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. Threadhttps://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="👇" title="Rückhand Zeigefinger nach unten" aria-label="Emoji: Rückhand Zeigefinger nach unten">
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& #39;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& #39;s scary to show customers something and likely be rejected, and have to iterate. It& #39;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& #39;t improve anyone& #39;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.
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