Tips For Early Stage Marketplace Founders

So do you have any tips for maybe for earlier stage marketplace founders? Yeah, so I mean, I touched on a few of them. I think, like, I think, you know, a lot of, I think, what YC kind of, I think, trains you for is just like really focus on just like delivering a great user experience. And I think there's, when you're getting started, when you're very early getting started, I think there's lots of distractions of things you like, quote unquote, should be doing as an entrepreneur and as a founder. And I think the more you can kind of like let a lot of that noise fade away and just like, how do I deliver? Like, how do I really focus on just like delivering a great experience for, you know, as YC says, like, make something people want. I think that's really, really helpful in the early stages. You know, I think you can get, you can have a lot of your time sucked up with like administrative type stuff and whatnot. Or, and I think like, just like you get that like core thing of like, this product is something really people really, really want. I think that's incredibly valuable. And then I think, you know, in the category of distractions, you know, I've talked a little bit of fundraising. I think fundraising could be a pretty big distraction. So I tend to follow also YC's advice of like, don't really engage too much with investors unless you're actually fundraising. And so just like, again, that focus, like, the, you know, if you want to have a successful fundraise, the best thing you can do is make your business way better. Like, it's way better than anything else. And that takes a lot of focus and it's a hard thing. And it's sort of like, if you let a lot of the other things disappear and you're like, I just want to do this, like, I want to focus on this one thing and I'm going to make my business really good. I think it can be super powerful. You know, we touched a little bit on the chicken-egg problem. I think, like, I'm a big fan of just like, you know, I think especially in those early stages, like you don't really know necessarily where you're going. You're kind of wandering about trying to find product market fit, trying to find something that resonates. I like to be like super scrappy at that stage. And so if, you know, if you're engineers like me and my co-founder were, then you build product, but you build it in a pretty different way than you build if you knew that product's going to exist forever. Like, You're just like trying to move really fast. You're trying to put stuff out there so you can learn from it quickly. You're comfortable with the idea that you're going to throw away all of that code over time if you're successful at all. That's actually like kind of the point. But you don't want to like spend a ton of time like architecting everything perfectly because like then it's going to take you a lot longer and it's going to like— if you're going to throw it away anyway, then who cares, right? Like the most important thing is that you figure out these these fundamental questions around, like, is the space I'm exploring, like, is there value there? If you're not an engineer, I actually often encourage people to, like, find hacky ways to, like, validate what you're doing. And so, like, you know, you could have imagined us, like, stringing something together with a spreadsheet and Skype and, you know, whatever else, whatever else was out there. Maybe not Skype, maybe Google Meet or whatever we'd use today. But I think I like just like trying to get like, what are your hypotheses about whether the thing is gonna, you know, the thing you're building is actually valuable? Like, is it valuable enough for someone to use it? Is it valuable enough for someone to pay for it? Like, kind of think really carefully through like, what are the, what are the open questions and what are the hypotheses you have? And then how do you go out and test them as fast as possible? And yeah, cadence makes a huge difference, because the faster you can put stuff out there and observe and learn, the faster you're gonna get to something that's actually working. And, you know, we're pretty far along compared to those early days, but I think we're still in the early days of our company. And so actually, this is a thing that we're still trying to hang on to. Like, how do we get stuff out there quickly, test hypotheses, and kind of— now we're building an organization, we're getting an organization to behave that way. But in the earliest days, it was just kind of the two of us, I think, operating that way. And in some ways it's easier because if you and your co-founders agree, You can kind of just act that way versus when you have a big org, you need to kind of figure out how to get, get an organization to behave that way.