Making Something From Nothing: Shubhi Nigam Of Carta On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Sunk cost bias is real: No successful product came out of its original idea. While building our company, my co founders and I pivoted three times. And each time I felt like I’d failed. But I realized most good ideas evolve, and that great founders can do it fast.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shubhi Nigam.

Shubhi Nigam is a Senior Product Manager at Carta inc, where she builds products for early stage founders. Prior to her role at Carta, she was the co-founder of Insight Browser (YCW19) and a product lead at Newgen Software Inc. Shubhi is passionate about taking products from zero to one, early stage customer acquisition tactics and continuous user discovery.

Shubhi has been featured in Forbes, Tech Crunch, Mind the product & more, and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council. She currently mentors early stage founders through accelerators such as Techstars, Founders Institute and the AWS Impact accelerator.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

I grew up in India, among a family of entrepreneurs where making new things was always encouraged. I watched my dad build products out of what seemed like a few lines of code. And then those products would be used by thousands of people. It was a fun yet humbling environment to grow up in. I thought it was amazing, and if you asked me what I wanted to be when I was three years old, I would have said, “Computer Scientist!”

I took my first coding class at age ten so I could build stuff too. I don’t get to code anymore in my day job. But I still love building products for thousands of people to use.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” To me, the downside of not trying is worse than the downside of getting rejected.

Do you want to apply to that program you think you can’t get into? What’s the worst that could happen? Getting rejected. And I have been rejected so many times. But for every ten rejections, I’ve also gotten the thing I really wanted. So “Shoot your shot” is the life quote I live by.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

During the pandemic, my co founders and I were planning a challenging pivot to our company. To escape my tiny apartment, I started running every morning. I hadn’t tried running before, so a friend recommended I read Endure by Alex Hutchinson. Alex writes how recent scientific research suggests that the seemingly physical barriers of endurance are set as much by our brain as by our body.

In other words, your brain has the same, or maybe even more, say in what you can and cannot endure. And the thing is you can train your brain; you can push it a little further every time. It helped me reframe how I thought about not just running, but also stress.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

An idea by itself is meaningless. It is the execution that matters. In my experience, your best chance at success is to understand your space deeply or to have felt the problem yourself. So if you’re looking for problems to solve, find a problem that annoys YOU.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

Google it, or go talk to 10 people. If those people all consider it a pain, then it’s still worth building.

Figma is a great example; they didn’t invent the space of design tools. Sketch and Adobe were already successful tools. Figma differentiated themselves from desktop apps like Sketch and Photoshop by being an online collaborative design tool. And they put in the effort to build a superior web-based design experience that was on par with a desktop app.

Find your problem, and then find the angle you want to tackle it from.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

From idea to launch is a long process. But at a high level you need to:

1. Conduct user research to validate your idea. Also analyze the competition to see what’s in the market.
2. Prototype it and get feedback from users. You’re looking for that aha moment where users really, really care about what you’ve built.
3. Test and experiment with customer acquisition channels to get your first 100 customers.
4. Once you have some amount of product-market fit, scale.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

1. Send that cold email: While warm intros are helpful, our first ten users came from cold emails, and our advisers came from cold emails. Take the time to draft succinct, actionable and personalized emails. A lesson I learned is that if you make it easy for people to help you out, many will.
2. You want angry users: In the early stages, you want strong opinions from users. It’s nice to get good feedback, but you don’t want apathetic users. If your users don’t care about your product, it will die. Fun story, I once did a 60-minute user interview where our user couldn’t stop raving about the product. When we went and looked at the analytics, they had only used it once and never came back.
3. A perfect MVP is a late MVP: If your first product out the door is perfect, that means you’re late to the game. In the early days, it’s very important to get feedback from as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Focus on getting “something” out the door.
4. Sunk cost bias is real: No successful product came out of its original idea. While building our company, my co founders and I pivoted three times. And each time I felt like I’d failed. But I realized most good ideas evolve, and that great founders can do it fast.
5. A big fundraise doesn’t make a great company: Stop reading TechCrunch articles about massive fundraises. Capital is helpful, but it doesn’t predict success. Raise only as much as you need to, and then focus on building your business.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

1. Start by talking to 10 potential users before you commit to the idea. If the problem isn’t excruciatingly painful, stop right there — people will find workarounds.
2. Once you have some indication of the problem, run painted-door tests to test viable solutions. These can be things like a fake landing page or a Facebook ad. Anything to get a larger sample of users in that space to validate your solution.
3. Then start prototyping. Build mocks or low-fidelity prototypes that help demonstrate your solution or unique take on the product. Take them to potential users and get validation.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

To be candid, the only place you should spend money in the early days is building. I’m a big believer in coaches and having someone to help refine your pitch or keep you accountable. But only you can do the work of thinking about your problem deeply.

In the early days, you should be spending your time and money living the problem. Go into the weeds. Don’t get distracted by throwing money after other things.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

In some ways it’s a false choice because not everyone has access to venture capital, and not everyone can afford to bootstrap. But if you have the options, I would ask four questions:

1. Do you have a scalable business that could be worth a billion dollars? Venture-backed businesses work when they’re scalable and disrupt an industry in a meaningful way.
2. Can your business hit the gas pedal immediately? Venture-backed businesses need to operate at a high velocity. You don’t really have the luxury of slowly figuring the kinks out. If your business is a slow burn or if you need more time to get that hockey-stick growth, bootstrap.
3. Is it hard to copy your business? Venture-backed businesses need significant moats. All good ideas will be copied, but you need to have a significant advantage over competitors.
4. Are you willing to give up control? I work every day with founders who are shocked by how much their company has been diluted and how little is actually left for them to run. If you’re not okay with giving up that control, bootstrap.

If you said yes to all of the above, you can consider raising venture capital. But in most cases, I would still bootstrap until the extra capital could be significantly helpful to me or my company.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

The main reason I wasn’t scared to build a startup was because I’d seen people do it around me. Now, I make it a priority to talk to early founders and women in tech to show them they can do it as well. Especially if they didn’t grow up in Silicon Valley or don’t come from families where quitting their job is looked upon kindly.

Because of that, I spend a lot of my time working with founders, both at and outside of work. I do a lot of talks, mentor programs and accelerator app reviews.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Try to put your phone away for blocks of time. It’s so easy to live that ‘hustle’ lifestyle and forever be checking your email. But there are so many distractions in the world. If you’re doing something, give it 100% of your attention, whether it’s a meeting with your team or just dinner with friends. Put your phone away and be present.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Ben Thompson, who writes the Stratechery newsletter. His breakdowns of how tech works have been instrumental in helping me understand the industry. Silicon Valley has so many gatekeepers, and it’s been invaluable to have someone break down concepts. He also seems like an unpretentious and stand-up guy who would be fun to get coffee with.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.