14 ms·

Having a launched product is hard

248 points by martinkl 16y ago

batasrki 16y ago
On an unrelated note, that whiteboard graph disturbed me a bit. Does every YC startup hope to get bought out? Why would that even be a goal or something to aspire to?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- pclark 16y ago
  it says "liquidity" which can imply IPO.
- dmoney 16y ago
  It seems to be part of the definition of a startup that the end goal is either acquisition or IPO. PG has said (in an interview, might have been on Mixergy) that YC can't make a profit on a startup unless it has an exit.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- martinkl 16y ago
  Nothing is fun when it goes beyond a certain level. User support is interesting, but it gets a bit repetitive if you need to do it all day long. Scaling is really interesting, but getting no sleep because the database is on fire is not fun. Fixing bugs is not fun if they happen on other people's weird configurations that you can't reproduce. And raising capital... sure, it's glamorous, but in the end it's pretty tedious. The amazing thing about a startup is that you can quickly translate your intuitions about a product you think that people want into an actual product. Making a good product and making people happy is what I care about. The other things are enablers. [Edit - grammar fix]
gnok 16y ago
On a somewhat un-related note, I am interested in hearing about your immigration issues. I realize an immigration attorney's advice is probably golden, but I would like to hear what visa categories you considered and applied for and what problems you encountered while applying/gathering paperwork.
- martinkl 16y ago
  I was planning another post on that topic :) in a nutshell, we got H-1B visas. With a good attorney the paperwork is mostly tedium, but lots and lots of tedium. The process is very opaque and full of uncertainties.
  - gnok 16y ago
    To me, the phrases 'H1B' and 'startup' are inherently disconnected. I -- and many others, i imagine -- would love to read your post on your immigration issues. Thanks!
  - blizkreeg 16y ago
    If you think H-1B is tedium and kafkaesque, wait until you have to apply for permanent residency :)
    - ameyamk 16y ago
      I am also interested in knowing how u get H1 when u start a start up. Immigration issues are keeping us away from doing anything full time.
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    I am also interested in learning about the process, please post the article on HN when you write it!
jedc 16y ago
Great post, Martin. In chatting with other YC starrtups that had already launched, is this a common feeling? The entrepreneurial mindset seems more geared toward building cool stuff, which makes the next stage of scaling/support much less fun.
rdl 16y ago
I think it's interesting how different people view the same tasks as pleasant or unpleasant. I find breaking things, scaling infrastructure, and talking to (potential and current) customers vastly more pleasant than planning/managing development or writing code. Logistics (for moving bits, boxes, and people) is great fun too. Recruiting is amazingly fun when you're not already under the gun for a specific position, because it's basically selling your idea and meeting someone new. It sucks if you're behind and need to hire a lot of people quickly, because you're going to have to make a lot of compromises you shouldn't be making, and you know it. I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy admin, accounting, and immigration bureaucracy, but those people are not me. Maybe figuring out what things your team enjoys (and presumably is good at doing) should inform what kind of product you build more than it usually does.
- benologist 16y ago
  It all depends on the circumstances. I love hacking away on Playtomic and scaling it and talking to my users or potential ones, and everything else. Until things go wrong. Logs aren't being processed, 100s of megabytes a minute are piling up, shit keeps on crashing... compile again ... deploy again ... hope this time the problem's fixed ... hope it really is this time cause it's 2am and I've been up since 7am. It looks like it's working finally ... I'm going to bed at last ... if it's not fixed tomorrow will be a fuck of a day racing to get those logs processing again before that server runs out of disk space, while people ask when their reports will be updating again or tell me there's some problem. Then it's not so fun.
edw519 16y ago
Our product development was almost stalled for months on end. Then you're doing something wrong. Scaling, debugging, refactoring, customer support, prospect interaction, and even raising investment must all be done in support of product development, not instead of product development. I am a notorious single tasker who loves coding more than anything else, so I used to have the same problem. If some other task took priority, all product development stopped. Until a artist friend of mine told me the secret of his success, 4 words I have never forgotten, "I paint every day." Now I code every day. No matter what else happens. With 3 of you, I would expect that at least one of you could keep building something every day without any of you dropping any of the other eggs you must juggle.
- martinkl 16y ago
  Yes, we probably were doing something wrong. That's the point of the post: to explain how easy it is to get into a situation where you are making little progress, and our story of getting out of it. I sincerely hope that others will be able to cope better when faced with a similar situation. It's easier said than done, though. Development takes significant ramp-up time; if you spend 10 hours a day on it, you get much more than 5 times as much done than if you spend 2 hours a day. We already did what we could in terms of distributing workload amongst people to minimize context-switching.
  - edw519 16y ago
    It's easier said than done, though. No kidding! Sometimes I think that the definition of success has less to do with intelligence, hard work, and breaks and more to do with finding a way to do that which is easier said than done. Didn't mean to be negative in grandparent, just to take advantage of sharing some of the best advice I ever got. There's a lot to be said for making progress every day, no matter how hard it is. Best wishes for your continued success!
    - pzxc 16y ago
      Just wanted to add I concur wholeheartedly, that's why my #1 commandment is "make progress every day". http://pzxc.com/ten-commandments-of-business-and-life http://pzxc.com/ten-commandments-of-business-and-life
Sukotto 16y ago
Were you able to leverage the YC "old boys" network? (I mean that in the positive sense, not the negative one) That is, did having access to talented former-YC people help you get over the technical humps and hurdles? I believe one of the main pros to joining YC (apart from getting mentoring from PG et. al.) is that many of the people that went before you are on tap to help resolve things in a "pay it forward" fashion.
- martinkl 16y ago
  Yes. The guys at Heroku were incredibly helpful, to name just one example.
razin 16y ago
Your ordeal with immigration reminded me of the importance of the startup visa.
rick_2047 16y ago
* Answering many, many support emails and tweets * Raising our seed round * Stopping our infrastructure from collapsing under our user growth * Responding to press and bloggers * Reading resumés and interviewing job candidates * Fixing gnarly bugs in production * Applying for visas, so that we could work in the US * Attending YC dinners and office hours How is all this not moving the product forward? I am genuinely curious, to an outsider like me, this is what is the growth of the company. All these things have to be done one time or another.
- axod 16y ago
  Notably absent: Anything to do with profit.
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    That problem is for the acquiring company to solve.
- jeffreymcmanus 16y ago
  "The product" is defined as the activity whereby the engineering organization delivers new products and features to customers. All of the above activities are important, but they're not "the product".
  - rick_2047 16y ago
    A product is something you offer to the user, to me if I am buying a service or a product I am also buying the customer service and the reliability (the service should never stop unless its supposed to). So the support emails and tweets are the product, as is the Fixing gnarly bugs in production and Stopping our infrastructure from collapsing under our user growth. If you are growing, you will have to have new employees so of course you will have to Read resumés and interview job candidates. This is essential for developing the product (even as defined by you). The only slightly unnecessary thing on the list is the responses to press and bloggers and applying for visas. I say this because both could be avoided if 1) your product does not require much press(as in, it is a tool which is used by experts, not something which has to be advertised) and 2) you can work in what ever country you are in.
araneae 16y ago
On a mostly unrelated note, I installed rapportive and discovered that someone had signed up for a social network with my e-mail address that wasn't me. So I had the site send me a new password and deleted the account. Why do people do that?
davidu 16y ago
What does any of this have to do with YCombinator? It sounds like you just needed to hire a customer support rep and scale your organization.
- frossie 16y ago
  Erm, the OP was explaining that if you have already launched, your YC experience differs from what you might expect. Fair point I thought, and might be useful for those considering the timing of their YC application. I have noticed that some people feel that having launched already gives them more "cred" in the process, and the OP points the downside to that.
  - ScottBurson 16y ago
    The funny thing about it, though, is that most of their problems during this time came from the fact that they were getting traction. I think these probably pale against the problems one has when one is not getting traction. Yes, not having users lets you keep building the product... but this is of rather less comfort when you're simultaneously wondering if anyone is going to use it.
shareme 16y ago
Martin, I enjoyed the post as it was from a different perspective.. The product is great too I use it every day..
jnovek 16y ago
Something that I think a lot of people don't realize about YC is that it's not very fun. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of great YC memories, but the pressure was enormous. We had yet to raise and so we were operating on shoestring. My co-founder and I fought more during YC than any other time, before or after (and often over nonsensical and petty stuff). That being said, you don't go through YC because it's fun. You go through it because it's good for your company. It gave us exposure to investors who probably wouldn't have given two first-time-entrepreneur yokels from Minnesota the time of day. We met a lot of people who had been through the pain of building a company before. More than anything YC forced us to take a hard look at our company and a hard look at ourselves and decide that we could do this thing even when it wasn't always fun.
- kirinkalia 16y ago
  This gets to a critical question about incubators -- what is the value you actually get from the process? (the followup is, how does it compare to what was promised?) As you point out, "You go through it because it's good for your company," and that mainly means meeting the right people and figuring out where your company is going. Martin, was YC ultimately good for your company even though Rapportive was in a different stage than your batchmates? Would you do it again?
  - martinkl 16y ago
    YC was (and is continuing to be) very valuable for us. Sachin Rekhi has written up a good summary, which I broadly agree with: http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2009/02/26/the-value-of-the-ycombinator-experience http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2009/02/26/the-value-of-the-... -- and I would add to the list of benefits the massive network of the YC partners, who will happily make valuable intros. Many other companies in our batch soon launched too, so we soon all ended up at pretty much the same stage.
mmaunder 16y ago
"Acquisition of liquidity"? http://adam.heroku.com/images/posts/startup_curve.jpg http://adam.heroku.com/images/posts/startup_curve.jpg Are all YC startups encouraged to get acquired?
- pg 16y ago
  Trevor put that on the graph as a joke. Actually all the labels are ones Trevor added as jokes, except the "Trough of sorrow."
  - elblanco 16y ago
    For a second I thought that was graph of the company I work for...right now we're in the wiggles of false hope having just come out of a very rough crash of ineptitude under a previous administration.

248 points by martinkl 16y ago

On an unrelated note, that whiteboard graph disturbed me a bit. Does every YC startup hope to get bought out? Why would that even be a goal or something to aspire to?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
pclark 16y ago
it says "liquidity" which can imply IPO.
dmoney 16y ago
It seems to be part of the definition of a startup that the end goal is either acquisition or IPO. PG has said (in an interview, might have been on Mixergy) that YC can't make a profit on a startup unless it has an exit.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

martinkl 16y ago
Nothing is fun when it goes beyond a certain level. User support is interesting, but it gets a bit repetitive if you need to do it all day long. Scaling is really interesting, but getting no sleep because the database is on fire is not fun. Fixing bugs is not fun if they happen on other people's weird configurations that you can't reproduce. And raising capital... sure, it's glamorous, but in the end it's pretty tedious. The amazing thing about a startup is that you can quickly translate your intuitions about a product you think that people want into an actual product. Making a good product and making people happy is what I care about. The other things are enablers. [Edit - grammar fix]

gnok 16y ago

On a somewhat un-related note, I am interested in hearing about your immigration issues. I realize an immigration attorney's advice is probably golden, but I would like to hear what visa categories you considered and applied for and what problems you encountered while applying/gathering paperwork.

martinkl 16y ago
I was planning another post on that topic :) in a nutshell, we got H-1B visas. With a good attorney the paperwork is mostly tedium, but lots and lots of tedium. The process is very opaque and full of uncertainties.
- gnok 16y ago
  To me, the phrases 'H1B' and 'startup' are inherently disconnected. I -- and many others, i imagine -- would love to read your post on your immigration issues. Thanks!
- blizkreeg 16y ago
  If you think H-1B is tedium and kafkaesque, wait until you have to apply for permanent residency :)
  - ameyamk 16y ago
    I am also interested in knowing how u get H1 when u start a start up. Immigration issues are keeping us away from doing anything full time.
- StavrosK 16y ago
  I am also interested in learning about the process, please post the article on HN when you write it!

jedc 16y ago

Great post, Martin. In chatting with other YC starrtups that had already launched, is this a common feeling? The entrepreneurial mindset seems more geared toward building cool stuff, which makes the next stage of scaling/support much less fun.

rdl 16y ago

I think it's interesting how different people view the same tasks as pleasant or unpleasant. I find breaking things, scaling infrastructure, and talking to (potential and current) customers vastly more pleasant than planning/managing development or writing code. Logistics (for moving bits, boxes, and people) is great fun too. Recruiting is amazingly fun when you're not already under the gun for a specific position, because it's basically selling your idea and meeting someone new. It sucks if you're behind and need to hire a lot of people quickly, because you're going to have to make a lot of compromises you shouldn't be making, and you know it. I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy admin, accounting, and immigration bureaucracy, but those people are not me. Maybe figuring out what things your team enjoys (and presumably is good at doing) should inform what kind of product you build more than it usually does.

benologist 16y ago
It all depends on the circumstances. I love hacking away on Playtomic and scaling it and talking to my users or potential ones, and everything else. Until things go wrong. Logs aren't being processed, 100s of megabytes a minute are piling up, shit keeps on crashing... compile again ... deploy again ... hope this time the problem's fixed ... hope it really is this time cause it's 2am and I've been up since 7am. It looks like it's working finally ... I'm going to bed at last ... if it's not fixed tomorrow will be a fuck of a day racing to get those logs processing again before that server runs out of disk space, while people ask when their reports will be updating again or tell me there's some problem. Then it's not so fun.

edw519 16y ago

Our product development was almost stalled for months on end. Then you're doing something wrong. Scaling, debugging, refactoring, customer support, prospect interaction, and even raising investment must all be done in support of product development, not instead of product development. I am a notorious single tasker who loves coding more than anything else, so I used to have the same problem. If some other task took priority, all product development stopped. Until a artist friend of mine told me the secret of his success, 4 words I have never forgotten, "I paint every day." Now I code every day. No matter what else happens. With 3 of you, I would expect that at least one of you could keep building something every day without any of you dropping any of the other eggs you must juggle.

martinkl 16y ago
Yes, we probably were doing something wrong. That's the point of the post: to explain how easy it is to get into a situation where you are making little progress, and our story of getting out of it. I sincerely hope that others will be able to cope better when faced with a similar situation. It's easier said than done, though. Development takes significant ramp-up time; if you spend 10 hours a day on it, you get much more than 5 times as much done than if you spend 2 hours a day. We already did what we could in terms of distributing workload amongst people to minimize context-switching.
- edw519 16y ago
  It's easier said than done, though. No kidding! Sometimes I think that the definition of success has less to do with intelligence, hard work, and breaks and more to do with finding a way to do that which is easier said than done. Didn't mean to be negative in grandparent, just to take advantage of sharing some of the best advice I ever got. There's a lot to be said for making progress every day, no matter how hard it is. Best wishes for your continued success!
  - pzxc 16y ago
    Just wanted to add I concur wholeheartedly, that's why my #1 commandment is "make progress every day". http://pzxc.com/ten-commandments-of-business-and-life http://pzxc.com/ten-commandments-of-business-and-life

Sukotto 16y ago

Were you able to leverage the YC "old boys" network? (I mean that in the positive sense, not the negative one) That is, did having access to talented former-YC people help you get over the technical humps and hurdles? I believe one of the main pros to joining YC (apart from getting mentoring from PG et. al.) is that many of the people that went before you are on tap to help resolve things in a "pay it forward" fashion.

martinkl 16y ago
Yes. The guys at Heroku were incredibly helpful, to name just one example.

razin 16y ago

Your ordeal with immigration reminded me of the importance of the startup visa.

rick_2047 16y ago

* Answering many, many support emails and tweets * Raising our seed round * Stopping our infrastructure from collapsing under our user growth * Responding to press and bloggers * Reading resumés and interviewing job candidates * Fixing gnarly bugs in production * Applying for visas, so that we could work in the US * Attending YC dinners and office hours How is all this not moving the product forward? I am genuinely curious, to an outsider like me, this is what is the growth of the company. All these things have to be done one time or another.

axod 16y ago
Notably absent: Anything to do with profit.
- StavrosK 16y ago
  That problem is for the acquiring company to solve.
jeffreymcmanus 16y ago
"The product" is defined as the activity whereby the engineering organization delivers new products and features to customers. All of the above activities are important, but they're not "the product".
- rick_2047 16y ago
  A product is something you offer to the user, to me if I am buying a service or a product I am also buying the customer service and the reliability (the service should never stop unless its supposed to). So the support emails and tweets are the product, as is the Fixing gnarly bugs in production and Stopping our infrastructure from collapsing under our user growth. If you are growing, you will have to have new employees so of course you will have to Read resumés and interview job candidates. This is essential for developing the product (even as defined by you). The only slightly unnecessary thing on the list is the responses to press and bloggers and applying for visas. I say this because both could be avoided if 1) your product does not require much press(as in, it is a tool which is used by experts, not something which has to be advertised) and 2) you can work in what ever country you are in.

araneae 16y ago

On a mostly unrelated note, I installed rapportive and discovered that someone had signed up for a social network with my e-mail address that wasn't me. So I had the site send me a new password and deleted the account. Why do people do that?

davidu 16y ago

What does any of this have to do with YCombinator? It sounds like you just needed to hire a customer support rep and scale your organization.

frossie 16y ago
Erm, the OP was explaining that if you have already launched, your YC experience differs from what you might expect. Fair point I thought, and might be useful for those considering the timing of their YC application. I have noticed that some people feel that having launched already gives them more "cred" in the process, and the OP points the downside to that.
- ScottBurson 16y ago
  The funny thing about it, though, is that most of their problems during this time came from the fact that they were getting traction. I think these probably pale against the problems one has when one is not getting traction. Yes, not having users lets you keep building the product... but this is of rather less comfort when you're simultaneously wondering if anyone is going to use it.

shareme 16y ago

Martin, I enjoyed the post as it was from a different perspective.. The product is great too I use it every day..

jnovek 16y ago

Something that I think a lot of people don't realize about YC is that it's not very fun. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of great YC memories, but the pressure was enormous. We had yet to raise and so we were operating on shoestring. My co-founder and I fought more during YC than any other time, before or after (and often over nonsensical and petty stuff). That being said, you don't go through YC because it's fun. You go through it because it's good for your company. It gave us exposure to investors who probably wouldn't have given two first-time-entrepreneur yokels from Minnesota the time of day. We met a lot of people who had been through the pain of building a company before. More than anything YC forced us to take a hard look at our company and a hard look at ourselves and decide that we could do this thing even when it wasn't always fun.

kirinkalia 16y ago
This gets to a critical question about incubators -- what is the value you actually get from the process? (the followup is, how does it compare to what was promised?) As you point out, "You go through it because it's good for your company," and that mainly means meeting the right people and figuring out where your company is going. Martin, was YC ultimately good for your company even though Rapportive was in a different stage than your batchmates? Would you do it again?
- martinkl 16y ago
  YC was (and is continuing to be) very valuable for us. Sachin Rekhi has written up a good summary, which I broadly agree with: http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2009/02/26/the-value-of-the-ycombinator-experience http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2009/02/26/the-value-of-the-... -- and I would add to the list of benefits the massive network of the YC partners, who will happily make valuable intros. Many other companies in our batch soon launched too, so we soon all ended up at pretty much the same stage.

mmaunder 16y ago

"Acquisition of liquidity"? http://adam.heroku.com/images/posts/startup_curve.jpg http://adam.heroku.com/images/posts/startup_curve.jpg Are all YC startups encouraged to get acquired?

pg 16y ago
Trevor put that on the graph as a joke. Actually all the labels are ones Trevor added as jokes, except the "Trough of sorrow."
- elblanco 16y ago
  For a second I thought that was graph of the company I work for...right now we're in the wiggles of false hope having just come out of a very rough crash of ineptitude under a previous administration.