The best way to know if people like your product is NOT:

- Have a lot of emails in the waiting list
- Become #1 on PH
- Become #1 of HN or Reddit
- Have people that saing "I'll pay"
- Have a lot of free users

The best way to know if they're actually pay for it.

With @ycombinator #demoday kicking off, @atrium gathered advice from past YC founders.

.@jaltma from @latticeHQ says “Don’t confuse investor interest with product-market fit. You’re about to be on the receiving end of a lot of hype and FOMO - use it to your advantage by taking the money and then keep your burn and ego low.”

.@typesfast from @flexport says “I like to remind myself that even Bruce Springsteen still gets nervous before his concerts. Remember that, and then try to focus on what investors want: First, not to be bored. Second, to get rich(er).”

.@collinmathilde from @frontapp says “Leverage your data to tell a story about what the business has achieved and where it is going. Metrics are necessary, but they are too often shared without a narrative arc.”

.@drusenko from @weebly says “Make it relevant. Investors can live in their own world, so try to find an angle that they can relate to.”

At Udemy, we were 3 first-time entrepreneurs trying to raise seed capital. We made every mistake in the book.

We got 200+ no’s and wasted 12 months fundraising.

We eventually pulled through, just barely. 😅

This thread shares our mistakes as lessons for founders.

**Read On**

We built an impressive product, but we were nobodies.

We thought: we need money to build our vision, so let’s go talk to some investors.

WRONG.

Nobody gave a fuck that we needed money. We needed to prove we deserved their money.

We met some associates and intermediaries who might introduce us to investors.

Few decision-makers wanted to meet with us.

We should’ve stopped there.

If getting meetings is hard, it will take you forever to raise.

Instead, spend your time building product + getting traction.

I was frustrated with investors: treated them as adversaries who asked dumb questions. My derision turned them off.

Learn to understand and appreciate investors. Follow them on Twitter, listen to podcasts from @HarryStebbings or @eriktorenberg.

An investor's job isn't easy.

They kiss a ton of frogs just to find one deal that may make them money 10 years from now.

They only win if you become a billion dollar company.

Don’t kid yourself - if you aren’t the right fit, bootstrap.

Risk-adjusted, bootstrapping can make you happier and more successful.

For those of you asking me if I bought my wework equity—I did not. But, not because I didn’t choose to buy it. Despite joining the company very early on, I was not offered options. Here’s a thread about what happened and my feelings about it now. /1

I joined wework in 2011 as the ~17th employee when we had 4 buildings. I was 23, naive, and didn’t know what equity or options were—I certainly didn’t know how much it could impact my financial future. When I, and the first hundred or so joined the team, /2

equity options weren’t a part of the deal and I thought nothing of it. As the company grew and we brought in more funding, the executive team decided it was time to allocate equity to its employees. It was mid-2013, about 4 years after the company started. /3

We had ~120 employees and I had been there for ~2 years. I don’t know much about what went on behind the scenes to determine who would get equity and how much, or quite frankly, why they did it at all. /4

In the process, they did a couple of things: First, the way in which they chose to allocate equity, to whom, how much, etc. was… interesting. I’ll get into that more soon. Second, for the people who were given equity options, wework made the choice *not* to backdate. /5

Last month, 250k people visited https://t.co/nkcmLxbhzC, mostly from Google search.

Here are some things I've learned about SEO:

1. Second-and-third-order consequences

SEO is a "mind game" of second-and-third-order consequences. The work you do today will not yield results immediately.

Write an article, publish it, and then get no results. This makes you think you "did it wrong". Most people quit here.

Just go in with the expectation that you won't see results for six months after publish.

Instead of getting discouraged, just write more and publish more. By the time you published your 20th article, you might start finally seeing the results of your first.

2. SEO industry is mostly BS

Try to avoid SEO experts and industry nonsense, they are mostly distractions.

*Examples of distractions*: Google algorithm updates, schema markup, page speed, meta tags.

Do you think you’re smarter than Google’s algorithm? Maybe today, definitely not tomorrow.

Write and publish compelling content that answers the searcher’s query. That’s it!

@Moz:

Some wed night thoughts on investor “value add”:

1) At the end of the day, money is a commodity. That mere fact should make every vc shudder.

It is amazing how many ppl (incl myself) clamor to get into a commodity business!

2) As such, to differentiate, different investors provide other things beyond money. Sometimes it’s community. Sometimes hiring help. Sometimes expertise or sector-focused networks. Etc

3) And some VCs are truly value add! For example, if I had an edtech co, I would hands down raise from @jwdanner - he has been there as an entrepreneur, built schools, and invested in so many hit edtech companies.

4) But at the end of the day, regardless of who invested in you, it’s the founders + team who are doing all the work.

5) when I think about what I’ve done for my own founders, it’s ranged from doing intros (mostly to other investors) to cust acq advice to feedback etc

But the reality is - all of my founders would’ve figured out how to get that intro or that piece of advice w out me