I’m a first time founder. a lot of what I know about building a company I learned in the last year, most of it by doing it wrong first.
speed
the biggest advantage a startup has is speed. and most of it doesn’t come from working more hours, it comes from not doing the wrong things. for almost everything I now ask: is this really the easiest and fastest way to do it? there is usually a less fun, less cool solution that gets you 80% of the value for 20% of the work. focus on what has the biggest impact for the customer, kill what doesn’t work, and keep checking if you are using the best tools or just old ones out of habit. → Speed
hiring
I look for three things: world class at something, work ethic, no asshole. if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no. hiring is outbound and it’s competitive. you don’t have to hire the best people in the world, just better ones than your competitors, and you won’t find them where everyone else is looking (linkedin is the worst). for the really good candidates the process flips around and you are applying to them. → Hiring
leading
people need to see where this is going, and feel that they own a part of it. so I share the big vision, and then give people problems, not tasks, and tell them honestly that they can probably solve it better than I can. everyone is a product manager: understand the problem, come up with a solution, test it with customers, iterate. deadlines are ambitious, and if we miss them we talk about why. everyone can be challenged, including me. → Leadership
tech
in the beginning you can get away with a lot. a handful of users, you test on your own phone, you ship, and if something breaks you notice it yourself and fix it in the evening. that stops working the moment your product is used by thousands of families. suddenly there is a crash on one android version you have never even seen, a bug in one messenger integration that only shows up for some kids, and you don’t find out until a parent writes to support. and in our case a bug is not just annoying. if detection silently stops working, a kid is not protected and the parents think they are. in the summer we went through weeks where it felt like we fixed a million bugs a day but more kept popping up the next day. we had to become way more professional. testing, testing, testing!! very good monitoring, so we see that something is wrong before any parent does. and a real release process instead of “it works on my phone, ship it”. none of that is exciting, but once people rely on you, it’s the job.
nothing about building a company is easy. literally nothing works on its own. but that’s exactly the point.
I’ll keep updating this.