- Lesson 1: Be humble. But also be compassionate to yourself. Look at everything as an opportunity to learn something new - You most certainly are wrong on a lot of things. - I’m not sure if this is true of every startup founder but we’ve always looked back on what we did and thought how stupid we were - The way I see this is that this is how growth happens. If you’re not experiencing that then maybe you aren’t experimenting fast enough - Don’t beat yourself up over it. Let me give you a few of our stories - Our dev roadmap when we started. We scoped out tasks for a full year. Look at this task list here. None of it was data driven. Pretty much random things we just thought would be cool. One thing we learnt even if you think you’re being data driven and objective it’s so easy to get blind sided. - Do PRE MORTEM it might help. - Honestly just talking through this I feel that one thing we’re going to not like about ourselves is how little Vivan and I put ourselves out there. And this stream and talking to you guys is part of my effort to do that. - Everything is an opportunity to learn - Lesson 2: Be prepared to do the worst tasks. - Everyone only sees the fun parts but being a founder means much more - It’s definitely a lot of fun and the destination is glamorous but there’s a whole bunch of shit work that you need to do - For the longest term the most time consuming task that we would do was actually customer support. Every week one of the most rubbish tasks I need to do is to actually - Think about it this way for a lot of the people who work for you it’s a job. Why would they do shit work with passion - Lesson 3: Reflect constantly. - Not just for entrepreneurs - Think of reflection as the fastest feedback loop possible - Why wait to get feedback from others when you can get from yourself instantaneously - Reflection has helped me see things very clearly before they get out of hand. And when I mean reflection don’t necessarily reflect on what happened, reflect on how it made you feel. Identifying how you’re feeling might help you understand your response to a certain situation. - Let’s take an example - a few months ago I was feeling super under confident and over worked. Someone on the team was reviewing my code and they pointed out a few issues that we had. Though we’ve always had a healthy culture of giving feedback, I got very defensive and didn’t take it well. Later when I reflected I realised that how I felt caused me to feel that way. I was able to communicate that with my colleague and they too noted that perhaps that was not the best time to discuss feedback. We sorted this out without it getting out of hand. - Lesson 4: Be boring - Remember why you're building the company. You need to create value and solve a problem not try to build the coolest product possible - Lesson 5: No matter how much you think you're listening to users and taking feedback you're probably not ## Questions 1. Finding balance is probably the most important challenge. I feel like there was a lot of challenges but this was the hardest thing. Balancing what the team wants to build vs what we need to build. Balancing trusting your instincts vs trusting user feedback. 2. We tended to listen to VCs a lot. I think the important thing to remember is that they don't know much either. As strategic as they claim to be they're equally clueless. Markets also really change things drastically. Suddenly one week the market is a certain way and then suddenly it's different so VCs tend to respond to that a lot more. 3. Being a co-founder sounds super glamorous but most of the time it's really shit work. There's a lot of mundane things that need to be done. 4. Create value. Fuck everything else. If you're creating value and you know you are you'll build something valuable. 5. Don't think we'd have built this at all. I don't think we were the right team to build it out. Thing we should have done is to fail a lot faster rather than be delusional about the fact that we can pull it off. 6. Cashflow was not as much a problem for us. Vivan kept track of burn and finances quite constantly.