Startup Advice

A collection of 73 posts

Startup Advice

Stanford, SF, FAANG job - The only way to get into YC?

For a long time, Y Combinator was known as a place that sniffs out the oddball hackers nobody else would fund, but would build billion-dollar companies later.

Startup Advice

Is usage-based pricing overrated? These 3 YC founders agree (and so do we)

If you love pricing, I’m sorry for you. It means you’re a nerd like me, someone who’s fascinated with the ripple effects of tiny, but fundamental decisions. It means you have to live with the knowledge that nobody in real life cares about your little niche interests.

Startup Advice

Rippling: The $11.3B company raising $ without pitch decks

Where we glaze other great products 👇 Where we glaze other great products 👇 There are only two ways to make money in a SaaS business - bundling & unbundling. After software moved to the cloud, companies made billions peeling off specific features & products from mega-conglomerates who were still stuck in

Startup Advice

We found PMF. Here were the signs.

People make product-market-fit seem like this mythical thing you can pinpoint to an exact moment, but it’s never that.

Startup Advice

From Virginia to Wall Street: Reddit's origin story

Where we glaze other great products 👇 Where we glaze other great products 👇 With over one billion posts and 16+ billion comments, Reddit has 76 million daily active users, who spend an average of 16 minutes on the site per day. On average, about 1 million posts are added to Reddit

Startup Advice

Airchat: Why Naval Ravikant is building yet another social network

A newsletter as fun as Airchat 👇 A newsletter as fun as Airchat 👇 Two veteran bank robbers got away with it all. They lost contact when they left their lives of crime and laid low for 15 years. Now they meet again in a seedy bar. After catching up on their

Startup Advice

How Hubspot became a $32B marketing & sales behemoth

Where we glaze other great products 👇 Where we glaze other great products 👇 One of the most common startup advice given to founders is to focus on one thing and do that really well. Hubspot did the exact opposite and in the process, ended up building a $32 billion company.  According

Startup Advice

How Deel became the fastest-growing startup in history

Where we glaze other great products 👇 Where we glaze other great products 👇 I hate being that person (hindsight is 20/20, I know you’ll roll your eyes at me), but when I saw Deel at YC’s demo day years ago, I knew they were going to be big.

Startup Advice

Canva acquires Affinity: The product strategy behind the battle of the design tools

Acquire our newsletter for free 👇 Acquire our newsletter for free 👇 Yesterday, Canva acquired Affinity’s design tools for an undisclosed amount. In this article, we’ll explore why this is a brilliant execution of astute product strategy from Canva—and how Adobe might retaliate. First, here's what you

Startup Advice

Taylor Swift is a startup guru. Here's what founders can learn from her.

For more tortured startup analogies 👇 For more tortured startup analogies 👇 Taylor Swift is and has always been a startup. A hyper-growth one in recent years. But she’s always embodied the scrappiness, boldness, and ambition of a startup. And I think there are things we can learn from her. I

Artificial Intelligence

How we priced our AI SaaS product (and the mistakes we avoided)

Learn if we change our pricing again 👇 Learn if we change our pricing again 👇 Steven Rothstein lined up for yet another one of his 10,000+ flights. But when a gate attendant handed him a letter, his life changed: After flying more than daily for 25 years, American Airlines was

Startup Advice

User Intent Data: How to Leverage It For SaaS

User intent data is super valuable for SaaS companies, but it’s more useful when it’s sourced Non-Intrusively. Learn some methods, and take informed action.

Startup Advice

Attack on Excel: 3 startups coming for the spreadsheet throne

We write our newsletter in Excel 👇 We write our newsletter in Excel 👇 I have a frustrating childhood memory of playing Pokemon Red on my flea market GameBoy Advance at 5am. Right after you start the game, there’s the Viridian Forest. I encountered lots of cool bug type Pokemon—and

Startup Advice

Don't Just Win New Users, Keep Them: How Emotions Drive SaaS User Retention

Join our newsletter so we can retain you Winning customers might feel like a battle for any business. But ensuring those hard-won customers keep using the product beyond their first login is nothing short of a war for SaaS businesses.  A new product always appears shiny and attractive. After the

Startup Advice

The ultimate product launch checklist

The newsletter with more checklists Imagine you’ve poured months, or even years, of work into launching an incredible product. But when you introduce it to the market, it flops. Meanwhile, there’s a mediocre product that people quickly embrace. What’s the critical difference here? The launch launch strategy.

Startup Advice

In-app notifications that aren't annoying or useless

Promise to only notify you once per week Let's say it loudly for the people in the back: no more annoying popups! Your browser does not support the video tag. Don’t scare your users! Guide them. In-app notifications shouldn't serve you or your brand. Notifications

Growth

Product Lessons from Linear: Controlling a narrative

Where we glaze other great products 👇 Where we glaze other great products 👇 We recently published our Command AI manifesto. It’s an article that won’t rank on Google and isn’t technically “product marketing”. Publishing it might feel self-indulgent. But we believe it’ll become one of our most

Startup Advice

The Product of Lenny: How product strategy fundamentals created a one-person, million-dollar business

Help us follow in Lenny's footsteps Help us follow in Lenny's footsteps Learning from Lenny Rachitsky is frustrating. I wanted to uncover growth secrets I could apply at Command AI but only found what looked like lucky breaks: He quit his job at Airbnb to take

Startup Advice

Mastering adoption metrics: No boredom included

Scale your company for positive growth with purposeful user adoption metrics and the right tools to improve.

Startup Advice

How to grow your LinkedIn following for SaaS founders

Help us grow *our* audience 👇 Help us grow *our* audience 👇 In consumer products, creator/celebrity brands are one of the biggest trends. Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime drink reportedly does $1.2 billion in revenue. Mr Beast’s chocolate company Feastibles is a $200 million business. The right face

Startup Advice

How to write a killer YC application

For more killer startup tactics👇 For more killer startup tactics👇 At the risk of sounding cringe-y, I like to think that a lot of the good things that have happened in my career so far stem from my decision to apply to YC in 2019. This includes my former co-founder

Startup Advice

What is survey fatigue and how to avoid it

Discover key tactics to avoid survey fatigue in SaaS, ensuring higher response rates and quality feedback from your in-app surveys.

Company News

Are we crazy? Making software work without making it annoying

For more of our hot takes 👇 For more of our hot takes 👇 Imagine you time-travelled to 1850 and met your great-great-great-great-great grandfather. After some introductory drinks at the saloon, he shows you his office at the local railroad, where he’s the bookkeeper. While you’re trying to decipher his

Startup Advice

Command AI's seed deck, what we got right and wrong, 3 years later

Last week I did a Reddit AMA on the r/ycombinator subreddit and answered questions about a recent article we wrote about our YC application from the S20 batch.

Startup Advice

Grading Command AI’s YC application

More self-praise and self-loathing 👇 More self-praise and self-loathing 👇 We went through YC in the S20 batch with Command AI. At the time, we were working on a different startup called codePost. We were excited about both ideas and saw YC as the way to break the tie. "If we