YC’s Essential Startup Advice

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In this article, YC partners shared advices that they consider the most important and transformative for startups.

Key highlights from the article:

• Launch your product right away — the only way to fully understand customers’ problems and whether the product meets their needs
• Do things that don’t scale — building of technology and processes to support that scaling, if premature, will be a waste of time and effort
• Look for the “90/10 solution” — a way in to accomplish 90% of what you want with only 10% of the work/effort/time
• Stay away from potential distractions — the most important tasks for an early stage company are to write code and talk to users
• A small group of customers who love you is better than a large group who kind of like you
• Sometimes it’s critical to fire customers — some customers can cost way more than they provide in either revenue or learning
• The best strategy is almost always to do less, really well
• Startups always die of suicide not murder — spending any time worrying about your competitors is nearly always a very bad idea
• Stay sane during the inevitable craziness of startup life
• Maintain open, honest communications between founders

View full article with highlights