andersschmidthansen / thestartupjigsaw Goto Github PK

"If you can just do this one thing, if you can just learn to think about the market first, you'll have a big leg up on most people starting startups. And this is probably the thing we see wrong with Y Combinator apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first, and what people want first." - Sam Altman

"One thing that we always tell college students is that more important then any particular startup is getting to know potential co-founders." - Sam Altman

"If it takes more then a sentence to explain what you're doing, that's almost always a sign that its too complicated. It should be a clearly articulated vision with a small number of words." - Sam Altman

"The tests are so different from tests in people’s previous lives. If you are absolutely terrified of starting a startup you probably shouldn’t do it." - Paul Graham

"If you try to build a growth machine before you have a product that some people really love, you're almost certainly going to waste your time." - Sam Altman

"If you find yourself talking about how it's okay that you're not growing—because there's a big partnership that's going to come save you or something like that—its almost always a sign of real trouble." - Sam Altman

"So the four areas: You need a great idea, a great product, a great team, and great execution. These overlap somewhat" - Sam Altman

Just go out and find people who desperately need your product.

1. What is the thing people are here to do?
2. What is the aha moment they want?
3. Why can't I not give that to them as fast as possible?

"The definition of the idea, as we talk about it, is very broad. It includes the size and the growth of the market, the growth strategy for the company, the defensibility strategy, and so on. When you're evaluating an idea, you need to think through all these things, not just the product." - Sam Altman

"Someone who knows zero about fundraising, but has made something users really love, will have an easier time raising money than someone who knows every trick in the book, but has a flat usage graph." - Paul Graham

"Great founders don't put anyone between themselves and their users. The founders of these companies do things like sales and customer support themselves in the early days. Its critical to get this loop embedded in the culture. In fact, a specific problem we always see with Stanford startups, for some reason, is that the students try to hire sales and customer support people right away, and you've got to do this yourself, its the only way." - Sam Altman

"Another piece of advice to make something that users love: start with something simple. Its much much easier to make a great product if you have something simple." - Sam Altman

"Think about the really successful companies, and what they started with, think about products you really love. They're generally incredibly simple to use, and especially to get started using. The first version of Facebook was almost comically simple. The first version of Google was just a webpage with a textbox and two buttons; but it returned the best results, and that's why users loved it. The iPhone is far simpler to use then any smartphone that ever came before it, and it was the first one users really loved." - Sam Altman

"If your product gets 10 percent better every week, that compounds really quickly. One of the advantages of software startups is just how short you can make the feedback loop. It can be measured in hours, and the best companies usually have the tightest feedback loop." - Sam Altman

"You'll understand it much better than if you have to understand it by talking to a customer to build the very first version. If you don't need it yourself, and you're building something someone else needs, realize that you're at a big disadvantage, and get very very close to your customers." - Sam Altman

This chains to piece #4 and #5.

"Most investors are obsessed with the market size today, and they don't think at all about how the market is going to evolve.

In fact, I think this is one of the biggest systemic mistakes that investors make. They think about the growth of the start-up itself, they don't think about the growth of the market. I care much more about the growth rate of the market than its current size, and I also care if there's any reason it's going to top out. You should think about this. I prefer to invest in a company that's going after a small, but rapidly growing market, than a big, but slow-growing market." - Sam Altman

"You need some users to help with the feedback cycle, but the way you should get those users is manually—you should go recruit them by hand. Don't do things like buy Google ads in the early days, to get initial users. You don't need very many, you just need ones that will give you feedback everyday, and eventually love your product. So instead of trying to get them on Google Adwords, just the few people, in the world, that would be good users. Recruit them by hand." - Sam Altman

Source: Chamath Palihapitiya

"In fact, one of the big mistakes that founders make is to not trust their intuition about people enough. They meet someone, who seems impressive, but about whom they feel some misgivings and then later when things blow up, they say, "You know I knew there was something wrong about that guy, but I ignored it because he seemed so impressive." - Paul Graham

Ties together with piece #42.

"In fact, one thing that correlates with success among the YC companies is the founders that hook up pager duty to their ticketing system, so that even if the user emails in the middle of the night when the founder's asleep, they still get a response within an hour." - Sam Altman

"[...] while imitating all the outward forms of starting a startup, they have neglected the one thing that is actually essential, which is to make something people want. [...] We saw this happen so often, people going through the motion of starting a startup, that we made up a name for it: "Playing House." - Paul Graham

"[...] starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. [...] in startups, that does not work. There is no boss to trick, how can you trick people, when there is nobody to trick? There are only users and all users care about is whether your software does what they want, right? They're like sharks, sharks are too stupid to fool, you can't wave a red flag and fool it, it's like meat or no meat." - Paul Graham

"You want to build an engine in the company that transforms feedback from users into product decisions. Then get it back in from of the users and repeat. Ask them what the like and don't like, and watch them use it. Ask them what they'd pay for. Ask them if they'd be really bummed if your company went away. Ask them what would make them recommend the product to their friends, and ask them if they'd recommended it to any yet." - Sam Altman

It is always good to be smart, but determination seems to be the most important trait for a founder.

"Any company that's a clone of something else, that already exists, with some small or made up differentiator—like X, beautiful design, or Y for people that like red wine instead—that usually fails." - Sam Altman

"As you're thinking through ideas, another thing we see that founders get wrong all the time is that someday you need to build a business that is difficult to replicate. This is an important part of a good idea." - Sam Altman

"If you're building an Internet service, ignore things like total registrations—don't talk about them, don't let anyone in the company talk about them—and look at growth and active users, activity levels, cohort retention, revenue, net promoter scores, these things that matter. And then be brutally honest if they're not going in the right direction. Startups live on growth, its the indicator of a great product." - Sam Altman

"The first thing on it is the fact I just mentioned: startups are so weird that if you follow your instincts they will lead you astray. If you remember nothing more than that, when you're about to make a mistake, you can pause before making it." - Paul Graham

"All the other stuff — PR, conferences, recruiting advisers, doing partnerships—you should ignore all of that, and just build a product and get it as good as possible by talking to your users." - Sam Altman

"Your job is to build something that users love. Very few companies that go on to be super successful get there without first doing this. A lot of good-on-paper startups fail because they merely make something that people like. Making something that people want, but only a medium amount, is a great way to fail, and not understand why you're failing." - Sam Altman

This ties closely to piece #16.

"The truly good ideas don't sound like they're worth stealing." - Sam Altman

"Great companies take 5-10 years, but the evidence of an “at least good” product is likely visible within the first 6-12 months, and the structure of a “at least good” company is apparent within 1-3 years.

Great companies don’t just pop out after 10 years of hiding in the shadows; the foreshadowing of their greatness happens far earlier.

But Sam is correct that the execution on a good idea or product may take many years, and the growth of the organization around it may take even longer." - Dave McClure

"One way that you know when this is working, is that you'll get growth by word of mouth. If you get something people love, people will tell their friends about it. This works for consumer product and enterprise products as well. When people really love something, they'll tell their friends about it, and you'll see organic growth." - Sam Altman

In the same vein: "The idea should come first and the startup should come second." - Sam Altman

"What you need to know to succeed in a startup is not expertise in startups, what you need is expertise in your own users." - Paul Graham

"Try to work in their office, if you can, and if not, talk to them multiple times a day." - Sam Altman

"You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand. This is why some great startup ideas look really bad at the beginning. It's good if you can say something like, "Today, only the small substantive users are going to use my product, but I'm going to get all of them, and in the future, almost everyone is going to use my product." - Sam Altman

Startup success can be, albeit a bit humorously, calculated as the

Idea x Product x Team x Execution x Luck

Where luck is a number between 0 and 10.000.