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We could easily have slammed together off the shelf components and potentially grown at a similar rate. Also potentially not, sales is hard! Seeing founders wi

We could easily have slammed together off the shelf components and potentially grown at a similar rate. Also potentially not, sales is hard! Seeing founders with less care for detail and more for the sheer growth of their user base was impressive and deflating. It felt like everyone I compared myself to, they were devoting 90% of their time to selling and 10% to building. I share the feeling. There's success stories of companies doing the same (e.g. Notion, Replit), so I know it's not completely off-book, but I constantly wonder whether there is downside to that approach of focusing on sales in the beginning. I can guess things like less likely to be innovative, but is that true? Maybe since they average being alive longer than the ones that focused on product in the beginning, any potential downsides are negated in the long term (e.g. just innovate later with the infinite runway they now have). Would love to see some study/survey on this.

taaron 4y ago
I think one downside is that because you are optimizing for sales in the short-term, it can lead to product design/architecture decisions which unknowingly constrain the direction or limits of future development/innovation (or at least make it very expensive to retrofit). I think Notion is potentially suffering from this now as users try to push its limits into more complex applications.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  > it can lead to product design/architecture decisions which unknowingly constrain the direction or limits of future development/innovation (or at least make it very expensive to retrofit) As my beard starts to grey, I've come to the conclusion that needing to drop a lot of money to retrofit is an infinitely better problem than not having captured a large segment of the market. As someone who did Perl commercially from 2001-2019, most of my career was spent working at companies who'd done a large Perl build-out some time between 1995 and 2005, made a lot of money and captured a large amount of market share, and were now expensively retrofitting a lot of very, very nasty code that inexperienced programmers had smashed together in a rush. Much better to be in that position than a company with a beautiful codebase who didn't capture the market
  - taaron 4y ago
    > Much better to be in that position than a company with a beautiful codebase who didn't capture the market For sure. But I wonder how many are prevented from capturing a larger segment of the market because of poor design decisions re more fundamental primitives of the product. I suppose the worst case scenario here is a complete rebuild and migration.
coderunner 4y ago
Did Notion focus on selling before they had the any semblance of a product? I thought the founders holed up in a Japan for months to get an early version implemented before things started taking off.
- alixanderwang 4y ago
  Sorry for the ambiguity, I meant I shared the feeling with OP that it felt like people around me were selling while I was building, but it can't be so wrong since there's success stories of companies like Notion that similarly focused on building.

taaron 4y ago

I think one downside is that because you are optimizing for sales in the short-term, it can lead to product design/architecture decisions which unknowingly constrain the direction or limits of future development/innovation (or at least make it very expensive to retrofit). I think Notion is potentially suffering from this now as users try to push its limits into more complex applications.

petesergeant 4y ago
> it can lead to product design/architecture decisions which unknowingly constrain the direction or limits of future development/innovation (or at least make it very expensive to retrofit) As my beard starts to grey, I've come to the conclusion that needing to drop a lot of money to retrofit is an infinitely better problem than not having captured a large segment of the market. As someone who did Perl commercially from 2001-2019, most of my career was spent working at companies who'd done a large Perl build-out some time between 1995 and 2005, made a lot of money and captured a large amount of market share, and were now expensively retrofitting a lot of very, very nasty code that inexperienced programmers had smashed together in a rush. Much better to be in that position than a company with a beautiful codebase who didn't capture the market
- taaron 4y ago
  > Much better to be in that position than a company with a beautiful codebase who didn't capture the market For sure. But I wonder how many are prevented from capturing a larger segment of the market because of poor design decisions re more fundamental primitives of the product. I suppose the worst case scenario here is a complete rebuild and migration.

coderunner 4y ago

Did Notion focus on selling before they had the any semblance of a product? I thought the founders holed up in a Japan for months to get an early version implemented before things started taking off.

alixanderwang 4y ago
Sorry for the ambiguity, I meant I shared the feeling with OP that it felt like people around me were selling while I was building, but it can't be so wrong since there's success stories of companies like Notion that similarly focused on building.