Starting a Startup

In this post, I will (hopefully) regularly update my thoughts and confusions on starting a startup. After about 4 weeks working full time with my co-founder Manojj, I learned a lot, in a fairly linear fashion. Everything was going good, I was watching YC startup school, Manojj was teaching me loads, but now that I’ve reached a sufficient level of deepness within this world, I have finally hit the inevitable stage of complete confusion and the point where you question yourself daily. Our minds are changing every few days, we are moving quickly, but we wonder - are we moving forward, or in circles? Speed means nothing without direction, right? Anyway, here I will post whenever we get to a new idea state, and I will write my thoughts.

I predict that in a few months, maybe years, and possibly decades, I will come back and think “what on earth was he thinking”, but I find that kinda fun and I look forward to it!

I spent my morning consuming Paul Graham - reading “Why smart people have bad ideas” & watching “Before the Startup”. I found them extremely interesting, and I was like damn, this guy is smart and I should definitely listen to him. He spoke & wrote about his experiences as an early founder with Viaweb and gave 6 points on why startups are counterintuitive. Early founders tend not to listen to YC partners, you need to be an expert in your users, not in startups, you cant game the system, startups are all consuming, they will change you a lot, and the way to get startup ideas is trying not to think of startup ideas. He also mentions the best startup ideas come from side-projects. Anyway, my thoughts:

It's interesting, you almost have to figure out your customer first, so that you know who you can deeply understand and learn about. But then, they say the best startups are side projects - now I wonder, how do we define a side projects For me, a side project is something that I work on to improve my life, or for those closely to me. Now, does that mean you should start looking at the world’s pain points and then treat them as side projects? Wait, but surely this line of thought is completely debunked with the fact that side projects should NOT be treated as startups in itself, so you should only develop it as if you are trying to make it for yourself, or a select few people close to you - right? If I took this advice I could start a 'side project' with the subconscious expectation that this would and could turn into a startup - but if i even have a trace of this thought, then doesn't it render itself as a 'startup idea', and no longer count as a side project? This must therefore mean that a side project, is one where you have some deep desire within yourself to solve this problem, no matter how niche, or useless it is to every other human on the earth. If it solves your problem, that's all you care about and you have the passion that pursue it with no expectation.

So let's say that you then have this side project, where you are truly, only focused on getting the solution working for yourself. How do you make that transition from a side project, to a startup?

• Well, it makes sense that if your product directly solves your problem perfectly, that it must also solve at least one other persons problem perfectly too? If so, this is the point where you begin to customer discovery - do people have the same point as you, and if so, do they feel as strongly as you?
• In this stage, you may be able to understand that actually, most of the market do understand and like your value proposition, but they may or may not agree with the implementation. This is where you begin to expand your product to fit more and more users, and deeply dive into their problem and suit their wishes.
• But what if they do not feel as strongly as you? What if the solution you made, only works for you?
  • Nothing? It's a successful side project, you learned about it, write a blog about it, and move on?
  • Continue using the product, and if you keep using for a long time, it must be really good at providing value, so maybe you can reconsider if this can be applied to an industry? I’m not sure

I think the reason this ‘side-project’ advice is kicking up such a fuss, is because we are working full time on finding a startup idea. So the fact that, on the side of this, we should be working on projects that we shouldn’t treat like a startup, sounds quite counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t we be better off spending all of our time talking to potential customers, like the founders of Brex did? Who knows.

This is what I’ve decided: We aren’t going to know what advice is worth listening to until we try ourselves. Let me try doing a few stress-free side projects during the week, alongside actively looking for ideas (even if Paul says “if you make a conscious effort to try to think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible sounding. Meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them. You'll waste a lot of time before realising they're no good.”)

Next topic: The whole thing about travelling to Thailand and going backpacking - this is something I absolutely must do, and I am not sure if I can NOT do it in my twenties, so it seems here that I have conflicting goals - seeing the world, and making my mark on it. We can all agree that if I spent 6 months of a year travelling, and the other half grinding, I would more likely to be successful if I was grinding the full 12 months. But, what is missing from this, is the quality of life between those two years - which one will I be a happier human for, and which one, in 10 years time will I be more grateful of? If I grind for a year, I am setting up (in theory) a great future for myself in terms of career and financial stability, but am I setting up deep, fulfilling happiness for my future self? Conversely, if all I did was travel, and have fun, I am sure I will learn a lot about myself, but will my future self be happy that I spent all of our money on experiences, so that in the future my family, wife, and kids suffer? There has to be a middle ground.

Also, I want to be the guy that can still travel a lot during the year, but grind hard on a startup, but I imagine that if we were to blow up like Cursor, I don't think I'd be willing to just stop for 3 months to go travel - right? They say a startup is like your child - would you leave your child for a 3 month break, and let it die? That's why it's hard to do this kind of thing whilst you are creating a successful startup. I guess, I am grateful I am aware of this as I write my thoughts out, because nothings done yet - I don't have a successful startup, so maybe I should go out and travel again? But times running out - don't I need to start my startup now - whilst I'm young, with no responsibilities? ARGGGGG

Oh and also Mark Reuben said something awesome the other day on my instagram reels -

"If the AI has reason, it wont do what the human can do, because we aren't reasonable. The breakthroughs come from what is not reasonable - what cannot be done, what's not supposed to be done. The AI cannot invent flight before the Wright Brothers, it can only regurgitate what the Wright brother did. And we do that, not by knowing more, but by believing in something that can't be. It’s something that can be imagined that allows forward motion. Always."

Manojj and I were discussing more common YC advice that you hear. We are told that we need to find a ‘hair on fire’ pain point - one that users are desperately trying to solve and are highly motivated to find a solution. I’ll let Micheal Seibel tell you about it in his words:

"As a founder, I never took the time to really understand what that meant and I thought it was just an investor marketing saying. Now, when I talk to founders I extend the metaphor to illustrate it more clearly. If your friend was standing next to you and their hair was on fire, that fire would be the only thing they really cared about in this world. It wouldn’t matter if they were hungry, just suffered a bad breakup, or were running late to a meeting—they’d prioritize putting the fire out. If you handed them a hose—the perfect product/solution—they would put the fire out immediately and go on their way. If you handed them a brick they would still grab it and try to hit themselves on the head to put out the fire. You need to find problems so dire that users are willing try half-baked, v1, imperfect solutions.”

I do think this analogy is great, and it makes perfect sense. Ultimately, that would be the ideal position to be in as a founder, but does this mean we should evaluate our ideas based on if it is a ‘hair on fire’ problem? If it’s not, should we disregard it completely?

We took Cursor, as an example. In its early stages, I think it’s fair to say that it started as a hair-on-fire type of problem for their ideal customer. I pay for Cursor, and use it daily. If you asked me 1 year ago, if I needed Cursor, I would say no. I have a chatGPT subscription so I didn’t need to pay for another LLM - I can just split screen GPT and VSCode and I was good to go. But if you asked me now, after using Cursor, I would say coding without AI embedded into my IDE was defiantly a pain point, and I would definitely pay for software to solve that. So what changed? Well, I saw the light, I experienced a better workflow and now in HINDSIGHT, I can identify that live without cursor would create quite a decently sized pain point. Isn’t that interesting. I only found a pain point in hindsight. This makes me think, does that mean we can build a product that we personally think is good and use, and then I guess hope that when other people USE it, they are like - wait, I love this, here’s my money? Essentially,playing on the fact that sometimes, customers don’t even know it’s a pain point until you show them? Is this realistic, or is this just luck? And it’s this “what if?” that makes me reluctant to disregard a product because people’s hair aren’t on fire. I guess time will tell!

So I talked to a successful (YC W24) startup founder today about the topic I discussed above - I was pretty much asking myself, how valid is the “hair on fire” advice? Surely I can think of examples of non hair on fire problems that people solved and that customers pay for. He explained that firstly, the ideal customer profile (ICP) for cursor wasn’t me. It was real software engineers whose hair actually was on fire. I just didn’t know it, because I’m not from that background. Ultimately, Cursor did solve a hair on fire problem for their ICP but happened to also solve a mild pain point for millions of other users like myself. In that way, he describe them as a bit of an anomaly, also taking into account how quickly they grew. I guess this has left me thinking, it definitely is a good idea to look at the best and quickest startups, but it’s not all I should be doing. The biggest startup names of AirBnb, Google, Apple, Cursor etc, are all great to learn from, but theres a reason they’re separate from the pack, and just because it worked for them, doesn’t mean it will work for us. Instead, we should take a holistic approach and look at what all successful startup’s have in common - solving a ‘hair on fire’ problem for their customers.

In hindsight I admit it does feel quite silly disagreeing and questioning advice from people who have been successful themselves AND been involved in so many startup journeys, regardless of their outcome. I guess that’s just my way of truly understanding a subject - dive in, realise I’m wrong, learn, and come out knowing that I now have a deeper understanding of the topic, rather than just taking it for truth.

So I just returned from holiday and I had some new thoughts. Before the holiday in the last few weeks I was basically pushing as much time as I could towards the startup and that meant sacrificing a lot of things such as reading books, listening to podcasts, and reading blog posts.

I basically felt if the content I was consuming was was not directly related to startups, that it did not count as work and therefore I shouldn't be consuming it.

I found myself neglecting reading as a result - something I love and get annoyed about if I don’t get a chance to do during the day. I read non-fiction, usually about topics and ideas I haven’t come across before. Eg. Books about biology & evolution (Selfish Gene, Sapiens). These books give me an ever so slightly better understanding of the world around me, and shift my perspectives which is one the reasons I love reading so much.

None of this is really related to startups, but could you argue that reading makes me a happier, more knowledgeable startup founder, thus positively influencing the startup. Surely a better understanding of the world and yourself would benefit a startup? I think what I am really trying to say is that, my bet is that the things we do outside of startup world has an impact on what happens in startup world, so we shouldn’t demonise and neglect them - instead, do them within reason. The may not look like they’re “pushing the needle” but maybe they are?

Anyway, sounds like I’m probably overthinking. Let me go read now. Will update you soon to see if I still feel the same way.

We started ideation on Monday. We face the same old problem we are always facing - what do we prioritise and how do we balance speed + depth. If we are ideating a problem space, how long do you spend? Where do you draw the line? 1hr, 5hrs, 1 day, 1 week? 1 week gives you a huge opportunity to dive deep into the space, talk to users, upskill yourself on the nitty gritty, and put you in a better position to offer up a solution. Buttttt, 1 week is way too long. We have 9 spaces we want to look into - does that mean 9 weeks for ideation? Way too slow. Okay, but if we do each for say 5 hours, is that enough time to dig deep enough to even find a problem? I guess it depends on how quickly you can deep. Isn’t it frustrating when every answer is a form of “it depends”!?

Anyway, in just three days by taking action, we are getting much closer to an answer. As we dive in more, we realise where we’re wasting time and where we are finding value. We are aware that you shouldn’t always go off your instincts when doing a startup, but we feel like this is the right time to use them. We don’t know and we won’t. I think that the pure fact we are getting better everyday is enough for me. I mean, no matter the outcome of these next two weeks, we will still question ourselves “could we have dug deeper?”, “maybe we spent too long researching”. Hindsight’s a bitch like that.

Dare I say we’re moving fast. Fast relative to a few weeks ago. Every week we push harder. We estimated that brainstorming would take around 2 weeks, and we’d have an idea by the 21st. We underestimated ourselves, and found ourselves finished brainstorming by Sunday the 13th. Yes you could brainstorm for weeks and weeks, but we went off intuition of balancing speed and depth. Quite impressed with ourselves, but still think we can move much faster.

What a week it has been! We have built our first real MVP, and will be shipping to users as soon as possible - tomorrow latest. We are working on an idea in the people search idea space - something that has been done well by a few companies, but we want to make it great. We also have some ideas of certain niches we can hit.

Building this week was a lot of fun. It was challenging, interesting, and most importantly, it taught us a lot. We realised how fast we could actually move when you really put your mind to it. I do think however, from Tuesday to Sunday, my mindset has ever so slightly shifted towards solution thinking - Since I took charge of the frontend, I have had to really step into the role of how the user would use the application, and what kind of queries they'd search with. This keeps your mind narrowly focused on predicting what people may use it for, without actually thinking problem first. Manojj, thankfully, is the opposite, where he is very much focused on really defining the problem, and this means he is pushing as hard as possible to get it into peoples hands. I’m grateful for this grounding - we need to stop building now, and really focus on what EXACTLY are we going to solve. On one hand it’s great that we are in a fertile idea space, with loads of scope to play with, but also, that means if we choose the wrong niche, we won’t be successful. Within this space, the most important thing right now is finding the pain point that users will pay to solve. We have had one person tell us with confidence if we did X, Y, and Z properly, they would pay for it. But that’s not enough. The next week is crunch time and customer discovery with our MVP.

Oh and before I forget to mention - I am a big advocate for work-life balance, and I try to strive for balance every single day no matter what. This week, Manojj stayed up all night till 7am to get some shit done that he said he would. That day I woke up at 6am, did some hand over, and I worked till 2am the following morning. This was my first huge day - the day’s all founders love posting about on LinkedIn (“Omg all those late nights were worth it…”), and as someone who likes balance, I was surprised how much I was happy to sacrifice my sleep for this. I was just so determined to hit our deadline and get this shit done. This isn’t impressive, but for people that know me, I almost never sacrifice my sleep for much haha. So for me, this tells me a lot about the feelings I have towards this startup. With this being said, I need to be a little slow on the gas - getting sucked into the idea too quickly is bad, and maybe its just been a big drought of ideas for months on months, that now that the half baked idea has arrived, I think its the end. That’s not the case - this idea could be dead tomorrow. You never know, so I am telling myself to stay level headed.

Having an ‘idea’ is worse than I expected. It’s such a broad space, we’re struggling to find the exact use case. It's frustrating, but part of the process I guess.

These last week has been tough. The YC deadline is coming up and we are keen to smash it out the park, but with that comes huge pressure on our application. We’re pushing hard but I have been struggling to turn off, and as a result my sleep has been considerably worse this week. I’ve been more tired, my productivity has dropped, and I have slipped on keeping up with balance - reading & journaling, and exercise etc. Now I’m sleeping later to get work done, but then sleeping an hour through my alarm like today (I don’t even remember turning it off lol). I also don’t want to become reliant on caffeine, so I’m forcing myself to not drink it daily.

Today I’m going to try and that 30 mins of wind down before bed. Even though I know balance is important, I’m always fighting with getting shit done, and getting enough REAL rest.

Fuck it. Just press post. We launched to our network over these two days, and spoke with our very first potentially paying customer. Super exciting, but very very scary at first. As someone who is a product designer of sort, I HATE giving products to customers when I know it doesn't look as best as it could, or doesn't work as best as it could. This isn't A-level product design anymore - I can't spend 4 months perfecting something. The stakes are higher now, and 'perfection' is defined by the users, not me. We need to get it out there, and let them drive our product as much as we do (or maybe even more? Still figuring this out)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/meerenchauhan_from-mech-eng-grad-to-startup-founder

This is hard. Very hard. Getting customers

It feels like a scramble to get customers before the YC deadline. I think I want YC so badly that I just want customers NOW NOW NOW. Thats not how it works. The timing sucks because we haven’t had enough time to get our customers. On the other hand it’s really good that this deadline is imminent because it’s forced us to get ourproduct out there, launch & just make everyone aware.

Submitted our YC application and feeling awesome. It was a big struggle this week, but this application in itself has made us really really think about what our vision is and what our mission is. The MVP we released to the public did not solve our problem at the core. We released it as a way to see what people would want to search. We tried this out, but I don’t think this method was as effective as it could be. First we need to actually build the product that we want to solve our pain point - after all, the problem came from us from the beginning.

Thats why this week we’ve decided to build an MVP to solve OUR problem. Ultimately that’s where I think it should start - if we’re building a product that we’re not even going to use, what’s the point?

The YC application really pushed us to deeply think about these kind of things, so YC has already done so much for us, and we haven't even got in yet! Cheers Garry Tan.

Okay, so we are almost 10 days post-YC application and my mindset has shifted yet again. Before the YC application, we were acting almost ‘desperately’. I actually think that was good, but now that things have cooled down, we’ve rebased and realised that YC is helpful, but we should forget about it for now, and continue building our product. I watched Garry Tan’s really insightful video about not being ‘thirsty’ and I also read Sam Altman’s "The days are long but the decades are short" - both were brilliant.

A note on work-life balance. The past week, we set very hard and strict deadlines for work — Meeren to stop working at 10:30pm NO MATTER WHAT, and Manojj at 2:00am. This comes from the fact that, pre-YC application, we were burning the midnight oil to get shit done — and it was great, we got shit done. But the startup race is a long one, and doing this on a weekly basis is not sustainable. I always “knew this,” but I really felt it after a few days of rest following our big week. I remember waking up feeling unbelievably energetic. I thought — imagine if I was like this every day — the shit we could achieve in the long run would be amazing.

So let’s do it — let’s focus on health and sleep even more than we already do, because this surely moves the needle further than working 16-hour days straight for weeks on end, right? Maybe I’m wrong, because so many successful founders talk about working 80+ hours a week, sleeping 4 hours a day, and having 4,892 cups of coffee. I wonder if they’d be able to achieve the same sleeping 8 hours a day.

I think getting 8 hours of high-quality sleep is really, really hard when you’re running a startup — the toughest part is actually disconnecting. If you can truly switch off in the evening, you give yourself a real shot at proper rest. The thing is, our startup is the last thought before bed and the first thought when we wake up. Ideally, we’d think about it for 14 hours a day, but in that window right before sleep and right after waking up, we’d be completely disconnected. That’s the goal. I really want to get there. It must be possible.

Manojj has been on holiday for the last 9 days, meaning I’ve had to spend this time building the product as quickly as possible. I've been in dev mode, hence the lack of updates here. The timelines don’t change just because one of the founders is on holiday. It’s been noticeably more difficult pushing through without your teammate. It really demonstrates how important having someone else is, and really tests your own discipline and drive. I enjoyed the challenge.

The last week, I’ve been borderline addicted to the Micheal & Dalton series. Today I watched one of my favourite ones - When Should You Trust Your Gut? . They speak about two main situations; 1) you are an expert in your niche field 2) you aren’t an expert but have some interest in doing a startup in this field. If you are part of group 1, you can maybe lean on your gut a little bit more, because your judgement comes from a place of expertise, and that is more valuable than the average joe (given that they’re not experts). How do you know if you’re an expert? Well, if you find that you have strong opinions and unique perspectives on a certain niche, maybe you are indeed an ‘expert’ in this field, compared to the rest of the world. Experts are in a good position to understand deep problems in their niche, often giving them a good starting point for a startup. If you fall more into the not-expert category, you should first admit this as quickly as possible and plan to build your expertise. Hopefully you want to learn more about this field, and more importantly, enjoy learning in this field. That’s going to be the best way to build expertise.

No path is better than the other - they’re just telling us to be self-conscious of if you’re bringing expertise, or building expertise.

Where things go wrong: “when the founder with expertise is fearful and acts like the founder without, and the founder without expertise is too confident and acts like the founder with”. Brilliant advice from Micheal.

If you are an expert, and you’ve built something that truly impresses yourself, you are probably in a good spot. With non-expert, it’s a little more complex - are you proud of what you’ve built? Would you buy it? Has it actually solved the problem for you, or someone you know? Are you impressed by it?

Bringing this back to Spectre - we are somewhere in the middle. We definitely have a few opinions on people search, however we are not experts on the subject. Instead, we’ve been trying to build that expertise by speaking to 100+ people from varying industries. The thing is, most people have told us that we should probably go down the sales leads/recruiting side of things where people search is a fundamental component. That makes sense, but our gut pulls us back on this, because the reason we started this was to help the average professional find people they actually wanted in the first place. We’re in a spot where the ‘building expertise’ part is telling us to go one way, however our own use-case, and the reason we had this idea in the first place, is telling us to go another.

For now, Manojj and I are in agreement that we can’t predict where it will go, but one thing is for sure - we are trusting our gut on building our MVP. Our MVP will first impress and solve our problem, and then we will go out and find others like us who may find value. With our scrappy V0 launch, we didn’t actually make something that truly impressed ourselves, or that truly solved our problem, so we’re rectifying that now.

Balancing Speed and Quality. We want to get our actual version 1 of our product out as fast as possible, but we are always wrestling with - “how good should we make this? Would we rather launch today with 7/10 quality, or spend an extra day doing 9/10? Maybe even another for 9.8/10? It’s tempting, and we know one thing for sure - we should bias speed over quality but it’s still not as simple as that. How much should we bias? I want to say we’re doing a decent job - I push for quality, while Manojj pushes for speed, and we meet nicely (or so I thinks in the middle. He keeps me in check - especially since I come from a product design background, and since high school, I’ve been wired to pay attention to every detail - “tenacity” as Mr Brown once drilled into me…and sometimes that can get out of hand.

I have been on holiday since Sunday with family, and I think I was due a break. On Sunday, I was so eager to just get my head out of Cursor. I just wanted this shit to be done, and get the product launched, but I also knew we couldn’t rush it. Getting away from the scene for a bit definitely helped but third day in, I am lowkey itching to get back. I’ve been checking my messages from Manojj every so often to see how its going, if it’s any closer to launch. I’m excited to get back home and get working - I WANT TO LAUNCH.

Brian Chesky is so fucking inspirational. He comes across just so real. True to himself and not afraid of saying what he thinks. With people like this, it's almost obvious that they are successful. It's almost harder for these people to fail than to be successful in the long run. I think it comes down to them just doing the 'simple' things correctly, for a long fucking time no matter what. Not giving up. Constantly growing. Open to learning. Being empathetic. Forming and maintaining good relationships. If you can hit all of these, is success now reduced to a function of time?

This thought was sparked after watching this interview on The Social Radars Podcast.