21 More Things I Learned as a Startup CEO on Way to Product-Market Fit
Aug 26, 2017 · 4 min read

- Identify your market. And then don’t waste time away from that. Just crack it as early as you can with absolute focus. Your time is limited.
- Revenue is good. It completely changes the morale of the team. Bring it early on.
- Growth is even better. It’s why the best people would want to work with you and be part of a potentially great story in the making.
- Document everything. Build proper systems across engineering, product, sales and marketing. People come and go. Systems remain.
- Automate as much as you can at your startup except what really needs human touch. Your people doing repetitive stuff is opportunity lost for you.
- Continuously inspire your engineering team to have more empathy for your sales and marketing folks. That way they will probably help with automation even more.
- Be a good listener. Being a good speaker is much easier and feeds your ego but doesn’t help the company much in most cases.
- Bringing talented folks from corporates could have downsides too. They have a hard time adapting to early stage startups. Have a framework to absorb them into your team without much disruption.
- Don’t underestimate the value of outside capital. Not every company should bootstrap at the risk of losing a potential market leadership opportunity in a competitive market. Capital can help you hire great people and invest in areas that can help you grow well.
- When you are in early stages of your business, have a preference for hiring only experienced folks for non-tech functions like sales and marketing. The same doesn’t always hold true for tech functions.
- Initial team is of generalists. Then you need specialists. Else you hamper your growth without even realizing it.
- Avoid having just one person for a critical function in the company. World is unpredictable. It’s much better to have at least two people for every major role even in early days of your product and business.
- Always hire good people and not just good talent. But you got to let even good people go if they aren’t able to adapt to the new reality of your startup as you grow. This is extremely hard but you have no choice.
- If you don’t want to stress your team, fine. Don’t advertise work-life balance to the extent that you lose a startup’s spirit. That spirit is what usually drives passionate people to have a sense of urgency and willingness to over-deliver. Remember, it’s a race against time for you before your business becomes stable.
- Get all team members, irrespective of their role, on customer support calls. Your engineers and designers who continue to hate it despite your advice, should be fired immediately.
- Founders should do sales, product, tech , recruitment and fundraising themselves. It’s probably a myth. Considering many tech startups start with just two tech founders splitting responsibilities across tech, product, sales etc, they should learn everything to some extent, do it early on and then bring great people who are better than them. In every single function.
- They should instead focus on setting up right systems and frameworks for efficient execution across functions.
- If you don’t have predictable revenue, your business is in terrible shape.
- Internal tools add a lot of value. Encourage your team to allocate time and resources to develop them.
- You can’t force diversity into your startup. Having the right intent and avoiding being biased in recruitment will do the trick without you compromising on your first 20 people. These are the folks who will be critical to setting the tone of the company as you grow in size.
- Resist the temptation of going overboard with the idea of giving back to the community by giving too many talks or organising too many workshops much before your business has truly taken off. Again, your time is limited and you better spend more of it with your team and customers for now.
Note : I wrote the first part of this series back in April. If you liked this post, I’m sure you would want to read that one too. Here is the link for 21 Things I Learned as a Startup CEO on Way to Product-Market Fit.
PS: I’m aware that this advice is not completely valid for all the startups out there. I’m talking from the vantage point of a SaaS/B2B tech startup. Still, I’m sure that some of this can be adapted to other forms of businesses too.
If you enjoyed this article, go ahead and hit that 👏 button below to give a few claps to my article and help others find it easily. Also share your feedback with me in the comments. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and Instagram @NavSha.
