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I get questions from founders about early stage product development. It's a unique time where you have to move fast but balance to work on the right things. I thought to share some of my lessons for founders at the earliest stages:
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My previous startup was in YC in 2012. Back then, like many YC founders, we knew how to design, code and ship. One thing I wish I had understood better was how to build products effectively in the early stage and avoid getting stuck.
When you get started, the way you do things doesn’t matter. Get going and build something. But very soon you enter a point where you have a product that works and you have some users. There are a lot of things you could do but you need to figure out what matters next
We learned that it's important to talk to users. So we did. We would build what users wanted. We improved, added, redesigned and rebuilt. But in the end these activities didn't push the needle enough. We didn’t grow.
The problem was that we lacked direction, goals and a structure we operated the company with. Without it, it’s easy to get stuck building stuff that doesn’t move the needle. Setting goals forces you to zoom out and think about what matters next
You should still talk to users all the time and build things they need. Use their feedback as a way to learn, get ideas and validate your thinking. Dive into why someone needs a feature, what it would enable them to do rather than build what they want.
Goals aren’t helpful if you don't have a way to work on them. Having basic weekly/monthly/quarterly planning cycles reminds you and the team where you should be going.
Building at the early stage is about balancing vision and intuition with what the users/market wants.
I wrote this guide to help fellow founders how think about product development and share how we did it at @linear_app in the first few months: https://medium.com/linear-app/building-at-the-early-stage-e79e696341db
I wrote this guide to help fellow founders how think about product development and share how we did it at @linear_app in the first few months: https://medium.com/linear-app/building-at-the-early-stage-e79e696341db
PS. Active YC companies can get Linear Standard for free for a year.
Join companies like Retool, Courier, Visly, Draftbit, Middesk, Valiu and many others who are building with Linear. https://linearapp.typeform.com/to/VowK2vj9#referral=tw
Join companies like Retool, Courier, Visly, Draftbit, Middesk, Valiu and many others who are building with Linear. https://linearapp.typeform.com/to/VowK2vj9#referral=tw
