YC’s Essential Startup Advice
That seems like a lot of excellent advice
except in cases where &quot;it depends&quot; and the
advice is not good or some other advice
would be better.<p>&gt; If we invest in you, your group is
expected to move to the Bay Area for
January--March 2018. You can of course
leave afterward if you want, but it&#x27;s a
good place for a startup to be.<p>IMHO it&#x27;s a horrible place to be, way too
expensive, and anyone not really wealthy
should get the heck out ASAP.<p>It&#x27;s the state of Governor Moonbeam and
the district of Nasty Nancy, &quot;The San
Francisco Treat&quot;.<p>&gt; we expect you to work out of wherever
you find to live.<p>I agree with that.<p>IIRC, some places there can be zoning and
insurance issues operating a business out
of residential housing.<p>&gt; At each dinner we&#x27;ll invite an expert in
some aspect of startups to speak.<p>Biggie problem:  For the startups that are
really wanted, eventually worth $10+
billion, there are not many experts from
the past and many fewer for the next dozen
such in the future.<p>Indeed, for the next $10+ billion
startups, a guess is that they will be
different from last $10+ billion startups,
mostly need to be something quite new in
some of problems solved, technology used,
market, and customers served.  Then the
new stuff might be from <i>field crossing</i>
and not from what is in Silicon Valley or
computer science now.<p>&gt; Most successful startups change their
idea substantially.<p>Not very good news.<p>&gt; The ideal company would have two or
three founders. We&#x27;ll consider those with
four or five. We&#x27;re reluctant to accept
one-person companies, though we have
funded many of them now.<p>But notice the advice<p>&gt; It turns out most companies fail fast
because founders fall out.<p>Right.  And the obvious solution is to be
a sole, solo founder where<p>&gt; We&#x27;re reluctant to accept one-person
companies,<p>For<p>&gt; Make something people want.<p>Yes, but at first, nearly no one knew they
wanted a telephone, a Ford Model-T, a PC,
Google, or Facebook.<p>&gt; the guidance below will help most
startups find their path to success<p>But &quot;most startups&quot; will be at most a
minor success.  So far we get another
Google only about once each ten years.
So, the advice that works for &quot;most
startups&quot; doesn&#x27;t have to work for the
next Google or even the next 10 startups
worth $10+ billion.<p>&gt; The first thing we always tell founders
is to launch their product right away;<p>That is good advice for some startups, but
for other startups there is the issue of
&quot;You only get one chance to make a good
first impression.&quot;<p>&gt; ... for the simple reason that this is
the only way to fully understand
customers’ problems and whether the
product meets their needs.<p>Again, that&#x27;s good advice for some
startups, but we would hope that the
situation was:<p>(A) The startup has picked a problem
currently solved at best poorly where it
is totally, 100%, completely utterly clear
that the first good, a much better, or an
excellent solution will just thrill enough
users&#x2F;customers with enough revenue per
each to make a really successful business.
The great example would be a cheap, safe,
effective one pill taken once to cure any
cancer.<p>Believe me, once someone has such a cancer
pill, no way will they then be out talking
to customers for feedback about, say, the
color (white or yellow) or shape (round,
oval) of the pill.  Instead, as soon as
that pill is known to exist, desperate
customers will literally be banging on the
doors to get one.<p>(B) The challenge is not at all having the
first good solution thrill the
users&#x2F;customers but just being able
actually to construct that solution.  That
is, as for that cancer pill, the reason
there is no solution now is that so far no
one has been able to find one.  So, the
solution will need something new, some
<i>secret sauce</i> in some important respects
too difficult for others to discover.
Then hide the secret sauce, say, in a
server farm, with good security.<p>&gt; Surprisingly, launching a mediocre
product as soon as possible, and then
talking to customers and iterating, is
much better than waiting to build the
“perfect” product.<p>Sure.  And &quot;The perfect can be the enemy
of the very good.&quot;<p>But the<p>&gt; talking to customers and iterating<p>is not very good for all startups.<p>&gt; Once launched, we suggest founders do
things that don’t scale (Do Things That
Don’t Scale by Paul Graham1).<p>Okay, but how did that little photography
experiment lead to &quot;a vibrant
marketplace&quot;?<p>Maybe you are saying that the photography
experiment said that pictures are
important.  Then the scalable, production
version was to tell the AirBnB associates
that they needed to hire an okay or better
photographer to take pictures, e.g., much
as in the experiment.<p>&gt; Talking to users usually yields a long,
complicated list of features to build.<p>Maybe.  But Google has hardly changed
their home page in years.<p>&gt; a 100% solution that takes ages to
build.<p>Creating unique, powerful, valuable,
crucial core &quot;secret sauce&quot; is, say, some
applied math research, and that by the
right person commonly can be done in
hours, days, or weeks.  Then write the
darned code, dirt simple code, and go for
it.<p>E.g., I worked out the main parts of my
Ph.D. dissertation research in my head in
an airplane ride.  The resulting
dissertation had some nice improvements
but was always well within what I first
worked out.<p>This &quot;ages to build&quot; stuff suggests
finding another problem to solve.<p>&gt; As companies begin to grow there are often
tons of potential distractions.<p>By far the worst I found was contacting
VCs.  I&#x27;ll never do that again.  It&#x27;d be
better to start a grass mowing service
than trying to get equity funding.<p>Besides, now, for an information
technology startup based on software, the
computing hardware, software
infrastructure, and Internet data rates
are so cheap that a solo founder, with a
good startup selection, can bring his work
to the <i>traction</i> equity funders want that
will put him into nice profitability and
ability to grow just from retained
earnings.  The equity funders are asking
for too much:  By the time a solo founder
has what the equity funders want, that
founder will no longer need, want, or
accept an equity check.<p>&gt; chasing after press coverage<p>That can be one of the most important
sources of publicity and users&#x2F;customers.
Remember:  You want your story told, and
the press desperately wants a story to
tell.<p>&gt; the most important tasks for an early
stage company are to write code and talk
to users.<p>That&#x27;s true for some startups, but such a
startup is usually going to be in a sad
situation.<p>Instead, the founders should already have
a good problem to solve.  By the time the
customers see the good alpha test, the
company should be in quite good shape with
very little more code to write until, say,
much bigger scale is needed.<p>&gt; For any company, software or otherwise,
this means that in order to make something
people want:  You must launch something,
talk to your users to see if it serves
their needs, and then take their feedback
and iterate.<p>This advice can hold for some companies,
but not all.  Instead, some startups have
already selected a good problem and found
a good solution.<p>&gt; These tasks should occupy almost all of
your time&#x2F;focus.  For great companies this
cycle never ends.<p>Again, Google has hardly changed their
home page in years.<p>&gt; Similarly, as your company evolves there
will be many times where founders are
forced to choose between multiple
directions for their company.<p>Again, Google has hardly changed their
home page in years.<p>&gt; When it comes to customers most founders
don’t realize that they get to choose
customers as much as customers get to
choose them.  We often say that a small
group of customers who love you is better
than a large group who kind of like you.<p>Sometimes, yes.  E.g., does an auto
company go for the Rolls Royce, Mercedes,
BMW, Chevy SUV, Ford F-150, etc. market?<p>&gt; YC is sometimes criticized for pushing
companies to grow at all costs, but in
fact we push companies to talk to their
users, build what they want, and iterate
quickly.<p>That talking and iterating stuff only
works for some startups.<p>&gt; It is very difficult as a new startup
founder not to obsess about competition,
actual and potential.  It turns out that
spending any time worrying about your
competitors is nearly always a very bad
idea.  We like to say that startup
companies always die of suicide not
murder.  There will come a time when
competitive dynamics are intensely
important to the success or failure of
your company, but it is highly unlikely to
be true in the first year or two.<p>Again, that doesn&#x27;t apply to all startups,
but it&#x27;s good news, and I can believe it
often applies.<p>&gt; A few words on fund raising (A Guide to
Seed Fund raising by Geoff Ralston9). The
first, best bit of advice is to raise
money as quickly as possible and then get
back to work.<p>Better advice:  (A) Pick a problem and
solution so that you, as a solo founder,
won&#x27;t need equity funding.  (B) If you
contact 20 VC firms and don&#x27;t get a check,
then give up on VC at least for a while.
(C) Do &quot;get back to work&quot;.<p>&gt; It turns out most companies fail fast
because founders fall out.<p>So, as above, be a solo founder.  So, pick
a pair of a problem and good solution that
you as a solo founder can bring to nice
profitability alone without equity
funding.