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1/ Why do *truly great* engineering/product teams from bigger tech companies often fail? One reason: they fail at sequencing product investment for 0-1 startups. Thread
2/ In a big company, you often lean into your advantages -- integration with a suite, enterprise-grade product (for SaaS), ability to do professional services, supporting many use cases with a customer that already trusts you, etc.
3/ The right strategy in a startup is not to chase these same advantages, but to try and skirt around them. You will have to win differently.
4/ Velocity and focus are key. The first $CRM prototype was built in one month.
If you're building a SaaS startup, keep the bar for velocity incredibly high, and go validate your hypothesis with a low-fidelity prototype.
If you're building a SaaS startup, keep the bar for velocity incredibly high, and go validate your hypothesis with a low-fidelity prototype.
5/ The temptation is usually too high (especially amongst talented engineering teams) to build something that can scale, or that is more "complete." It's scary to show customers something and likely be rejected, and have to iterate. It's emotionally easier to keep building.
6/ Focus on the 20% that will make 80% of the business. Nobody will try your product if you have "all the checkboxes." The existing products already have all the checkboxes. They wrote the list of checkboxes.
7/ But if you have something novel or better - something fundamentally magical, some customers will overlook those checkboxes and campaign for others to overlook them too.
8/ This is increasingly true in the modern world of software discovery and purchasing, where users and buyers are closer. That SaaS adoption is (mostly) no longer intermediated by 5 layers of corporate bureaucracy and centralized control.
9/ Beginning by architecting for perfection is a recipe for failure. Beginning by designing for experience is a recipe for rapid learning and company growth.
10/ A SaaS company whose product catches on, that becomes a cult, a movement, and finally an emerging market leader, gets a "window of momentum" to build a product and a company that can scale -- it attracts talent and capital.
11/ With the right execution, emerging market leaders are a self-fulfilling prophecy. A SaaS company with a winning architecture and no customers is fighting an uphill battle.
12/ The name of the game for building modern SaaS companies is leaders is getting to "benefit-complete," validating and iterating your core growth loop, iterating with the customer on product scope and depth, and tacking back and forth on these two vectors ad infinitum.
13/ What does your product need to be "benefit-complete"?Data loss or failed onboarding/user activation prevents the user from getting the key benefit. But data infrastructure that supports 10x the scale any of your potential customers needs doesn't improve anyone's experience.
14/ Get v0.1 out with the bare minimum of functionality to get a small group of believers to see the magic, and bring your design partners along for the journey.
Remember, in SaaS the product is never complete.
Remember, in SaaS the product is never complete.
