How to rapidly grow your startup, sell to Facebook and still love what you do
Sergey Gonchar (Founder & CTO of MSQRD) gave some advice to a lucky group of entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs in London this week.
I’d like to share with you the five main things I learnt from him.
1. You need to have a vision for how your company will become a $1b company from the very beginning.
To be worth $1 billion, you’ll need a lot of users. So make a strategy for how to acquire them and then execute it. That’s exactly what Sergey and his team did! Their main strategy was to make the app as fun and easy as possible to use — this is what helped them go viral.
2. Don’t motivate yourself with books.
Do your own experiments rather than wasting time reading about what other people have done.
Sergey and his team built the MSQRD app in a way they thought was easy to use. But when they launched it, many users still had questions about the most basic functionality. What this experience taught them was that they needed to make the app even easier to use than they had originally thought was necessary — no book would have taught them this.
3. When everything just flows, that’s a good sign. Don’t fight it.
The team was in a state of flow when they were building the original MSQRD prototype at a hackathon. So much so they worked for 48 hours straight on it, finished the prototype, presented it to the judges and then went on to win the competition.
4. When you get your chance, make sure you don’t lose it.
There’s a lot of luck involved in achieving startup success so if you get a big opportunity you have to work really hard to keep it. After selling MSQRD to Facebook, Sergey could have taken a back seat. But he didn’t, he invested a lot of time and effort into making the integration between the two companies a success.
5. Do what you're passionate about.
Sergey has always loved making things and then watching people use them. That’s what still motivates him today. Find what makes you passionate and keep doing it.
If you like this post, please follow me for more.
