Startup advice

Some lessons I learned while building General Folders

12 Aug 2024

From my time at Techstars SDSU.

It’s been quite the journey building General Folders so far. I learned things I wish I had known before starting the company. I also learned valuable lessons from past jobs that proved helpful in company building. Below is a list of these lessons. I hope that you find them useful on your journey!

Build a team. Bring along co-founders, but for the right reasons. Two can outperform one. Building the first team is your most important task.

Be genuinely passionate. The secret to hiring great people is to be knowledgeable and passionate about the product and business. Passion is contagious, and expertise is hard to fake. The same holds for sales: don’t underestimate the impact of stoke on selling a product.

Define the MVP. Determine the minimum amount of product or visuals required to get 1) customer buy-in and 2) relevant feedback.

Your ability to come up with a successful MVP is tied to being able to describe a very particular use case with a well-defined customer profile. Having a well-defined use case, more than anything, paves the way for successful distribution.

As it turns out, this is an exercise that a company inevitably repeats again and again. You can easily bankrupt a company as you spend to develop an upcoming version.

Sell early and often. A startup’s success hinges on its sales and the trajectory of those sales. Life is easier if the product can be sold early and often. A startup will struggle to survive with grand plans and lengthy sales cycles unless it secures substantial external funding.

Talk to customers. Nothing benefits a company more than customer feedback. Never lose sight of it. Feedback saves products and companies from veering off the tracks into irrelevance.

Embrace change. Don’t obsess over a particular decision or plan. If product reception is anything but stellar, update your strategy.

Follow the crowd. Tried-and-true practices are popular for a reason. It pays to follow the crowd if you know when and where to apply a technique.

Follow trends. Don’t ignore market trends. Following trends makes you more likely to get noticed, talked about, and funded. It’s an easier ride if you want to take it.

Hire an accountant. While it pays to follow trends, plan for the dry season. New trends always give way to newer trends — it’s funny how that works.

Stand out. Likewise, while following trends can be rewarding, sometimes it pays to focus on what you uniquely believe to be true. You can’t expect a significant return without taking on a risk nobody else wants to take.

Hustle. Aside from being a function of big risk, a big return is also an outcome of hard work. There are no shortcuts. Pick up the phone. Knock on doors. Get the product in front of customers. Put in the work.

Make the call. Running a business involves endless decisions with incomplete information. Indecision is a decision. Make the call. Use every decision as an opportunity to learn more about your business.

Move fast. Faster is better, but only when the goal is to serve customers and tend to their needs. Rushing for PR reasons comes at the expense of quality, ultimately tarnishing the brand.

Moving fast is not just about writing more code, sending more emails, and doing more busy work. Building requires clear thinking and planning. It requires coordinating with customers at every step. Skipping steps creates tech debt, ineffective plans, and underwhelmed customers. Rarely do products fail because there isn’t enough code and artifacts; rather, it is often due to inadequate thought. Don’t skip steps. And don’t settle for busy work.

Keep learning. In every scenario, assume you don’t have all the answers. Learn and evolve to become the leader the company needs at each stage. Can you hire yourself every day?

Ask for help. Ask for things and get help. The startup community is more generous, welcoming, and helpful than expected. Knowing when to ask, who to ask, and for what is a skill worth perfecting.

Go after capital. Raise capital to accelerate growth. Attract investors who are already sold on the vision and are ready to champion the company. If it’s a hard sell, it’s not a good fit.

Believe in yourself. Be kind, especially to yourself. Self-confidence is the only thing you have going for you for a long time. Things won’t ever be perfect, and that’s okay.

Keep going. People (mainly yourself) will tell you that what you’re doing is not enough and that if it were to work, it would have worked by now. They will tell you to give up. Don’t. Opportunities will come around.

Keep focused. Don’t compare your startup to other startups. Don’t read into startup news. Startup news doesn’t talk about the deal details. Focus on your early customers. Focus on your collaborators. Focus on well-defined local problems for your first few customers. Don’t attempt to solve global problems for imaginary customers.

Seize the day. You might not have achieved all the milestones, but you’ll never be this young ever again. 💁🏻‍♀️

What are some of your experiences from working at startups? I’d love to hear from you!