17 startup lessons from 2017

This year was full of startup lessons for me at Lattice. Over the course of 2017 we grew our customer base by 10x and our team from 7 to 30 people. We went from what felt like a big project to what now feels like a small company.

As the year comes to an end, I thought it would be useful to write down some of my major learnings, both to crystallize them for myself and to share them with others who might benefit.

1. Spend more time with your customers, not less. It’s easy to spend time with your customers in the very early days. But as you grow you have more sales people, more account managers, and a product that people seem to want to buy and use whether you talk to them or not. Fight the urge to hide behind your computer and talk to your customers as much as you can.
2. Listen to customers’ problems, not their solutions. Product development is not an exercise in polling a bunch of customers and building the most requested spec. It’s a process of understanding customer problems and coming up with solutions yourself. Because most customers will tell you proposed solutions, it’s your job to peel those back to their problems.
3. If things are basically working, stay focused. As you grow its gets tempting to spread your company thin because you have more resources, more understanding and, frankly, because novelty is fun. Try to find your zen in doing the same thing over and over. There will be enough change without you having to try to create it.
4. Just keep going. Some days it will feel never ending. One more feature, one more customer conversation, one more interview, one more bug squash, one more whatever. Remember that success doesn’t happen overnight, and doing things one more time adds up and compounds.
5. Give great people lots of responsibility and then get out of their way. Truly great employees are rare. When you have them, give them as much responsibility as they want and can handle, and then just let them do their thing.
6. Ability and passion win out over experience. While experience helps, and there are undoubtedly roles where it’s required, you will be shocked at how successful a capable person who wants to succeed can be. Hire and promote these people as much as you can.
7. Be generous with employees who are generous with you. You’ll have some employees who give your company an incredible amount of their time, energy, and mindshare. You owe it to them to give them growth opportunities, increased compensation, flexible work policies, whatever you can. They are the people who drive your company forward, so you owe it to the company too.
8. Work with the team you have. Obviously, you’re always trying to improve your team. But in the meantime, work with what you’ve got. Maybe you have a particularly product-minded designer, a CTO who is great at customer support, or an account manager who is great at product. Don’t be too quick to pigeonhole people into the roles and responsibilities you think an ideal organization should have.
9. It’s okay to go to sleep with things still broken. It’s a marathon not a sprint, and you can wake up tomorrow and keep plugging away. Doing a startup isn’t always fun, but it shouldn’t be miserable. Remember that substantial companies are built in 10 years not in 2, so you need to make sure you can stay in the game that long.
10. It’s also okay to let some fires burn for a long time. You have to fight your instincts to prioritize what’s important over what’s urgent. Figure out what matters most and learn to be okay with letting some problems burn.
11. The company comes first. You’ll constantly have to make trade offs and sometimes that means making decisions that go against an individual’s interests. That’s just part of the job and it sucks. But a rising tide lifts all boats, and your first responsibility is to the company, even and perhaps especially when that comes ahead of individuals’ interests.
12. There’s no such thing as being too aligned. Whatever amount of time you think you should spend making sure your team is on the same page, you can probably triple it. You should over-communicate until it feels awkward and repetitive.
13. Embrace critical feedback. Actually though. Too many people say they want critical feedback but then react defensively when they hear it. You are not perfect, and no one is better suited to point out where you can improve than the people you work with every day. Help them help you.
14. Don’t spend time trying to be tapped into the startup scene. There are of course advantages to it, and a certain amount of connectedness helps. But is that party or event really a better use of time than talking to customers, working on your product, or working with your team? Unlikely.
15. Give your professional relationships the work they deserves. All relationship takes ongoing work. If you’re lucky enough to have a strong partnership with your cofounder, your teammate, or your manager, don’t take it for granted. These relationship make work more productive and more meaningful and deserve to be constantly nurtured.
16. Collect advice from lots of people, then decide for yourself. On any given question, if you ask for five people’s opinions you might get five different answers. Your job is to collect input, think about how those people’s backgrounds and interests affect their answers, and then decided what to do for yourself. You own the result, so you own the choice.
17. Thank your partner. If you have a significant other, thank them profusely for putting up with your singular focus, which is almost certainly more fun for you than it is for them.

Those are some of the things I learned this year. I’m looking forward to learning more in 2018.