Growing Startups When the Product Sucks

We have exactly $325,710 left in our bank account.

The cash is burning fast, and we’ve already wasted a big portion of our seed investment trying to market a product for which we thought we had already found a product/market fit.

“Four out of ten,” shouts Lauren, breaking the silence we’ve had for almost twenty minutes in our meeting room.

Things were finally looking promising, with the new version of our product we’ve been testing over the last weeks.

“Four out of ten people repurchased our new product! And some even brought their friends. Now, imagine we achieved such a high repeat rate and word of mouth in all the locations where we’ll be launching.”

Sitting today in this meeting room in Singapore and seeing Lauren’s excitement over those four out of ten people, I remember, once again, how reading those powerful lines from Sam Altman had hit me back in 2013:

“… if you want to be a great company someday, you have to eventually build something so good that people will recommend it to their friends-in fact, so good that they want to be the first one to recommend it to their friends for the implied good…