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Weekly Dispatch 25

· 5 min read
Shane Mac

Hey team!

First off, welcome Saul and Martin to the team. It’s awesome to add more horsepower to our product and eng org.

Last week was one of the best aligning weeks we've had together as a team. Thank you to everyone for the candid feedback, the clear path forward, and the working sessions to push this company forward. Excited for a lot more working sessions together.

When thinking about where we are as a company, I wanted to remind us all about what matters in the pre-product-market fit stage.

This post from Y-Combinator is one of my favorite reminders on what matters in this phase:

Finding product-market fit = focusing on the market first​

Founders often hold too tightly onto solutions and too loosely onto problems. The problem, i.e. the market, is the real opportunity. Your unique and special v1 idea on how to solve that problem is usually wrong and only through launching, talking to customers, and iterating will you actually find a product that reaches product-market fit. Founder genius is most often expressed in choosing the right problem to solve. As Andreessen wrote, “the market pulls product out of the startup”.

At Sequoia, they talk about finding customers who “have their hair on fire”. As a founder, I never took the time to really understand what that meant and I thought it was just an investor marketing saying. Now, when I talk to founders I extend the metaphor to illustrate it more clearly. If your friend was standing next to you and their hair was on fire, that fire would be the only thing they really cared about in this world. It wouldn’t matter if they were hungry, just suffered a bad breakup, or were running late to a meeting—they’d prioritize putting the fire out. If you handed them a hose—the perfect product/solution—they would put the fire out immediately and go on their way. If you handed them a brick they would still grab it and try to hit themselves on the head to put out the fire. You need to find problems so dire that users are willing to try half-baked, v1, imperfect solutions.

At YC, we encourage founders to build MVPs (minimum viable products). In a good market, an MVP is all you need to get your initial customers in the door, interacting with you, and offering the feedback that will inform your v2, v3, and v4. The advantage that small companies have over big ones is that they can move fast, deal with problems by having unusually good customer service, and their customers expect less. So to find product-market fit, choose a market where users have a real, meaningful problem, launch quickly, and listen to your users.

Once you’ve actually reached product/market fit—congratulations—you can begin optimizing your core product, hiring specialists to increase your efficiency, and making strategic investments. Also, you’ve made it further than most startups ever dream.

It's easy (I've been guilty of this too!) to think we have some magical solution. Or to spin on assumptions without talking to our community. We have people telling us daily this is a problem, let's listen and build the hose that they need to put out the fire. We will learn so much and can grow from there because we earned permission by solving their first problem.

Let's have a great week! In this stage, it's up to each and every one of us to write up the plans, do the work, and help each other drive more clarity in every conversation.

  • Shane Mac

Last week goals​

November 22nd​

  • Alpha kickoff
  • Alpha user flows understood and finalized
  • Alpha wireframes delivered

The bottom 2 goals were combined into a working document for phase I of Alpha.

Next week goals​

November 28th​

Client / Protocol​

  • Complete workflow definition for Feature 1
  • Start tech spec for the protocol to support Feature 1
  • Continued progress on accounting concepts

Communities​

  • Outline Use case/customer matrix draft

XMTP Updates​

Crypto industry news​

What we are reading/listening to​

  • Short week with the holiday, feel free to share anything you are reading with the team.