When to Launch Your Startup and When to Wait

i think this is image founders have of the launch which is it's going to be like the launch and it's going to be like the oscar ceremony or something where there's just going to be like hordes of people and like and like you're going to be treated like a celebrity and so like you don't want to turn up to the oscars in like your scruffy like top and bottoms right like you want to like you want to spend some time getting in shape you want to be looking good like it's just this whole thing [Music]

hi this is michael with harj and brad and welcome to the partner lounge so as yc partners we find ourselves repeating the same seemingly obvious advice to startup founders over and over again before covid we'd often gather together in the partner lounge at the yc office to try to figure out why this was the case and how we could help startups figure it out faster now that we're in the remote world we're going to do this in front of all of you so the first topic we talked about today in the partner lounge is why

don't startups like to launch early and move quickly hard to be honest this is painfully obvious advice right this is you know yc paul graham 101 like no one applies to yc not knowing this is what we're going to tell them right so what do you think is going on why why do you think people are getting screwed up here a bunch of reasons the first one that springs to my mind is you have to know what fast is to move fast um and i i think one of the things we get to see as

partners is across hundreds of companies and founders the different speeds they can move at and honestly i remember when i first started working at yc it surprised me right like i thought my startup we were moving as fast as we could and then you see some of the top companies you're like wow how do you get so much done in a week um and so i think there's that effect i think maybe a specific version of that is if you've only ever worked at a big company like you might think you're moving fast because you're

moving big company fast um but like start up fast as a whole other ball game fast means you have to be a little bit uncomfortable what's going out there you know you were talking about instacart before what are you what how dirty did instacart look back in the day when when you saw them go through yc i mean pretty there's the classic story with instacart which is we interviewed them and they um did a demo of the product where they like clicked to order beer and beer turned up um pretty quickly and i think it

actually turned out it was like arpuva's friend or someone just drove to the store to like there was no back end right like and so that kind of continued during yc2 from what i remember it wasn't like they had they didn't spend a year building a sophisticated fulfillment center with complex algorithms to you know optimize delivery times pretty sure they just had like the founders and maybe some people off craigslist driving to the grocery store to pick up groceries pretty dirty like i think it was a good ui but they the the product was um

very much hacked together what's funny because brexit was almost the exact opposite like when they come in to tell their story at their batch there was no ui like they could give you a virtual credit card and like it worked but that was it you couldn't see what you spent money on you couldn't see how much money you spent you couldn't all they knew was that you had a card and it worked one of the things though that i think is going on and you brought this up a little bit hard is that like founders

will lie to themselves they will think i'm the exception i know the advice is good in general i've heard all these great examples but like we are different brad you were talking a little bit about like the idea that maybe i could maybe i can do a perfect launch so how do you think founders think about their perfect launch and why they maybe can't move fast well i think the minute anyone starts making something they start thinking about the moment when they show it to people and what they want the reaction to look like and

sound like and feel like and yet they also know that there's a chance that it won't be like that and it will be crushing and devastating and so i think every founder no matter what they're working on has this like parallel universe in the back of their mind of what the reaction is going to be to their product and when they let that parallel universe kind of win out over the reality that they need to get it in front of people faster and not worry about that it can slow them down because they start optimizing

for this thing that is just living in their head and it's not real at all i think this is image founders have of the launch which is it's going to be like the launch and it's gonna be like the oscar ceremony or something where there's just gonna be like hordes of people like and like you're gonna be treated like a celebrity and so like you don't wanna turn up to the oscars in like your scruffy like top and bottoms right like you want to like you want to spend some time getting in shape you want

to be looking good like it's just this whole thing like the reality is like often no one cares like you launch there's no one there well the way you talk about it has a fallacy baked into it the launch yeah right right that it's that it's a singular thing there's the launch of the product and that's just not the case you launch over and over and over again and it's not a precious thing the goal here is to get people excited about what you're working on and show it to the world and you might have

to show your thing to the world more than once before they get it and like that's okay like who cares you know like um brad you were talking about like what's the worst case scenario like what how do you like how do you think about that like what do you think founders are afraid of like what do you think is like their worst vision of a launch so i think they're afraid that people will think their product is ugly or that it doesn't work well or that they will notice immediately the thing that the founders

don't like about the product and confirm their worries they're afraid that a competitor will hear about the product they're afraid that um investors will hear about the product before it's ready they're afraid of all these things but then when you actually think about them for more than two seconds you realize that if you play out the worst possible thing that could happen after each of those occurrences it's fine one of the fun kind of mental gymnastics moves that we see people do is this like oh i did launch we have a wait list of 3

000 people we're ready to use the product or like does it like what are you talk brad what are you talking about we've already launched right like and then and then when we say oh great um let's open up the wait list now where's the button let's push the button no no no um yeah i think there's a whole um a whole set of contortions that certain types of founders have figured out how to tie themselves up in so that they can feel like they're launching they can talk like they're launching but they're not actually

putting a thing in front of people to use just yet a waitlist is just a form and you're not really getting product feedback from that experience you know it was funny because one of the best examples i'm remembering from back in the day at yc was a company named magic and when they came up with the idea of magic they launched two days later and it was just a website with a phone number and it just said text us and we'll do whatever you like and like to me like that's the right spirit right like

they understood that they didn't really know what was going on yet so like let's just get this thing out there and we'll start learning live versus versus waiting um i do want to play devil's advocate though right like there are these examples of companies that founders will throw in our face right we'll give this advice they'll be like harj and brad you all are idiots remember dropbox remember ripling remember a stripe like they didn't all launch publicly in the first three days of coming about which one of you wants to kind of tackle this one

like what what is our what what is our answer to the uh to the pushback here yeah like there are there are exceptions you mentioned good ones i take one at a time there like i take rippling right so i think that i when rippling was going through yc they took close to like a year and a half or more maybe it was two years to sort of officially launch um and it turned out to be right actually the company is like doing tremendously well and i think my analysis on that is you in that

case you had a founder who was building a product he'd already built for his last startups an unusual case right i mean like and he'd have tons of users um like zenefit was like a big startup growing really quickly and then on top of that like his benefit itself was a customer of zenefit like and so i think with parker you got this like incredibly unusual deep level of product insight and domain expertise and so he was actually the example of where he could come up in his head with here's what the product needs to

be it needs to actually be like a lot of product it's going to take us like some time to build this amount of product and we're only makes sense to launch like the mvp was robust um and he could trust his instincts right because he had this unusual depth of experience with what to build but brad how rare is that how often are we interacting with founders who have used and built a massive product doing the thing they're already doing before they decide to do that again it's pretty rare it doesn't happen that often and

it's not always a fun office hour because you don't want to say you're you're not parker right you don't want to throw it in their face to that extent the thing that i think is really great about the rippling example is that the first time he built the product with zenefits he did not spend a year and a half in fact he's one of the i think the greatest examples of what we were talking about earlier i remember when i was working on my company in san francisco he emailed me out of the blue while

he was in the batch said i'm working on this new benefits thing i'd love to come to your office and show it to you and so my company is building this ad tool we spent a year polishing the ui and making it all great and he shows up with this um with this hr software that was beautiful it was it had it was feature rich it had everything you could possibly need it and blew me away and i thought how the heck did this guy build this so quickly this is incredible and what i didn't

know was that it was a bunch of forms and there was not a back end at the time and so that first time when he was not the expert in what the product needs to do didn't have that knowledge that's the strategy that he took and then the second time after he'd already built this he was able that he'd earned the right to do the big build and make it that way i think this is like the common trap that founders have is that like they know five percent of the story and they don't know

the other 95 percent of the story so that's another kind of thing that i think people need to dig in a little bit to when they think of these exceptions like how can they be rigorous about making sure they're they know what really happened one of the things i love to encourage founders to do is to go back to um something like github and go to the blog and go to the beginning of the blog you know 10 years ago or whenever and and look at the screenshots from then look at the feature announcements from

them and just try to internalize that the the stakes were lower the features were simpler the feature set was simpler and they were just getting on the board and it wasn't this huge gargantuan product that you think of now so if we're gonna wrap up here if the if you're uh early stage founder listening to this and you are a parker conrad you've already built a billion dollar company doing this exact same thing before and now you know exactly how to do it right you should ignore all the advice we gave in this talk if

you're not then kind of what harj and brad were saying beginning you already know launching fast and moving fast is the right thing to do so just do it right just just do it right at the end of the day you choose every day you decide not to launch you choose every day you decide to go at 10 miles an hour versus 100 miles an hour maybe today you should choose differently all right thanks brad thanks harj thanks guys thank you [Music] you