# How to Start a Startup - Lessons & Tips ## Great reads - [Startups in 13 Sentences](http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html) 1. Pick good cofounders. 2. Launch fast. 3. Let your idea evolve. 4. Understand your users. 5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent. 6. Offer surprisingly good customer service. 7. You make what you measure. 8. Spend little. 9. Get ramen profitable. 10. Avoid distractions. 11. Don't get demoralized. 12. Don't give up. 13. Deals fall through. - [How to Start a Startup - Paul Graham](http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html) - [Do Things that Don't Scale](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html) - [Startup - Kung Fu - Advice](https://blog.asmartbear.com/kung-fu.html) - [5 Pieces of Advice Entrepreneurs Never Hear. That They Need to Hear. | SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/5-pieces-of-advice-entrepreneurs-never-hear-that-they-need-to-hear/) ![[0. Essential YC Advice.jpg]] [YC's Essential Startup Advice: Becoming a Founder, Early Stage, Talking to Users | Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4D-yc-s-essential-startup-advice) ## Early principles at Nike and Apple ![[Nike - Early days principles.jpeg]] ![[Apple - Early days principles.jpeg]] ![[Benefits over Features.JPG]] ## The 10 Most Important Lessons I’ve Learned as a Founder-CEO (and VC) - Lemkin [The 10 Most Important Lessons I've Learned as a Founder-CEO (and VC) | SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/the-10-most-important-lessons-ive-learned-as-a-founder-ceo-and-vc/) 1. Slow down big decisions, speed up the rest. 2. Wait and find a truly great co-founder. 3. Make your first customers wildly successful. They teach you how to make the next 10, 50, 100 wildly successful, too. Your first customers are your future. You will get more just like them. A bit more here. 4. Power laws are real. If your startup is worth $20m today, it can be worth $100m in a few years, and maybe, $1000m a few years after that. Value, brands and revenue compound. 5. Don’t worry as much about the competition. 6. Go all-in. If you don’t commit 100%, you’ll never maximize the success. 7. A great team is a family. Few things are more special than having a great team at a start-up. Family members will leave and go on to other great things. But you’ll be a family for decades. 8. A great journey makes you relevant. If you sell your startup, you’ll see that no matter how much money you make, you start to feel … less relevant afterwards. 9. 90% transparency is about right. You can’t share every single issue, every drama. That’s too much. But about 90% transparency is good. The team can take it, and will appreciate it. Don’t share everything. But hide less. 10. Time is the ally of the committed. If you are willing to work not just harder, but for longer than the rest — you probably won’t fail. You won’t let the tough times, that terrible year, kill you. You’ll push on. And you’ll stay in the game long enough for those power laws to finally kick in. ## My top 10 Year One SaaS Mistakes. Save Yourself Some Pain & Just Don't Make Them Yourself - Lemkin - [My Top 10 Year One SaaS Mistakes. Save Yourself Some Pain & Just Don't Make Them Yourself. -- SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/my-top-10-mistakes-as-a-successful-saas-entrepreneur/) - **Launching Too Early**. This paid off with press, PR, partners, etc. But we should have made the product better and waited 3-5 more months before public launch. - **Insufficient Diligence**.  While I thought I understood the market we were attempting to create and attack, with time, I realized I didn’t fully research comps as deeply or successfully as I could have.  If I had, I would have better understood the likely endpoint vis-a-vis freemium vs. enterprise.  And then, I would have invested more wisely in Year 1 especially. - **Turning Down Extra Series A Funds That Were Offered and That We Ended Up Needing**.  I ran it probably too lean, not so much to avoid dilution, but I guess, to maintain control in some fashion.  Or really, just not to lose control.  But that wasn’t necessary.  We ended up needing another $500k in our Series A to get to the B.  Not the end of the world, but it could have been.  We should have taken more money when initially offered.  In fact, I made this mistake twice.  We also turned down $2-$4m extra in the Series B.  We should have taken $2m more. - **Not Hiring 2-3 Sales Reps to Start**.  I started with one.  I thought this was a better way to learn.  I should have hired 2-3 as soon as we were ready for 1. - **Not Realizing Your First or at least Your Tenth Customer May be / Likely will be the Same as Your 1000th**.  Our first ‘enterprise’ customer seemed like an outlier.  But in fact, the use case, the profile, was the same as our 1,000th. - **Confusing MVP and MSP**.  A minimal viable product isn’t interesting in SaaS.  A minimal _sellable_ product is.  It wasn’t clear which we were building for our 1.0. - **Scaling Too Slowly — and Too Quickly**.  I should have invested a little more in sales reps, more quickly, once we had some initial traction (see above).  But I also tried to scale up too quickly after our Series A.  Money has to chase opportunity at this phase.  Instead, I tried things I strongly suspected wouldn’t work in the hopes of growing even faster.  That was a mistake.  I should have told my investors I was taking a pause after our Series A, and invested another 3-6 months in processes and people, instead of rushing to ‘Scale Up’. - **In Year 1, Not Fully Seeing What Was Working, Stuck in the Fog of “The Plan”**.  I should have gotten more, better advisors in the early days.  We accomplished so many great things in our first year.  But I couldn’t see it, because we came up about 50% short on our revenue plan.  But we hit everything else.  So, really, that delta was irrelevant from a long term perspective.  I wish someone had been there to show me just how well we actually somehow did in Year 1. - **Should Have Spent Even More Time Recruiting & Upgrading the Team**.  I spent a ton of time here.  But I should have spent even more. - **Not Going Long All the Time**.  I believed in the big market and the big opportunity — always.  But the endless operational challenges pre- and then post-Initial Traction buried me a little too much.  Instead of just focusing on hitting the number for this year, and working on the next — a full-time job already — I should have found a way to also focus on hitting the numbers for 4 and 10 years out.  That can seem hard to do, even a luxury.  But it’s not. ## Other resources - [How to Start a Startup - Lessons](http://startupclass.samaltman.com/) - [How to Build a Billion Dollar Company - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1N0wKSKuJ8) - [Company Building 101 -- Andreessen Horowitz](https://a16z.com/tag/company-building-101/) - [How to Succeed In Startups (Without Getting Lucky) | Product Hunt](https://www.producthunt.com/stories/how-to-succeed-in-startups-without-getting-lucky) - [Information is Power - VC Mike Hirshland has some (very early) seed-stage investing advice | TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/16/vc-mike-hirshland-has-some-very-early-seed-stage-investing-advice/) - [21 Tips for First-Time Entrepreneurs](http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245697) - [How to Win as a First-Time Founder, a Drew Houston Manifesto | First Round Review](http://firstround.com/review/How-to-Win-as-a-First-Time-Founder-a-Drew-Houston-Manifesto/) - [Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner: Kevin Systrom, Instagram - Mike Krieger, Instagram - From Stanford to Startup [Entire Talk]](http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2735) - [How the tech elite teach Stanford students to build billion-dollar companies (in 11 quotes) | VentureBeat | Business | by Gregory Ferenstein](http://venturebeat.com/2014/09/25/how-the-tech-elite-teach-stanford-students-to-build-billion-dollar-companies-in-11-quotes/) - [Why You Can't Just Tell a Company "Be More Like a Startup"](https://hbr.org/2017/06/why-you-cant-just-tell-a-company-be-more-like-a-startup) - ["A BAD Plan is BETTER Than NO Plan!" - Peter Thiel (@peterthiel) - Top 10 Rules - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCLHNP3cT3g) - [How Rockefeller Built His Trillion Dollar Oil Empire - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9saLsvWcppw) - [9 Habits of World Class Startups](https://www.nfx.com/post/9-habits-world-class-startups) - ["Blitzscaling" by Reid Hoffman: Summary and Thoughts](https://medium.com/@MTorygreen/blitzscaling-by-reid-hoffman-summary-and-thoughts-b0bfb60e7644) - [Unspoken Startup Folk Wisdom - Stay SaaSy](https://blog.staysaasy.com/p/unspoken-startup-folk-wisdom) - Important Projects Must Have Exactly One Owner - Hire For Talent Over Experience - Promote From Within, Often - Hard Work Works - Don’t Squeeze Candidates ![[Doug Leone - Sequoia - Checklist.JPG]] ## Pricing ![[Pricing - High early-on in B2B SaaS.png]] ## Destination ![[Jason Lemkin - Criteria on building a unicorn.jpg]] # Startup mistakes to avoid ![[Mistakes that kill startups.PNG]] [The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - Paul Graham](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) - [[saas-startup-mistakes.pdf]] - CB Insights - [242 Startup Failure Post-Mortems](https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-post-mortem/) - [The Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail](https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-top/) - [6 Mistakes that will kill your B2B SaaS Startup - Pierre Lechelle](https://www.pierrelechelle.com/marketing-failures-startups) ![[Before a unicorn, a 10M business.png]] ![[3 common pitfalls of founders - The Great CEO Within.png]] [8 Things That Kill Early Stage SaaS Companies. And 3 That Don’t. | SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/8-things-that-kill-early-stage-saas-companies-and-3-that-dont/) - Not committing to 24 months to get to first $1m+ in revenue — whatever it takes - Running out of money - Not recruiting a strong enough team. In the end, a great team with 24 months of runway almost always can do amazing things. They never seem to fail. They often come close. But great teams pull it out. - Not leaning into the market and customers you end up having initial traction in. The folks that end up buying your product are often not the same you imagined! Some founders just aren’t willing to build software and sell to the customers that want them. They just don’t want to take it where it goes. - Not finding a 10x feature. Almost every category already has 5, 10, 100, 1000 vendors in it. What’s your 10x feature? The one customers will pay for? Do you know? - Cofounder Drama / Conflict. Starting up is hard. Cofounders being at each other’s throats when it’s harder and takes longer than expected kills a lot of startups. A lot of them. - Too slow to change, evolve and adapt. Markets change. Teams that can’t evolve every few years with the market often eventually end up not quite failing, but having mediocre outcomes at best. - Quitting. See point #1 above. No one can force you to quit.