YC Partner Dalton Caldwell: “Growth hacking is a total waste of time for very early startups”

I think growth and growth hacking and doing all this analytics, a B testing stuff is a total waste of time for very early startups. One of the weird things about having lots of startup advice on the Internet is a lot of the advice was catered towards later stage companies like oh, here's how you set up your board and here's how you motivate your sales team. It was all aimed at series A series B founders and not for seed stage founders. And so you see this inclination away from getting a first customer, getting one customer and talking to that person and instead they have like all this really complex growth hacking theory. I think this also happens if you worked in big tech where there are your product already has scale and so you know if you work at Facebook and your job is to launch new little features. Yeah of course you should make heavy use of analytics and a B testing and split testing and feature flags like yeah, yeah, yeah, it makes sense. But when you have no users, what are you doing? I think if you look at the Facebook story but them getting a hundred percent penetration on the Harvard campus first instead of launching overall, again good strategy would recommend that strategy. So again the way to extrapolate that is know what your comps are of what companies you your archetype is and then look at what they did on the 0 to 1 and ignore what they do today. Right. Don't pay attention to what Facebook does today. If you're a brand new startup founder, pay attention to Facebook. When they were getting their first thousand users, what were those tactics?