For some reason, I find the writing and decisions to be mature. Shouldn't the early stage product development be messy and full of doubts? I understand the post doesn't capture everything, but it feels the decisions the founders took most of the time had positive outcome. Is this luck or value of product-market fit?
Early-stage definitely was filled with messiness and doubts. We had no idea we were going to get to $1m ARR. When we started we had no idea how to price a SaaS product or make a landing page.
There's that quote, "hindsight is 20/20", meaning it's easier to understand what went well/poorly when looking back. It's easy for us to reflect on what went well, and share just that.
Doesn't mean it was easy/obvious in the moment, but hopefully our post helps others with their journey!
> a) How relevant was your experience (as engineers) in building and growing startups?
Super relevant to building the product. I feel like to be successful, you have to be really, really good at a couple things. For us that was engineering + design. For another team it might be that they're good enough at sales that they can close big deals right off the bat.
Being great at engineering + design meant we could build the best product in our market, with a robust codebase that's free of errors (unit tests, CI/CD) and easy to scale.
> b) Looking back, what skills would you have liked to acquire before starting up?
Hmm. It might have been good to work at an early-stage SaaS startup before starting one. This would have given us a lot of context into pricing, sales, marketing, recruiting, etc. Problems that we kind of just had to figure out from scratch.
> c) How much of startups is marketing and networking compared to product and growth?
Most of our success can be attributed to a) building a great product, and b) getting it in front of people. B is all marketing. Ads, SEO, content, etc.
Now, some startups rely entirely on product + sales, and some startups are able to attract all of their customers with just product (esp consumer). It really depends on your product/market/company, and how your customers want to buy.
