Startup Snippets - By Socionity: Recent Episodes
Madhavan Malolan
We record our board meetings, standups, strategy calls and casual founder conversations.
We record them. We make them available to you. You can learn how we think of startups, and maybe that helps you too. These will always be small snippets of about a minute or less.
Making sure I run fast experiments on the product. We've got to let a few things continue to break.
I need to work with people who are potential CEOs themselves.
If I hire somebody I need to make sure I give them the best exposure to become entrepreneurs themselves and go start a company.
Once I've done that, I need to figure out how to keep them excited enough to continue working with us.
Founders might want to hire to delegate the "dirty work". More often than not, that is counter productive. If the founder doesn't know what needs to be done - for example, how to do sales, they cannot hire a sales person and expect them to come and figure out what needs to be done. The founders have most context - they need to do it themselves repeatedly first.
Make sure it works. Make sure you use good variable names. Everything else is fluff in the interest of speed.
It's not an Idea if you've not spoken to a customer - it's a wish.
You must prove or disprove your idea quickly. Talk to a customer.
What should you track for growth of the startup?
Pick any metric and relentlessly execute. Pick one where you can grow for the next 10 years.
When you apply that filter, you usually boil down to revenue and/or number of users.
Why a lean team?
A lean team that is able to execute implies the team is smart. You need a smart team to capture a market.