mwseibel

21 ms·

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by mwseibel 10y ago
Thanks - I agree that balance is really important. Also, in many cases - especially where the founder is a user - intuition can be a key early driver of success.
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Its funny - I think the Ford quote is right. I always tell folks to not ask a customer what they want but ask them what their problem is. Its the customer task to describe and demonstrate their problem - its the founder's task to thi
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by mwseibel 10y ago
sorry for the delay :) - its really hard to do active a/b tests in the early days - often I tell founders that feedback cycle then has to rely of direct interaction with customers alone. Which I think is a good habit for all startups
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by mwseibel 10y ago
I always tell folks to start talking to users from day 1 :)
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by mwseibel 10y ago
not sure - you can poke around here: https://medium.com/breaking-into-startups
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by mwseibel 10y ago
I always love the debate on whether great products are imagined or are discovered through experimentation (certainly a bit of both). This post details the advice I usually give to startups on this topic and I'm happy to answer questio
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by mwseibel 10y ago
My friend was inspired by breakingintowallstreet.com (which he used to get a job on wall street) to create a similar set of advice on how you can get a job in tech without having a traditional background or growing up in the valley. It&#x2
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Breaking into startups – podcast to share with your non-tech friends(itunes.apple.com)
127 points by mwseibel 10y ago|13 comments
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by mwseibel 10y ago
They do exist - I have a pair of Markhor shoes that I wore at my wedding last year and I love them :)
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Really excited to have these folks join us!
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Man - I wish I could be in here answering questions about the post but I'm on the YC World Tour and currently meeting startups in Lagos - I'm glad you all liked the post
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by mwseibel 10y ago
People care because its a pretty big early milestone for a company. Especially if it happens pretty quickly and you can talk about some customers.
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Yes - because investors, potential employees, potential partners read tech news
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Thanks Brian - when you go all in on demo day prep so do we :)
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Thanks! I really enjoyed working with you guys!
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Investor day was epic - tons of props to software and ops teams!
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by mwseibel 10y ago
thanks!
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Yes! So many startups in YC encounter this exact problem in their early days...
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by mwseibel 10y ago
I totally agree with you that often times your first set of users aren't the users you end up serving at scale. There are so many examples of this that they are hard to count. What is great about your example is that Uber made a stra
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by mwseibel 10y ago
To be clear - I'm not arguing that you should ignore any user. I'm simply saying you don't have to comply with every user request and you don't HAVE to let a user request change the focus on your startup.
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Hey folks - slightly different piece today - trying to get away from investor/fundraising posts as of late. Would love your thoughts/comments/questions. I'll check in a couple times over the course of the day.
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Solve the problem of your family or friends
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Facebook totally was a hair on fire problem - if you saw a cute girl on campus and you wanted to look her up - all we had was a stupid freshman "facebook" (book of faces and names) and a crapy web version of the same.
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Exactly!!!
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by mwseibel 10y ago
That is the problem they started solving - and customers pulled the rest of the product out of them
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by mwseibel 10y ago
Exponential growth with retention over time is probably another definition of product market fit. I think the world is always creating new problems to fix and we aren't successfully tackling the hard ones yet (housing, healthcare, pov
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by mwseibel 10y ago
New user growth and retention
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by mwseibel 10y ago
I 100% agree - blog pmarca was epic!!!
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by mwseibel 10y ago
I think there are tons of hair of fire problems - what's cool is that new products (if they are successful) often create new problems.
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by mwseibel 10y ago
You're welcome!

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