When building a startup I rarely have the time to build software in the way I think of as correct. In these situations I find particular pleasure when simple solutions can be "good enough". Best yet is when one of these solutions holds up to increasing numbers of users, employees and use cases. One pattern that manages all of these is using Slack as a searchable event stream DB.
Chasing the wrong KPI is like chasing a mirage of water in the desert.
Check out our trailing twelve month site analytics above.
Our marketing and user acquisition was awesome in Feb, right? More of that?
(photo credit Charles Cushing)
This article is intended for startup founders, particularly for those who are first timers. There is nothing extraordinary about my VC experiences. I have done the following: raised an angel round and two institutional rounds (and failed at two rounds?) at a company I co-founded in the GovTech/Community space (SeeClickFix). I have participated in pitches as CTO of a pre-PMF (product market fit) mortgage tech company (HeavyWater). I have raised a friends-and-family round at my current Cloud Infrastructure company (https://www.cyclic.sh)
As a repeat founder I get the question from entrepreneurs and others: "how do you get your first users?"
For me, this is actually the easiest stage. I think of acquiring and growing a group of users differently based on the scale of the existing user base. There is a great book that talks about going 0 to 1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero\_to\_One). What I mean here is how to go from 0 users to 1 user.