Dalton Caldwell: recommendation

Transcript context

…Great. Okay. So for the final phase before we get to very exciting lighting round, I have these two segments, recurring segments. I have failure corner and contrarian corner. We can do both or we can pick one or the other. Failure corner, share a story of a time in your career where you failed and when you learned from that experience. Contrarian corner, what's something you believe that most other people don't believe? Yeah, I think for contrarian corner, I know where I would start and I think it's relevant for your listener. I think this is relevant to this and you could argue this isn't contrary, but here's what I think. I think growth and growth hacking and doing all this analytics, A/B testing stuff, is a total waste of time for very early startups. And that one of the weird things about having lots of startup advice on the internet, again, this is one of the reasons we started making videos at YC, is a lot of the advice was catered towards later stage companies. Like, "Oh, here's how you set up your board and here's how you motivate your sales team." It was all aimed at series A, series B founders, and not for seed stage founders. The problem was seed stage founders would consume all the later stage advice and get really confused. And so the anti-pattern I see is there are lots of founders that are very familiar with your awesome work, which again, I really recommend, I like it. But when you have no customers and you're reading Lenny's guides on how to set up split testing and how you did growth at Airbnb, oh man, that is so dumb. That is so not helpful. And so you see this inclination away from getting a first customer, getting one customer and talking to that person, and instead they have all this really complex growth hacking theory. I think this also happens if you worked in big tech where your product already has scale. And so if you work at Facebook and your job is to launch new little features, yeah, of course you should make heavy use of analytics and A/B testing and split testing and feature flags. Yeah, yeah, yeah, makes sense. But when you have no users, what are you doing? So do you think that's contrary? What do you think? I'm just trying to argue this advice applied to a startup that's too early is actively not helpful. I think it's contrarian for many people. I also 100% agree with it. It makes me feel like I need to, at the top of my post, share here's who this is for. If you're earlier than this, ignore it. If you're later than this, ignore it.…

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