Founder Journey - Founder of Zapier.wav

Speakers: Wade Foster (Co-Founder & CEO of Zapier)

Key Points

• Raising is such a distraction as an early stage company. If you can’t raise quickly then don’t raise at all. Raising money is sort of binary these days. In the Bay area, you don’t have to prove the company’s worth like you do in the Midwest. The best time to raise is when you have traction, which investors can’t hide from. If you are not getting the responses you need I will go back to building your business because clearly you don’t have an investable business.
• In the early days, what you really need is 10 customers. The marketing and sales strategies change when you are scaling. You can be more nimble and scrappy when you are acquiring the early customers. You are always experimenting and A/B testing different channels. Over time you have to figure out how to get a bigger ROI.
• The hard thing about the early days is you are limited to only your expertise and everything is dependent on you. There are pros because you can move fast and change features immediately. In the later days, it is how do you institutionalize your team’s knowledge and the knowledge of your customers. You won’t get to spend as much time with your customers like you did in the early days. The bigger you get the slower you get so it is imperative to sets values and know your customers well. The product team gets further and further from the customer as you grow so the big challenge is how to keep the customer’s needs front and center.
• A lot of ideas start out as toys/small solutions and organically grow into massive businesses.
• Metrics trumps everything.
• If you are not getting a response to investors they probably don’t believe the problem is important enough or you are not articulating your problem/solution well enough.
• You can’t be good at everything just be the best at what really matters. If you lose focus those other things can kill you.
• Growth is the best indicator that you are delivering value and what you are doing matters.
• There is a somewhat of a science to by going through the basic startup process of customer dev, product dev, etc, but in reality, building great products requires a lot of artistry. Some people naturally have the ability to build products that people love.
• Money is usually not the constraint to innovation but founder DNA. Do you have people in your company that think like founders? Usually not, because if you have founder DNA you are going to go launch a company. Try to hire those people for 12 months and then offer to cut the first check into their company. Knowing if someone has founder DNA is whether someone has built something prior or has a history of tinkering with things.