flâneur

Vedant Nair

13 followers · 14 following · 1052 views

on the atlas — 109

highlights — 423

  • Great work is hard, but also so obvious and simple when you see it done. You’re not done until you look at a solution and say: “This is so simple. How could this be any different?” The hidden benefit of this approach is that it allows us to break the trade-off between designing for small and large customers by building more thoughtful and composable product primitives that are simple to use, and continue to scale as spend on Brex grows.
    Building Brex 3.0, March 2024 | Brex
  • “In the early days, I underestimated just how much value can be accrued in having exceptionally good integrations,” says Rauch. “That's a trap that founders can fall into: Instead of integrating, they try to boil the entire ocean.”
    Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business
  • Instead of building more, become exceptionally good at less.
    Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business
  • One signal of product-market fit that I recommend you pay attention to: When something is really needed, you’ll find there are lots of very intelligent people at other organizations trying to build a version of it.
    Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business
  • “If I use MongoDB, I’ll be the first to tell my team, ‘Let's give Mongo to the experts of hosting Mongo. Let's give it to the folks that have been hardening this system at scale.’ But it gives me confidence to know that I'm betting on an open platform, so if I decide not to do so, I have the freedom to take the workload with me. That’s why open source is, in my opinion, the best option. Because if there's a company supporting it, I can automate a lot of my work away. And if, for whatever reason, I need to do it on premise, I also have that option.”
    Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business
  • To outsiders, it seemed like an overnight success because Next.js had a lot of attention and adoption from basically day one. But they hadn't seen all this development that went into it before. They hadn't seen all these internal battles and pressure testing. I had been thinking about the principles that the framework would live up to since two years prior, or even more. So the overnight success story is a bit of a myth.”
    Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business
  • While he was still in the process of finding two co-founding engineers, Rauch tasked himself with an ambitious goal: He would put out a prototype of his deployment platform in just three months. “Creating infrastructure like that in three months is very, very difficult, but I wanted to create a deadline for myself to start getting feedback. In the process of building, we realized that a deployment platform needs a dynamic web application to be able to do things like orchestrate and see logs. There was a lot needed for a platform like that.”
    Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business
  • Everything around me had failed to fulfill the cloud’s promise of making development faster. So I decided I was going to make deploying software completely instantaneous and give that power back to the developer.
    Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business
  • He didn’t know it at the time, but open source was also his path to a billion-dollar business. His company, Vercel — the frontend cloud service behind open-source development framework Next.js — was recently valued at $2.5 billion. If you’ve ever visited the websites of eBay, Zapier or The Washington Post, you’ve seen Vercel in action. As for Next.js, more than 850,000 developers use it to build websites with billions of global users, like ChatGPT, TikTok and Notion.
    Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business
  • On average it takes 7 points of contact to book a meeting with a prospect. I think this is the thing that comes most unnaturally to founders: you need to follow up. On the first message, at best your response rate will be 5-10%. Rarely people are annoyed with follow up message, and while you’re doing sales your goal should be either to get to a “no“ or a demo meeting as fast as possible. Once you’re connected with a prospect, message them every 2-3 days until they either tell you to go away or book a meeting. I typically do up to 5 messages before giving up. The difference between 1 message an…
    A YC Founder's Guide to Linkedin Sales
  • There also has recently been a trend toward platforms to empower robotics companies to make it easier for them to succeed just like AWS made it easier for modern internet companies to succeed. Again this sounds great on the surface but the difference is that before AWS, there was a flourishing set of software companies who were building great businesses and who had cash to pay AWS for a better product. But today, there simply aren’t enough robotics companies who have enough revenue to make these B2B companies make sense. It still seems we need the “killer application” of the iPhone before the …
    Where are all the robots?
  • Yes, I can imagine cases where you could end up making something that was really only useful for one user. But those are usually obvious, even to inexperienced founders. So if it's not obvious you'd be making something for a market of one, don't worry about that danger.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • Patrick Collison wrote "At some point, there was a very noticeable change in how Stripe felt. It tipped from being this boulder we had to push to being a train car that in fact had its own momentum."
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • It would be a little frightening to be solving users' problems in a way that wasn't yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • When manual components look to the user like software, this technique starts to have aspects of a practical joke. For example, the way Stripe delivered "instant" merchant accounts to its first users was that the founders manually signed them up for traditional merchant accounts behind the scenes.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • When we approached merchants asking if they wanted to use our software to make online stores, some said no, but they'd let us make one for them. Since we would do anything to get users, we did. We felt pretty lame at the time. Instead of organizing big strategic e-commerce partnerships, we were trying to sell luggage and pens and men's shirts. But in retrospect it was exactly the right thing to do, because it taught us how it would feel to merchants to use our software. Sometimes the feedback loop was near instantaneous: in the middle of building some merchant's site I'd find I needed a featur…
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • As long as you can find just one user who really needs something and can act on that need, you've got a toehold in making something people want, and that's as much as any startup needs initially. [9]
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get. When you're so big you have to resort to focus groups, you'll wish you could go over to your users' homes and offices and watch them use your stuff like you did when there were only a handful of them.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • He meant it more literally — that one should focus on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be considered pathological.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying too hard to make their initial users happy.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • Maybe if they go out of their way to make existing users super happy, they'll one day have too many to do so much for. That would be a great problem to have. See if you can make it happen. And incidentally, when it does, you'll find that delighting customers scales better than you expected. Partly because you can usually find ways to make anything scale more than you would have predicted, and partly because delighting customers will by then have permeated your culture.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made. And you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways to delight them.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the other companies we've funded, and none took better advantage of it than Stripe. At YC we use the term "Collison installation" for the technique they invented. More diffident founders ask "Will you try our beta?" and if the answer is yes, they say "Great, we'll send you a link." But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say "Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • However, Kyle Poyar of OpenView warns against using time savings as a value proposition. Nearly every software product promises to save folks time. Isn’t that the goal of software after all? Go deeper to pinpoint what’s different about your approach and how that helps the user & the business. In his post, he stresses the importance of focussing on the outcome of that saved time. Connect into the broader benefits around what folks can *accomplish* with that extra time — are you able to execute more projects with the same staff? Or ship products faster, giving you a competitive edge?
    How to sell dev tools in 2023. If you’re experiencing a lot more… | by Anna Debenham | boldstart ventures | Jun, 2023 | Medium
  • GitHub (open source repos) A tactic I particularly like is basically this. Heard about it on this podcast episode "Growing with open source projects - Josh Thurman from Uffizzi" but saw it in many variations. Anyhow it goes like this: You go to popular open-source repositories You create integration and connect your product You submit a Pull Request doing everything you can for the OS repo maintainers (so that they don't have to) They agree cause it is a win for them and a win for the OS repo users You just gained brand awareness and trust from that OS repo users For this to work IMHO, your pr…
    My favorite developer marketing channels
  • To explore buying a product, prospects need a reason to change how things are done today. Do not underestimate the status quo. We will use a standard narrative template used in sales and good business writing called TAS (Thesis Antithesis Synthesis). For example, here's what this would look like for a company like Lavender: Thesis (current state of the world): Your BDRs use automated template emails that are long and generic to reach thousands of buyers. Antithesis (why this doesn't work): Buyers ignore these emails and mark them as spam. You fail to hit targets for meetings booked because of …
    Turning LinkedIn Into an Acquisition Channel with Letterdrop | Letterdrop
  • While quantitative proof is usually the most impactful for B2B sales cycles, qualitative proof points can be helpful as well—and together, they make for an excellent one-two punch that hits both the left and right brain of your prospect. Traditionally these qualitative points come in the form of “customer success” materials. Like with quantitative proof points, they should correlate to your value proposition buckets, but can do so at a level of granularity that is up to you. The best way to do this is to have good relationships with some early customers and offer to write the testimonials for …
    Founding Sales—The Founder Led Sales & Startup Sales Handbook
  • In a nutshell, “justify why you’re asking for additional contacts,” Joe Jarvie, Senior Account Executive, UserGems, emphasizes. “You don’t want to step on people’s toes or be perceived as a guy who says, ‘hey, who’s your boss?’”
    Sales multithreading: A practical guide to win more deals
  • If you’re speaking with a frontline person, you can ask if their manager might want to join. And if it’s a manager/director, ask if they want any of their colleagues who would benefit from the tool to join the call so they can air their opinion
    Sales multithreading: A practical guide to win more deals
  • “Who’s going to feel left out if they’re not involved in this conversation. Is there anyone else who may want to join the meeting? Someone this may be relevant to?
    Sales multithreading: A practical guide to win more deals
  • ntainers carry all their dependencies with them, meaning that software can be written once and then run without needing to be re-configured
    What Are Containers? | IBM
  • A container’s smaller size, especially compared to a VM, means it can spin up quickly
    What Are Containers? | IBM
  • Except, as he has realized, in most cases, and especially his, “you are so far from the Pareto Frontier where you have to make that trade-off.”
    The future belongs to those who prepare like Dwarkesh Patel | Meridian
  • In my case, it was just that I decided that I was going to spend a week preparing for a podcast episode instead of just a day. That doesn’t seem like it should have been the case. Similarly with Stripe, it was just ‘We’re going to make it easier for somebody to build an API for payments.’ It doesn’t seem like it should have been something PayPal missed. But in a strange sense, a lot of seemingly competitive domains are pretty easy to get a handle on.”
    The future belongs to those who prepare like Dwarkesh Patel | Meridian
  • We only have annual commmits at Rippling (unless a specific use case), but we give the option to pay monthly or pay up front (at ~20% discount). It’s been a huge positive for us, if you can manage to get ~50% of your revenue paid up front, you can essentially hire the sales org without impacting burn (we’re even able to cover the cost of SDRs, SCs, etc). Your actual post went into this in more detail, but I think the bigger mistake most start-ups make is allowing people to pay via net terms and wasting time and resources chasing down invoices. At Rippling, we require ACH for direct debit or CC…
    Annual Contracts: Maybe Not All They Are Cracked Up To Be | LinkedIn
  • The odds if a deal gets sent to legal that it closes the same month are close to zero. This always at least takes weeks. Avoid it if you can.
    Annual Contracts: Maybe Not All They Are Cracked Up To Be | LinkedIn
  • And lastly, be flexible in the beginning. This is probably the most important thing on pricing terms. You have to learn. Once you have a brand that customers trust, more will prepay annually. In the beginning, at a minimum, you may need to do more paid trials and proofs-of-concept, or quarterly/monthly deals.
    Dear SaaStr: When Should a SaaS Company allow Month-to-Month Contracts vs Requiring 12-month Commitments? | SaaStr
  • While at some point you probably will try to increase pricing, odds are that you’ll be waiting at least a year.
    Month-to-Month vs. Annual Contracts in B2B SaaS | by Danan Margason | Medium
  • In situations where the client is cost-sensitive and hesitant to commit before trying, here’s a #protip that will give you the best of all worlds: sign them up for a 14-month contract where they can terminate without penalty any time in the first 2 months. This effectively allows for an easy trial period without forcing you to renegotiate later, while at the same time demonstrating the confidence you have in your product and team.
    Month-to-Month vs. Annual Contracts in B2B SaaS | by Danan Margason | Medium
  • Remember the "doorknob phenomenon": people say the most interesting stuff when your hand is on the doorknob — so be ready to listen to (or receive) their “one more thing”
    Interviewing tips
  • The specific is easier to answer than the general and becomes a platform from which you can ask more questions.
    Interviewing tips
  • Always ask open-ended questions Ask the shortest question you can
    Interviewing tips
  • For most topics, you’ll need a series of questions to get to the information you want. After you’ve been given an answer, reflect whether it really gives you all you want to know; if it doesn’t, ask something further.
    Interviewing tips
  • Develop rapport with the person to whom you're speaking People like to talk if they know they are being listened to
    Interviewing tips
  • I won't email a list of questions beforehand, but will suggest two-three broad topics. Then they might think of some good stuff in the shower. I'll also say "hey if you think of anything else walking home tonight, let me know" Then they may walk home and think more :).
    Interviewing tips
  • Over email: “meet over coffee” instead of “interview over coffee” so they don’t stress about it. In person: “I’ve prepared a few questions to do this like a UX research interview. This is actually my first time! So it might be a little rigid, but I want to make sure I can report back on this to my teammates.”
    Interviewing tips
  • I’m working on a new startup. I’m here to learn more about how you communicate with other teams at Airbnb.”
    Interviewing tips