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Startup Playbook
- skm 3y ago(2015) According to web.archive.org this is from Nov 2015: https://web.archive.org/web/20151108010026/https://playbook.samaltman.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151108010026/https://playbook....
- still_grokking 3y agoIt was discussed here previously: > Startup Playbook (November 5, 2015 — 1202 points, 232 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10514729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10514729 > Startup Playbook (2015) (January 16, 2019 — 640 points, 55 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18917362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18917362
- throw4w4yceo 3y ago> The way to test an idea is to either launch it and see what happens or try to sell it (e.g. try to get a letter of intent before you write a line of code.) > The former works better for consumer ideas [...] and the latter works better for enterprise ideas (if a company tells you they will buy something, then go build it.) > Specifically, if you are an enterprise company, one of the first questions we’ll ask you is if you have a letter of intent from a customer saying they’ll buy what you’re building. If you're a new startup building a B2B product, how does that work in practice? It's difficult to imagine an unproven, early stage startup getting letters of intent from customers. How would you even go about finding those customers?
- xmprt 3y agoWhich of the following sounds easier? Getting a letter of intent from a business looking to buy your product. Or building an entire product and trying to convince businesses that they need to use your solution. Neither are easy, but the latter is just the former but with more steps and you'll probably have to make a ton of changes to your original solution before anyone buys.
- motoxpro 3y agoI think people struggle with this because: 1. They think the letter has to say "I will buy this today" instead of "I will buy this if it does xyz" 2. People think someone seeing a product (e.g. build something great is all that matters) trumps everything.
- ioblomov 3y agoPresumably you would already have a relationship with the client by, say, working at one of their vendors or having been an employee.
- karmicthreat 3y agoI work in the IoT space, specifically around food and beverage production. Its been my experience that people who have a job solving problems are perfectly happy to dump their problems off on you if its cheap enough. Cheap enough might even be several thousand dollars a year. Everyone has more problems than they can pay attention to, so mostly you are probably looking at people you have direct contact with. Competing in an industry you have no experience in is going to be a very different experience.
- unusualmonkey 3y ago> How would you even go about finding those customers? This goes to the team. If you want to build a startup selling to enterprise, it helps to have a co-founder that has the skills/experiance to do this.
- ian0 3y agoYou contact the potential user, explain who you are and what your trying to build, they like it and are comfortable signing an LoI. Thats pretty much it. If its a big B and you need credentials, you'll need to get that first. You can do it by looking and sounding professional, bringing in advisors who add some weight, getting an intro from the CEO or owner (you'd be surprised how many will pay it forward). If its a small B just wander around and say hello. People generally want to help people who are making things that help them. And your not getting anywhere without understanding your user so you'll need to talk to them, emphasise. A lot of the earliest discussions will be more around you figuring out exactly how your product will help them.
- smallerfish 3y ago> Consider these criteria when you’re choosing a cofounder -- it’s one of the most important decisions you’ll make, and it’s often done fairly randomly. You want someone you know well, not someone you just met at a cofounder dating thing. And yet...
- pickledish 3y agoHeheh, I thought that was pretty funny too. For those unfamiliar, YC now runs its own “cofounder dating thing”: https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching
- EntrePrescott 3y agoFor that matter, I'd even say that it can be dangerous to choose cofounders within one's friend circle. It tends to make people more blind to lacks and red flags (for the needs of a tech business) that would clearly be recognized as disqualifying if selecting someone who isn't a friend, on the basis of a focused rational evaluation.
- alberth 3y agoSome unsolicited advice … You can succeed in achieving everything in that playbook, and still fail. Life can be brutal. Appreciate the importance of timing & luck. Stars need to align & lots of things are out of your control. Like an unexpected global pandemic, a persons health turning bad, or simply a key customer not paying timely - are all things that can tank your perfect business and more.
- pgayed 3y agoAre you describing a particular experience you had?
- frozencell 3y agoIt's an astrologist.
- papito 3y agoWhat you are saying is that it may increase your odds of success, but it by no means guarantees it. If you do nothing - you won't succeed. If you do everything - you may succeed.
- tmoertel 3y agoBut the choice isn't between doing a startup and doing nothing. It's between doing a startup and taking an established tech job at, say, a FAANG. For most definitions of success, the second route leads to success with pretty high probability. While a startup win has much higher payoff, I suspect that the expected utility is higher for the other option.
- papito 3y agoRight, but the original article is about startups :) Life is a wide-ranging buffet of risks, just like the stock market. You can choose anywhere from bonds (career, stable job) to penny stocks (startups).
- twodave 3y agoIs this advice actually helpful? I feel like if I were considering a start-up I’d still have just as many questions after reading what amounts to, “If you want to be great, you need to … be great.”
- superfrank 3y agoI just kind of skimmed the post, but I know more than a few wantrepreneurs who don't seem to understand the importance of a great team and great execution. They think the steps to building a successful company are just "come up with a revolutionary idea" and "find cheap labor to turn that idea into a product". This post may not be the most in depth thing in the world, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who could learn something from it.
- doctor_eval 3y agoYeah, for one of the startups I founded, my mantra was "build a great business and a great product". But I didn't think I had the bandwidth to do both, I wanted help on the business side so I could focus on the product, so I hired a team to "build a great business". But I wish I had read the bits about cofounders and exec teams. The number of pitched battles I had about management processes in my pre-revenue, pre-customer, barely-there startup took so much of my time, while I was just trying to get the product out the door so we could sign people up. I definitely chose the wrong parters... and it definitely sunk the company.
- aik 3y agoAdvice is pretty much never one-size-fits-all. If it’s helpful to you, then it’s helpful to you. If not, or not at this stage in your life, then it’s not. You decide.
- shcmary 3y agoIt might also just not be useful advice for the majority of people.
- nextaccountic 3y ago
- monero-xmr 3y agoSafest way to start an enterprise SaaS startup is to have a buyer lined up before it’s founded. The way to have a buyer before founding is to have worked at an established, profitable firm that has that exact problem, cannot build a solution themselves, and get a signed agreement from them to buy your future product. If you leave that firm and have that document, you can raise money, then use that money to hire a team, then build the product and fulfill the contract. Getting into such a position requires an established career. Therefore safe, reliable entrepreneurs cannot possibly be college drop outs - they need to be established careerists with good connections who have entrepreneurial ambitions.
- ido 3y agoMaybe I missed it in the text, but I haven't seen anywhere "enterprise SaaS" mentioned specifically? I thought this was general startup advice.
- monero-xmr 3y agoIf you are selling to other businesses I consider that enterprise. If you are selling to consumers you don’t need signed contracts from other businesses to buy your product.
- 4pkjai 3y agoAgree with everything except the last line. You outlined one path to creating a successful SaaS company, but there are other paths.
- vasco 3y agoKeyword I think you missed is "reliable".
- steve_taylor 3y agoEasier said than done. Your employer would probably prefer you to stay and build it exclusively for them, rather than leave and also sell to their competitors. There’s also the issue of trust. For some reason, managers tend to trust third parties more than their own employees. For example, they won’t think twice about using open source libraries with a single hobbyist maintainer, but often feel uneasy about using an open source library built and maintained by one of their subordinates. I’m not sure why this happens. There must be a name for the phenomenon. I suspect the same thing will play out when you try to pivot from employee to supplier.
- qazpot 3y agoI don't see "First create a non-profit then make it for profit once it takes off."
- echelon 3y agoThere's nothing wrong with that.
- markdown 3y agoNothing wrong with a bait and switch? Only on HN.
- echelon 3y agoWho was it that was harmed, exactly? I'd love to see a list.
- fakedang 3y agoWell, for starters, Musk? As an investor (rather, lead capital provider) in a non-profit, he was blindsided by the decision entirely. And before anyone criticizes me for defending his viewpoint, let's assume this: if Musk's $100 million investment were to be replaced by 100k HN users investing $1k each into a non-profit focused on safe and "open AI", do you think they would be uniformly happy about this decision?
- flangola7 3y agoYou can't have an AI that is powerful, safe, and open. You can pick at most 2 options. The investors wanted a cake and to eat it too.
- fakedang 3y agoYou can perfectly have an AI that is powerful if you have the investment backing (like Musk provided). You can develop stuff out in the open like most software non profits do (case in point, the Linux Foundation), instead of playing Microsoft's slave. An open AI is safe inherently, since it means that it can be easily ripped apart and thoroughly studied for exploitable points, unlike some closed black box system. Having Open AI be some closed system does nothing to reduce the number of bad actors - they will all choose to exploit Open AI's system once given the opportunity.
- revelio 3y agoIt's interesting to consider how much of this advice OpenAI violates. They spent years doing relatively derivative work in a well hyped space with lots of big companies that were in fact competently executing on a big technological transition. It took them, what, seven years to get to the point of doing ChatGPT. They are mostly in the b2b space but clearly didn't start with a letter of intent.
- twayt 3y agoI wonder how much of this startup playbook is just a way to rationalize luck. Companies that succeed may not necessarily do all of these things. Companies that fail may do all of these things. A person who'd be inclined to click this link is likely new to startups and wants some kind of structure, knowing how unpredictable things can be. In some sense, this is exactly "what people want" ala YC advice. As long as they say a few milquetoast things that other established entrepreneurs cannot argue with, they have essentially used the (possibly random) initial successes they've had to build credibility in the eyes of potential founders. There is no doubt that a large part of YC's successes are due to its network effects but you first need to get lucky in order to build it. That's the part they seem to leave out.
- revelio 3y agoI don't mean to be too cynical. I think a lot of the advice in this article actually rings true and aligns with my personal experience. No advice on something as vague as success can be comprehensive and OpenAI may just be an exception. Especially as it's not a successful business yet and given their enormous raises, it'll be years before anyone can tell if they're actually able to swim on their own. For example, when I was young I worried that ideas were precious and had to be protected in case I told someone and they stole it. Now I recognize the fundamental truth Sam expresses in the article: the best ideas sound bad, and the majority of people will just roll their eyes if you tell them what you want to do. I've directly had that experience with several successful projects so this isn't just nodding along to something that sounds vaguely aspirational. Whilst OpenAI seems to violate a lot of what's in the article, in that way it's example of it. They're in their current position because groupthink within the AI space came to state that scaling up language models wasn't worth doing and academically uninteresting compared to developing more sophisticated neural architectures. OpenAI said, no, let's just try spending shittons of money and engineering on brute forcing enormous model sizes with an ordinary-ish transformer network and see what happens. Right up until they started getting these amazing results they were sort of out on their own in being so committed to that approach.
- jatins 3y ago> They all started with a product that their early users loved so much they told other people about it I have seen/worked a few enterprise SaaS companies where the customers could not barely use the product without handholding from a customer success rep, let alone love it. Love YC's advice for indie, first time founders but a lot of it falls flat if you know you know a guy, who knows a guy.
- lelanthran 3y ago> If there are ten other companies starting at the same time with the same plan, and it sounds a whole lot like something that already exists, we are skeptical. Is that why YC went so heavily into cryptocurrency startups? /s
- baby 3y agoIs there an epub version of this?