playbook- just to share my experience. Hope it might build greater empathy.
Here goes….
3/ Why: When I tell people that I’m transitioning to an Exec Chairman role their first question is always: “why?” Short answer: co. pivot + fertility issues + health issues + a false sense that grit was always the answer = burnout. Long answer: is longer so hang in there with me
4/ Over a 12-18 month period that ended in late 2017 I ran my tank far beyond empty for far too long. You know that sound your car makes when it’s sputtering for more gas? It was like that. Worst year of my life. Since then it has felt like bone on bone.
5/ Here is what happened:
Professionally: pivoting a Series C company was a living hell in and of itself, as I’ve talked about before.
This is a thread about what happened, why and my emotions about it. For more detail:
https://t.co/vYImcm1bTM
Much of this I have never talked about.
2/ My goals: I hope it helps founders feel less lonely than I did. Little public content about the challenges of transitioning exists, but I longed for it. I’m not here to provide a playbook- just to share my experience. Hope it might build greater empathy.
Here goes….
3/ Why: When I tell people that I’m transitioning to an Exec Chairman role their first question is always: “why?” Short answer: co. pivot + fertility issues + health issues + a false sense that grit was always the answer = burnout. Long answer: is longer so hang in there with me
4/ Over a 12-18 month period that ended in late 2017 I ran my tank far beyond empty for far too long. You know that sound your car makes when it’s sputtering for more gas? It was like that. Worst year of my life. Since then it has felt like bone on bone.
5/ Here is what happened:
Professionally: pivoting a Series C company was a living hell in and of itself, as I’ve talked about before.
1/ We Pivoted a few yrs ago. This is the story- mostly my feelings. It has never been told publicly.
— Ryan Caldbeck (@ryan_caldbeck) April 16, 2019
This will be rambly and represents the chaos in my head at the time. There is [hopefully] no advice here. I don\u2019t know if we did it right.
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.
Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.
"Who is the prototypical client here?"
A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.
(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)
"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"
I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
On a serious note, it's interesting to observe that you can build a decent business charging $20 - $50 per month for something that any good developer can set up. This is one of those micro-saas sweet spots between "easy for me to build" and "tedious for others to build"
— Jon Yongfook (@yongfook) September 5, 2019
Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.
"Who is the prototypical client here?"
A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.
(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)
"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"
I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"
The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.
1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!
2) "Repressed memory" syndrome
3) Facilitated Communication [FC]
All 3 led to massive abuse.
"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.
Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.
FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
For three years I have wanted to write an article on moral panics. I have collected anecdotes and similarities between today\u2019s moral panic and those of the past - particularly the Satanic Panic of the 80s.
— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) September 29, 2018
This is my finished product: https://t.co/otcM1uuUDk
The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.
1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!
2) "Repressed memory" syndrome
3) Facilitated Communication [FC]
All 3 led to massive abuse.
"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.
Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.
FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
