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Stupid mistakes I made while building my first startup

255 points by soorajchandran 6y ago

soorajchandran 6y ago
There are some silly, stupid mistakes I've done when going through YCombinator - building my first startup.
- Kamic 6y ago
  Would you fail again?
  - soorajchandran 6y ago
    I don't know. I recently sold my second startup. So I'd say that was not a failure. But that doesn't guarantee all the future ventures will be a success.
    - ApolloRising 6y ago
      What was the second one? Just curious what you adapted to make that work.
      - soorajchandran 6y ago
        It was called Carrom (https://money.yahoo.com/oyster-acquires-carrom-accelerate-global-100000172.html https://money.yahoo.com/oyster-acquires-carrom-accelerate-gl... ) I have not repeated any of those mistakes I mentioned in the post. I think that itself was enough to take us to a good place. Apart from that it was good timing, a lot of luck and market I knew down under. Another thing was consistency - we also had lot of ups and down, in fact we stopped operations at some point. But kept going to come out of it. Consistency was the most important thing there.
        ApolloRising 6y ago
        A game from my youth :) I'm glad you kept going.
    - madcow00 6y ago
      Aside from not doing these mistakes in your second startup, what do you think you did right?
slovette 6y ago
Thanks for writing this. Sales is hard because it means you have to face the fact that you’re whole passion project is not yours to control, it’s theirs and always will be. That’s a hard thing to face and, in my opinion, the primary reason why it’s so often ignored. I really appreciate you taking the time to write this down and allowing us to read it. Thanks again.
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  Can't agree more. As engineers we tend to work on interesting things instead of important things. Glad it helped! :)
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    When bogged down in some horrible XML soup or similar, I get motivated by thinking about how this integration or whatever will improve things for the end user. It's especially nice when sales get back from a demo and reports about jaws being picked up from the floor. Or when the base you made allows you to whip up a solution to a pressing customer issue in 5 minutes. It's not always fun to write that code, but it can fun to have written that code.
- georgeecollins 6y ago
  That's a great description of why product developers (including myself) so often dread talking to the end user.
wolco2 6y ago
"We slept on the carpeted floor" Is this how most ycombinator funded companies general work? You have to move California even if you are sleeping on the street? Wouldn't staying in home country make more sense until profitibility is discovered?
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  At least before covid, companies had to move to Bay Area. But I don't think everyone sleeps on the floor. YC funds you enough (120k then, 150k now) to afford decent housing. We were just a bit too concerned about the runway since we didn't make enough revenue. I want to make it clear that YC definitely recommends a healthy life style and this was strictly our choice.
- welder 6y ago
  If only the author knew of all the free furniture being given away in the bay area. Back in 2017 I furnished my whole apartment with only free furniture in just a few weeks. Facebook groups like "Buy Nothing SF" are littered with free beds, chairs, couches.
namenotrequired 6y ago
As far as I can tell (never having gone through YC), some of these mistakes are exactly the ones YC spends a lot of time talking about. I'm curious what caused you to make them anyway. Did YC change, am I wrong, or is it simply a case of practice being harder than theory? How did your office hours go? Thank you for sharing!
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  Meeting smart people was always great. We learned a lot of things. It was life changing - Still I feel like we didn't make the best out of it due to several reason. One of them was our self doubt when it came to communication - This was our first time outside our home country(India)and we had a lot of inhibitions socialising with people. We always kept thinking if we were doing something right or wrong in terms of western culture. I think under pressure we made a lot of stupid decisions. We were inexperienced and we were doing that for the first time. I don't think these are harder to practice - My second startup was recently acquired and I think I did a decent job there. The reason why YC emphasise about these mistakes are probably the same - they have seen a lot of first time founders make the same mistake.
  - leobakerhytch 6y ago
    You say this was your first time outside India. May I ask, what was your path to setting up a company in the US and moving there? Was this via an L1 intra-company transfer, an E2 investor visa, or something else?
    - soorajchandran 6y ago
      Company got funded by YC - we moved temporarily with Business visas. Company was setup via Stripe Atlas.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ignoramous 6y ago
OP: Thanks for sharing this. I have a few questions, if I may: > We shipped features at a tremendous pace. But we never talked to enough users to identify if it was something necessary. We assumed things and kept building – in a few months, we had a product which was an engineering marvel – but nobody cared to use. I am curious because the YC application needs one to clearly articulate who ones target customers are, what they do today, why is it such a pain, and what one is building to solve that pain-point. And it looks like you folks at Marketfox did have it figured out [0]. It is interesting to me, then, that you'd cite this as a key mistake. What am I missing? > We were very naive to think that building software is the hardest part of building a startup. Well, there's a balance here: Both are equally hard. Writing code is less hard if you're a software professional and same goes if you're a Sales or Marketing professional. You did say you shipped features at a break-neck pace... but usually, for an enterprise SaaS, isn't that the bread and butter anyway? I am curious why you'd consider this a mistake. Not every (SaaS) product is novel anyway, and learning from your competitors is a shortcut to the otherwise long arduous road of defining a category / industry / market. Assuming that you folks did not build a feature in a vacuum (that is, you'd have would thought a feature was necessary only after looking at competitors do it better or a paying customer ask for it), was it the case of feature mis-prioritization / building too many bespoke features that only one or two customers wanted? [0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-w17-launch-lively-scaphold-marketfox-floyd-servx-fibo-and-wifi-dabba/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-w17-launch-lively-scaphold-m...
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  1: Correct, we had "assumed" who the ideal users would be. Because the market was already huge, and we "assumed" people who used our competitors would use our product too. And when we were not able to sell, we thought It was because of lack of feature. The "one more feature" mentality was bad. The surface area of products like Hubspot(our competition) is huge - and we tried to catch up with them in terms of feature and this was a mistake. We didn't try to identify a niche. I think this is one of those things that is easy in theory and hard to practice. 2: Agree that both are hard. I'm still happy with the pace which we shipped at. Looking back at it I think we were not shipping the right features. There are a few reason for this: - We got a bit desperate at some point and started building features for single customers(which we thought would be useful to others, but was not). And this spiraled downwards and our product started doing things that we initially didn't intend to. (Like email automation, push notifcations, website builder, form builder, inapp messaging, blogging platform, social media management etc) - At some point we blindly started copying features, without thinking why we need to build it. (I know this sounds really stupid now, hence the title) - We were young and we thought we could brut force(or hustle) our way out of every problem. I hope that helps. Happy to explain more if you have questions :)
lovetocode 6y ago
This is the type of advice we should see more here on HN.
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  Happy that it helped. Hopefully it helps someone to not make those mistakes.
  - tmilard 6y ago
    Yes. Interesting. It is for me a difficult problem the product vs selling... It seems simple at first - "yea, just sell" , but I'm fact often you need good-enough-pridict to sell. Moreover, the energy(ie money ) to sell will be lost if you try to sell a not-baked-product whereas spending to upgrade the product is never lost... So yes, this building vs selling is to be nuanced ....
    - soorajchandran 6y ago
      Selling is much easier if the product solves a painful problem for the user. Much harder to sell if you are just trying to sell cool features.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
I consider this my "Peak Startup" event... I was in a similar situation as author, only in Chicago 'burbs. We were working hard to build our product, and there was free unlimited fizzy sugar water in the kitchen. I drank so many MtDews that when I got back home, to the house we rented where I was living with 3 other startup members, and passed out in bed, I ended up peeing myself in my sleep for the first time as an adult. Worse, it happened again the next night! It didn't happen after that, to my knowledge, but I've sworn off both MtDew and doing more than 10 hours per workday since then. It also made me realize that if a startup can't make it without taking a huge toll on health and happiness, it's not sustainable by definition, and should be modified. There are occasional exceptions, but most of the time this rule stands.
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  Wow! Thanks for sharing this. We all have had our lows. I think anything that is not sustainable over a period of time is not a good idea. It is ok to try and do things that don't scale in the beginning. But it shouldn't come at the cost of physical and mental health.
jatsign 6y ago
"You can go a long way if you avoid stupid mistakes." I find this true whenever I decide to take on a new endeavour. If you can learn from someone else's mistakes, you're better off than 80% of the competition in ANY MARKET. So many people have an idea to make money, look at the competition, and give up. But if you keep going just a bit further, you find out that most of the competition, which looked so daunting at the start, is actually awful.
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  Correct! We always try a bit too hard to do great things - in fact avoiding mistakes itself will give you a significant advantage.
  - gcc42 6y ago
    Yep, agreed. Most of this advice is useful even if you're just building an open source project that you're passionate about, and your post helps a lot. Nobody wants to build a product in vaccum that has no users, no matter how brilliant the idea.
    - soorajchandran 6y ago
      My other two cofounders are building an open source tool - https://www.chatwoot.com/ https://www.chatwoot.com/. I'm sure they have used a lot of wisdom from this experience too.
drchiu 6y ago
Marketing software is really hard, as others have mentioned, due to switching costs, the number of niche verticals, and user to user requirements. I also notice that in the past few years, there are a flurry of new products in this space offering lifetime deals as well. This makes it so that a traditional saas offering needs to incorporate some sort of up sell later on.
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  Correct - marketing space is one of the most saturated. But it is amazing to see new niche spinning out of it.
onion2k 6y ago
"Too much building and not enough selling" is the major mistake in the list. It's the reason for my first startup failure too. You need to be generating revenue within a few months of starting. If your product solves a real problem people will pay money for less than the minimum product just to make sure your company survives long enough to build the minimum product. Ultimately, money is the only thing that can keep a startup going. That means either sales and revenue or investment, and getting investment is a lot easier if you have sales and revenue. Eating more healthily, getting more sleep, and doing some exercise are useful for staying focused and selling better, but the number of successful startups whose founders had horribly unhealthy lifestyles yet still managed to sell their product is significantly higher than the number of startups with healthy founders who didn't sell anything.
- danjac 6y ago
  Not only horrible unhealthy lifestyles, but horrible unhealthy codebases.
  - jahewson 6y ago
    So true. Are they showing their code to their customers? Nope.
    - danjac 6y ago
      No - bad coding practices for a company are like bad personal health practices like eating junk food and sitting on the couch all day. It won't hurt too much when you're young, but you sure pay for it later.
      - marcinzm 6y ago
        The vast majority of startups fail and usually they fail early. Increasing your early chances of success at a cost in the future (which you may never need to pay if you fail) is a net gain.
        6y ago
arey_abhishek 6y ago
This was a fun read. I was in the same YC batch as you(BicycleAI) and we made some of the same mistakes too. I remember Marketfox really well because I've never seen a team build so many things so quickly! The execution speed was legendary and it made us feel so slow in comparison. :D Good luck with your next startup!
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  I remember BicycleAI too! :) Thanks - Hope all is good.
imtringued 6y ago
Everyone knows the third hardest part of building a company is making products. Everyone knows the second hardest part is figuring out what products to make. Everyone knows the hardest part is finding customers who are actually buying your products. I'm not saying the easier tasks are unimportant but if you don't solve the hardest problem your business won't go anywhere, no matter how good you are at the first two. Meanwhile someone with a good sense of business can often delegate the first two to someone else.
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  Agreed that selling is the hardest part. But it is hard to do 1 without the others.
hevelvarik 6y ago
Interesting, I thought YC provides a lot of coaching for the business side of things they messed up on. I vaguely recall reading against all those practices in YC related blogging. I guess they aren’t too heavy handed about it. Also the coding on the floor thing, wow. But after all is said and done, major props for getting to be a YC startup to begin with!
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  YC doesn't intervene in your day to day operations. They are there to give any guidance if necessary - But they have no role in running your startup. That would be impossible and unnecessary. YC is as good as what you can make out of it. It can be anything from average to great, depending on how much effort you put into learn from smart people.
blobbers 6y ago
The first start up I worked for we made our desks out of doors that had been discarded. There's an IKEA in East Palo Alto. Sleeping on the floor for extended periods of time is ridiculous. Even a $30 inflatable air mattress is better than that. Come on. It's not like SV carpets are tatami mats.
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  Totally agree. That's why I mentioned we should have spend more on improving quality of life. Having moved from India, our brains also did this Dollar to INR conversion, that made it hard for us to spend money.
- blackrock 6y ago
  A $30 inflatable air mattress is bad for your back. It deflates overnight, and you end up waking up from sleeping in a bad posture, and having a sore back. It’s better to just sleep on thick padding on the floor. Surprisingly, programmers don’t require a lot of room to work. Just a small table and a laptop. And multiple monitors are a great productivity tool.
ilamont 6y ago
Hard work is romanticized by the startup world. I used to brag how many hours I worked a day as if it is an achievement. Yep. And it is still romanticized by the investor class looking for tireless worker bees and some successful founders who believe that because they built startups that way, it's the only way.
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  Correct. There are a lot of people who considers 24x7 hustling as the only way to build a startup. Worse, many founders and VCs expect that from you. This is mostly the case in US centric startups. The work culture in Europe is much different, relaxed and life centric.
k__ 6y ago
What makes so many people believe startups should be run that way?
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  Bad examples set by people who have been there previously? We have always romaniticised hard work - especially in the "American Dream" culture. It has changed a lot these days. We can see a lot of sane startups vouching for work life balance.
preommr 6y ago
> We shipped features at a tremendous pace. People say this, but what features? If you've built something that's buried under 3 menus, then that's not going to have great returns. Every feature added is is another node in a graph with multiple branches to any related features. This includes non-code related things like ux, maintenance cost, marketing, tie-in with product vision (i.e. how well does it fit into that brief description of your product, and if it doesn't how to do you communicate it). Building the software is the hard part. It takes a few hours to talk to dozens of customers. People will use your product if it solves a pain point. It takes 100x more time to actually implement that feature.
- enraged_camel 6y ago
  >> Building the software is the hard part. It takes a few hours to talk to dozens of customers. Actually, finding those customers is the hard part.
ElHacker 6y ago
I'm currently going through with my first startup, I'm a technical founder and this post definitely helps me to try to invest more of my time learning how to do sales. Thanks for sharing.
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  Glad it helped. If you have a co-founder whom you trust can do sales for the company you need not worry about it. Nevertheless, a bit of soft skill can go a long way.
aaisola 6y ago
Shipping features without talking to users is a death knell. You end up with an bloated product that serves no one particularly well. It sounds like all the other problems are just derivatives of this because all of the time was spent head down and "working" and no time spent being strategic, creative or learning what your customer base actually wants.
segmondy 6y ago
How did they make such mistakes? I thought that was the entire point of YC, to guide founders and to make sure they don't make such mistakes?
- pedalpete 6y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, but the other aspect is that YC is not a baby-sitter. They have 100 companies in a batch. If you're attending the meetings but not taking the advice, they'll probably write you off fairly quickly as the chances of success are low and they can focus on helping those who are leveraging the knowledge and experience.
sontek 6y ago
My co-founder just left our company after 4 years because we basically had to pivot and restart with a new product that fit with COVID (we are in the events space). Looking back at everything that lead up to him having to leave, I've come up with the one mistake I regret doing: Splitting up duties. We were technical founders but we decided one of us would handle the business side and one of us would handle the technical side. I think this ended up isolating us rather than having us work together as a team. As we grew I hired account managers, sales, etc and he hired devs. We chose to start a company together but never really worked together. Now 4 years later I'm working in the backend for the first time. I wish I would've spent more time pair coding with him and discussing architecture together. We worked at 3 other companies together and went to university together and I think we missed our opportunity to truly work together on something WE want to build.

There are some silly, stupid mistakes I've done when going through YCombinator - building my first startup.

Kamic 6y ago
Would you fail again?
- soorajchandran 6y ago
  I don't know. I recently sold my second startup. So I'd say that was not a failure. But that doesn't guarantee all the future ventures will be a success.
  - ApolloRising 6y ago
    What was the second one? Just curious what you adapted to make that work.
    - soorajchandran 6y ago
      It was called Carrom (https://money.yahoo.com/oyster-acquires-carrom-accelerate-global-100000172.html https://money.yahoo.com/oyster-acquires-carrom-accelerate-gl... ) I have not repeated any of those mistakes I mentioned in the post. I think that itself was enough to take us to a good place. Apart from that it was good timing, a lot of luck and market I knew down under. Another thing was consistency - we also had lot of ups and down, in fact we stopped operations at some point. But kept going to come out of it. Consistency was the most important thing there.
      - ApolloRising 6y ago
        A game from my youth :) I'm glad you kept going.
  - madcow00 6y ago
    Aside from not doing these mistakes in your second startup, what do you think you did right?

Thanks for writing this. Sales is hard because it means you have to face the fact that you’re whole passion project is not yours to control, it’s theirs and always will be. That’s a hard thing to face and, in my opinion, the primary reason why it’s so often ignored. I really appreciate you taking the time to write this down and allowing us to read it. Thanks again.

soorajchandran 6y ago
Can't agree more. As engineers we tend to work on interesting things instead of important things. Glad it helped! :)
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  When bogged down in some horrible XML soup or similar, I get motivated by thinking about how this integration or whatever will improve things for the end user. It's especially nice when sales get back from a demo and reports about jaws being picked up from the floor. Or when the base you made allows you to whip up a solution to a pressing customer issue in 5 minutes. It's not always fun to write that code, but it can fun to have written that code.
georgeecollins 6y ago
That's a great description of why product developers (including myself) so often dread talking to the end user.

wolco2 6y ago

"We slept on the carpeted floor" Is this how most ycombinator funded companies general work? You have to move California even if you are sleeping on the street? Wouldn't staying in home country make more sense until profitibility is discovered?

soorajchandran 6y ago
At least before covid, companies had to move to Bay Area. But I don't think everyone sleeps on the floor. YC funds you enough (120k then, 150k now) to afford decent housing. We were just a bit too concerned about the runway since we didn't make enough revenue. I want to make it clear that YC definitely recommends a healthy life style and this was strictly our choice.
welder 6y ago
If only the author knew of all the free furniture being given away in the bay area. Back in 2017 I furnished my whole apartment with only free furniture in just a few weeks. Facebook groups like "Buy Nothing SF" are littered with free beds, chairs, couches.

namenotrequired 6y ago

As far as I can tell (never having gone through YC), some of these mistakes are exactly the ones YC spends a lot of time talking about. I'm curious what caused you to make them anyway. Did YC change, am I wrong, or is it simply a case of practice being harder than theory? How did your office hours go? Thank you for sharing!

soorajchandran 6y ago
Meeting smart people was always great. We learned a lot of things. It was life changing - Still I feel like we didn't make the best out of it due to several reason. One of them was our self doubt when it came to communication - This was our first time outside our home country(India)and we had a lot of inhibitions socialising with people. We always kept thinking if we were doing something right or wrong in terms of western culture. I think under pressure we made a lot of stupid decisions. We were inexperienced and we were doing that for the first time. I don't think these are harder to practice - My second startup was recently acquired and I think I did a decent job there. The reason why YC emphasise about these mistakes are probably the same - they have seen a lot of first time founders make the same mistake.
- leobakerhytch 6y ago
  You say this was your first time outside India. May I ask, what was your path to setting up a company in the US and moving there? Was this via an L1 intra-company transfer, an E2 investor visa, or something else?
  - soorajchandran 6y ago
    Company got funded by YC - we moved temporarily with Business visas. Company was setup via Stripe Atlas.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ignoramous 6y ago

OP: Thanks for sharing this. I have a few questions, if I may: > We shipped features at a tremendous pace. But we never talked to enough users to identify if it was something necessary. We assumed things and kept building – in a few months, we had a product which was an engineering marvel – but nobody cared to use. I am curious because the YC application needs one to clearly articulate who ones target customers are, what they do today, why is it such a pain, and what one is building to solve that pain-point. And it looks like you folks at Marketfox did have it figured out [0]. It is interesting to me, then, that you'd cite this as a key mistake. What am I missing? > We were very naive to think that building software is the hardest part of building a startup. Well, there's a balance here: Both are equally hard. Writing code is less hard if you're a software professional and same goes if you're a Sales or Marketing professional. You did say you shipped features at a break-neck pace... but usually, for an enterprise SaaS, isn't that the bread and butter anyway? I am curious why you'd consider this a mistake. Not every (SaaS) product is novel anyway, and learning from your competitors is a shortcut to the otherwise long arduous road of defining a category / industry / market. Assuming that you folks did not build a feature in a vacuum (that is, you'd have would thought a feature was necessary only after looking at competitors do it better or a paying customer ask for it), was it the case of feature mis-prioritization / building too many bespoke features that only one or two customers wanted? [0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-w17-launch-lively-scaphold-marketfox-floyd-servx-fibo-and-wifi-dabba/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-w17-launch-lively-scaphold-m...

soorajchandran 6y ago
1: Correct, we had "assumed" who the ideal users would be. Because the market was already huge, and we "assumed" people who used our competitors would use our product too. And when we were not able to sell, we thought It was because of lack of feature. The "one more feature" mentality was bad. The surface area of products like Hubspot(our competition) is huge - and we tried to catch up with them in terms of feature and this was a mistake. We didn't try to identify a niche. I think this is one of those things that is easy in theory and hard to practice. 2: Agree that both are hard. I'm still happy with the pace which we shipped at. Looking back at it I think we were not shipping the right features. There are a few reason for this: - We got a bit desperate at some point and started building features for single customers(which we thought would be useful to others, but was not). And this spiraled downwards and our product started doing things that we initially didn't intend to. (Like email automation, push notifcations, website builder, form builder, inapp messaging, blogging platform, social media management etc) - At some point we blindly started copying features, without thinking why we need to build it. (I know this sounds really stupid now, hence the title) - We were young and we thought we could brut force(or hustle) our way out of every problem. I hope that helps. Happy to explain more if you have questions :)

lovetocode 6y ago

This is the type of advice we should see more here on HN.

soorajchandran 6y ago
Happy that it helped. Hopefully it helps someone to not make those mistakes.
- tmilard 6y ago
  Yes. Interesting. It is for me a difficult problem the product vs selling... It seems simple at first - "yea, just sell" , but I'm fact often you need good-enough-pridict to sell. Moreover, the energy(ie money ) to sell will be lost if you try to sell a not-baked-product whereas spending to upgrade the product is never lost... So yes, this building vs selling is to be nuanced ....
  - soorajchandran 6y ago
    Selling is much easier if the product solves a painful problem for the user. Much harder to sell if you are just trying to sell cool features.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

I consider this my "Peak Startup" event... I was in a similar situation as author, only in Chicago 'burbs. We were working hard to build our product, and there was free unlimited fizzy sugar water in the kitchen. I drank so many MtDews that when I got back home, to the house we rented where I was living with 3 other startup members, and passed out in bed, I ended up peeing myself in my sleep for the first time as an adult. Worse, it happened again the next night! It didn't happen after that, to my knowledge, but I've sworn off both MtDew and doing more than 10 hours per workday since then. It also made me realize that if a startup can't make it without taking a huge toll on health and happiness, it's not sustainable by definition, and should be modified. There are occasional exceptions, but most of the time this rule stands.

soorajchandran 6y ago
Wow! Thanks for sharing this. We all have had our lows. I think anything that is not sustainable over a period of time is not a good idea. It is ok to try and do things that don't scale in the beginning. But it shouldn't come at the cost of physical and mental health.

jatsign 6y ago

"You can go a long way if you avoid stupid mistakes." I find this true whenever I decide to take on a new endeavour. If you can learn from someone else's mistakes, you're better off than 80% of the competition in ANY MARKET. So many people have an idea to make money, look at the competition, and give up. But if you keep going just a bit further, you find out that most of the competition, which looked so daunting at the start, is actually awful.

soorajchandran 6y ago
Correct! We always try a bit too hard to do great things - in fact avoiding mistakes itself will give you a significant advantage.
- gcc42 6y ago
  Yep, agreed. Most of this advice is useful even if you're just building an open source project that you're passionate about, and your post helps a lot. Nobody wants to build a product in vaccum that has no users, no matter how brilliant the idea.
  - soorajchandran 6y ago
    My other two cofounders are building an open source tool - https://www.chatwoot.com/ https://www.chatwoot.com/. I'm sure they have used a lot of wisdom from this experience too.

drchiu 6y ago

Marketing software is really hard, as others have mentioned, due to switching costs, the number of niche verticals, and user to user requirements. I also notice that in the past few years, there are a flurry of new products in this space offering lifetime deals as well. This makes it so that a traditional saas offering needs to incorporate some sort of up sell later on.

soorajchandran 6y ago
Correct - marketing space is one of the most saturated. But it is amazing to see new niche spinning out of it.

onion2k 6y ago

"Too much building and not enough selling" is the major mistake in the list. It's the reason for my first startup failure too. You need to be generating revenue within a few months of starting. If your product solves a real problem people will pay money for less than the minimum product just to make sure your company survives long enough to build the minimum product. Ultimately, money is the only thing that can keep a startup going. That means either sales and revenue or investment, and getting investment is a lot easier if you have sales and revenue. Eating more healthily, getting more sleep, and doing some exercise are useful for staying focused and selling better, but the number of successful startups whose founders had horribly unhealthy lifestyles yet still managed to sell their product is significantly higher than the number of startups with healthy founders who didn't sell anything.

danjac 6y ago
Not only horrible unhealthy lifestyles, but horrible unhealthy codebases.
- jahewson 6y ago
  So true. Are they showing their code to their customers? Nope.
  - danjac 6y ago
    No - bad coding practices for a company are like bad personal health practices like eating junk food and sitting on the couch all day. It won't hurt too much when you're young, but you sure pay for it later.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      The vast majority of startups fail and usually they fail early. Increasing your early chances of success at a cost in the future (which you may never need to pay if you fail) is a net gain.
      - 6y ago

arey_abhishek 6y ago

This was a fun read. I was in the same YC batch as you(BicycleAI) and we made some of the same mistakes too. I remember Marketfox really well because I've never seen a team build so many things so quickly! The execution speed was legendary and it made us feel so slow in comparison. :D Good luck with your next startup!

soorajchandran 6y ago
I remember BicycleAI too! :) Thanks - Hope all is good.

imtringued 6y ago

Everyone knows the third hardest part of building a company is making products. Everyone knows the second hardest part is figuring out what products to make. Everyone knows the hardest part is finding customers who are actually buying your products. I'm not saying the easier tasks are unimportant but if you don't solve the hardest problem your business won't go anywhere, no matter how good you are at the first two. Meanwhile someone with a good sense of business can often delegate the first two to someone else.

soorajchandran 6y ago
Agreed that selling is the hardest part. But it is hard to do 1 without the others.

hevelvarik 6y ago

Interesting, I thought YC provides a lot of coaching for the business side of things they messed up on. I vaguely recall reading against all those practices in YC related blogging. I guess they aren’t too heavy handed about it. Also the coding on the floor thing, wow. But after all is said and done, major props for getting to be a YC startup to begin with!

soorajchandran 6y ago
YC doesn't intervene in your day to day operations. They are there to give any guidance if necessary - But they have no role in running your startup. That would be impossible and unnecessary. YC is as good as what you can make out of it. It can be anything from average to great, depending on how much effort you put into learn from smart people.

blobbers 6y ago

The first start up I worked for we made our desks out of doors that had been discarded. There's an IKEA in East Palo Alto. Sleeping on the floor for extended periods of time is ridiculous. Even a $30 inflatable air mattress is better than that. Come on. It's not like SV carpets are tatami mats.

soorajchandran 6y ago
Totally agree. That's why I mentioned we should have spend more on improving quality of life. Having moved from India, our brains also did this Dollar to INR conversion, that made it hard for us to spend money.
blackrock 6y ago
A $30 inflatable air mattress is bad for your back. It deflates overnight, and you end up waking up from sleeping in a bad posture, and having a sore back. It’s better to just sleep on thick padding on the floor. Surprisingly, programmers don’t require a lot of room to work. Just a small table and a laptop. And multiple monitors are a great productivity tool.

ilamont 6y ago

Hard work is romanticized by the startup world. I used to brag how many hours I worked a day as if it is an achievement. Yep. And it is still romanticized by the investor class looking for tireless worker bees and some successful founders who believe that because they built startups that way, it's the only way.

soorajchandran 6y ago
Correct. There are a lot of people who considers 24x7 hustling as the only way to build a startup. Worse, many founders and VCs expect that from you. This is mostly the case in US centric startups. The work culture in Europe is much different, relaxed and life centric.

k__ 6y ago

What makes so many people believe startups should be run that way?

soorajchandran 6y ago
Bad examples set by people who have been there previously? We have always romaniticised hard work - especially in the "American Dream" culture. It has changed a lot these days. We can see a lot of sane startups vouching for work life balance.

preommr 6y ago

> We shipped features at a tremendous pace. People say this, but what features? If you've built something that's buried under 3 menus, then that's not going to have great returns. Every feature added is is another node in a graph with multiple branches to any related features. This includes non-code related things like ux, maintenance cost, marketing, tie-in with product vision (i.e. how well does it fit into that brief description of your product, and if it doesn't how to do you communicate it). Building the software is the hard part. It takes a few hours to talk to dozens of customers. People will use your product if it solves a pain point. It takes 100x more time to actually implement that feature.

enraged_camel 6y ago
>> Building the software is the hard part. It takes a few hours to talk to dozens of customers. Actually, finding those customers is the hard part.

ElHacker 6y ago

I'm currently going through with my first startup, I'm a technical founder and this post definitely helps me to try to invest more of my time learning how to do sales. Thanks for sharing.

soorajchandran 6y ago
Glad it helped. If you have a co-founder whom you trust can do sales for the company you need not worry about it. Nevertheless, a bit of soft skill can go a long way.

aaisola 6y ago

Shipping features without talking to users is a death knell. You end up with an bloated product that serves no one particularly well. It sounds like all the other problems are just derivatives of this because all of the time was spent head down and "working" and no time spent being strategic, creative or learning what your customer base actually wants.

segmondy 6y ago

How did they make such mistakes? I thought that was the entire point of YC, to guide founders and to make sure they don't make such mistakes?

pedalpete 6y ago
I was thinking the same thing, but the other aspect is that YC is not a baby-sitter. They have 100 companies in a batch. If you're attending the meetings but not taking the advice, they'll probably write you off fairly quickly as the chances of success are low and they can focus on helping those who are leveraging the knowledge and experience.

sontek 6y ago

My co-founder just left our company after 4 years because we basically had to pivot and restart with a new product that fit with COVID (we are in the events space). Looking back at everything that lead up to him having to leave, I've come up with the one mistake I regret doing: Splitting up duties. We were technical founders but we decided one of us would handle the business side and one of us would handle the technical side. I think this ended up isolating us rather than having us work together as a team. As we grew I hired account managers, sales, etc and he hired devs. We chose to start a company together but never really worked together. Now 4 years later I'm working in the backend for the first time. I wish I would've spent more time pair coding with him and discussing architecture together. We worked at 3 other companies together and went to university together and I think we missed our opportunity to truly work together on something WE want to build.