I was interviewed by
@stripe
about startup building in an economic slowdown.
Look forward to their report with interviews from
@ycombinator
founders & others.
In the meantime, here’s the main takeaways from my interview🧵
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1. Runway: Focus on getting to default alive first. Building a remote team is a good way to make your runway last longer (no expensive office!) and to find and retain top talent. BUT you need to work harder to build a good culture . . .
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2. Remote culture: Optimize for intrinsic motivation & ownership rather than discipline. When founders really care about their team members’ well-being, team members care more about the business doing well so that they can grow their careers there.
Since starting a remote company, I keep being offered “collaboration” tools seemingly designed to monitor employees. Not interested.
I want to build intrinsic motivation & ownership rather than discipline & butts in seats.
That’s the ultimate startup productivity hack🧵
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3. Hiring: Early stage hiring is particularly difficult in a downturn because most folks seek financial stability, and early startups are risky. Get top candidates interested by figuring out what they want next in their careers and kraft🙃 a perfect role uniquely for them.
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4. Sales: In a downturn, b2b buyers spend more time on LinkedIn and are more likely to ignore sales outreach via email. Good opportunity to optimize ROI by doing outreach and organic marketing in that same channel (i.e. LinkedIn).
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5. Marketing: Organic > Paid. Track engagement to optimize the content. Success stories and upbeat messaging work best when folks are mostly doomscrolling stories about layoffs and closedowns.
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6. More sales: When a lot of companies are unable to buy, it takes more effort to find the ones that are. That means creatively generating more sales calls (even when it gets 10x harder) to be able to re-qualify further into the sales funnel.
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7. Product: Startups have to focus. But with market changes, this means frequent ruthless repriotization because you need to pause a project to start a new one (rather than just doing 5-10 at once). Being clear about the reasons for change is key for team morale.
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8. Staying motivated: Great companies were built during economic downturn. YC partners say startups often die when founders run out of motivation, not money. So catching burnout early & investing in motivation = investing in startup success. It's surprisingly hard to internalize.
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