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We tell startups all the time that they have to grow quickly. That's true, and very good advice, but I think the current fashion of Silicon Valley startups has taken this to an unhealthy extreme. Startups have a weekly growth goal before they really have any strong idea about what they want to build.

In the first few weeks of a startup's life, the founders really need to figure out what they're doing and why. Then they need to build a product some users really love. Only after that they should focus on growth above all else.

A startup that prematurely targets a growth goal often ends up making a nebulous product that some users sort of like and papering over this with 'growth hacking'. That sort of works-at least, it will fool investors for a while until they start digging into retention numbers-but eventually the music stops.

I think the right initial metric is "do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?" Until that's a "yes", founders are generally better off focusing on this instead of a growth target.

The very best technology companies sometimes take awhile to figure out exactly what they're doing, but when they do, they usually pass that binary test before turning all their energy to growth. It's the critical ingredient for companies that do really well, and if you don't figure it out, no amount of growth hacking will make you into a great company.

As a side note, startups that don't first figure out a product some users love also seem to rarely develop the sense of mission that the best companies have.

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22 d ago

Free and open-source software (FOSS) projects built by Zerodha Tech

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25 d ago

OpenAI opens application for Grove, a program for individuals early in their company building journey

openai.com

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28 d ago

Google launches Gemini for Education, built with Gemini 2.5 Pro, and is included free of charge in your Workspace for Education plan.

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1 mo ago

Chamath Palihapitiya on the growth principles that got Facebook to billions of users

“The most important thing we did was I teased out virality, and said, ‘You cannot do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t touch it. I don’t want you to give me any product plans that revolve around this idea of virality. I don’t want to hear it.”

Instead, Chamath urged the growth team at Facebook to focus on “the three most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with”:

How do you get people in the front door?
How do you get them to an aha moment as quickly as possible?
How do you deliver core product value as often as possible?

Chamath warns that focusing on virality is why you see so many startups experience this amazingly steep rise and then fall off a cliff.

The second thing he set out to do at Facebook was invalidate all of the lore:

“In any given product, there’s always people who strut out around the office like, ‘I have this gut feeling.’ It’s all about gut feeling. And most people’s gut feelings are morons. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Gut feel is not useful because most people can’t predict correctly. We know this. So one of the most important things that we did was just invalidate all of the lore… You can’t believe your own BS. Because when you do, you start to compound these massively structural mistakes that don’t expose core product value… You don’t listen to customers because you think it’s all about your gut. You don’t bother doing any of the traditional, straightforward, obvious things, and you lose yourself.”

As Chamath explains, a maniacal focus on delivering core product value as frequently and fast as possible is what led Facebook to its most important realization:

“The single biggest thing we realized was to get any individual to 7 friends in 10 days. That was it… There was not much more complexity than that. There’s an entire team now of hundreds of people that have helped ramp this product to a billion users, based on that one simple rule — a very elegant statement of what it was to capture core product value… And then what we did at the company was talk about nothing else. Every Q&A. Every all-hands… It was the single, sole focus.”

He continues:

“You have to work backwards from: What is the thing that people are here to do? What is the ‘aha moment’ that they want? Why can I not give that to them as fast as possible? That’s how you win.”

Chamath recommends starting with a cohort of your most engaged users — What features are they using? What pathways in your product did they take? Then work backwards and try to get all of your other users to that same state.

Source

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1 mo ago

Naval Ravikant talks about how to build a team that ships

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1 mo ago

Free AI Premium plans available for India

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1 mo ago

Podcast with Ritesh Agarwal

Hey guys! I'm a fellow startup founder and an aspiring podcaster. I'm no Nikhil Kamath or Raj Shamani but talking to people is my passion and I decided to cultivate my love for this and start my own show called 'Conversations Amplified'. I really want to make an impact with my podcast and help twenty something year olds like myself with words of wisdom and impactful conversations with industry leaders. Couldn't think of a better community to ask for some feedback.

Anyways, I cold emailed Ritesh Agarwal last month and his team invited me over to Gurgaon to record a quick podcast with him. We spoke about the rebranding from Oravel to Prism, where Ritesh sees Prism heading and the Indian startup environment

I'd love to hear some feedback on this and how I can improve the next time. I hope you enjoy it and take away some valuable insights as much as I enjoyed talking to him.

https://youtu.be/tB06TKV1Rlo?si=IUV8FTBWT_T-G46E

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2 mo ago

19 Important Marketing Channels from the book Traction: How Startups Achieve Explosive Growth

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2 mo ago

What CEO, CFO and COO's actual roles are

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2 mo ago

5 Ways to Turn Anger Into Fuel for Your Startup

inc.com

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2 mo ago

Questions you need to ask yourself before building an MVP

Ask these below questions before you build your MVP:

What problems are you exactly trying to solve? (identify your value proposition)
Who are you building this solution for? (your target market)
How big is the opportunity? (Potential market size)
How are you going to measure your growth? (revenue strategy and metrics)
What are the alternatives out there? (your competition in market)
Why are you the best startup to pursue this? (your differentiator)
Why is now the best time to introduce this product? (market window)
How will you deliver this product to the market? (your got-to market strategy)
What are the factors which are critical to success? (solution requirement)

Once you can answer all the above questions logically, you will get a clear idea and a conclusion about the need to even build the MVP or if this idea needs to be scrapped and move on to the next potential problem.

Read more about how to build an MVP here.

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3 mo ago

"Do things that don't scale" - Paul Graham

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3 mo ago

Paul Graham’s 6 principles for making new things

You need to find: (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

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