TigerEye builds AI-powered planning and revenue management software for businesses, combining AI and machine learning with a company’s own historical data to help them predict their future. It’s “Moneyball but for business,” as Tracy puts it. </p><p><strong>I recently sat down with Tracy to find out more about her, what drives her, and some of what she has learned along the way. We talked about:</strong></p><ul><li>Why she wanted to jump back in as a founder/CEO, and what sparked the idea for TigerEye</li><li>The YC interview that inspired her to focus on enterprise software</li><li>Why she and her co-founder spent months “dissecting the past” before starting another company, and what they’re doing differently this time.</li><li>The hard parts of joining a big company following an acquisition, her advice for new founders going through YC, and more!</li></ul><p><em>Find our conversation below, lightly edited for clarity and length.</em></p><hr><p><strong>You had a massive exit with PlanGrid. You took a couple of years and then jumped right back in to do it again with TigerEye. What drives you?</strong></p><p>That’s a really good question.</p><p>I think my kids drive me. I always need a project to work on; I’m a busybody that way. I like working, and I like working with really smart, talented people.</p><p>But I also have a lot of energy and intensity, and my kids don’t need me all over them all the time. They have their own life, they don’t need founder-mom on top of them — because then I’m nitpicking every little thing. “Why are your toys out? Go pick that up!” <em>[laugh]</em></p><p>They don’t need that energy on them 24/7. So I output it into a startup.</p><p>But more than anything, I watched my parents work incredibly hard to give my siblings and me the life we have. They were refugees of the Vietnam War. They worked seven days a week for many years; they worked two jobs a piece just to make things work for our family. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/library/JF-the-immigrant-journey-behind-a-silicon-valley-success-story/">It absolutely made me who I am today</a>, and I want my kids to see that you can dream, you can work hard, and you can do whatever you want as long as you’re passionate about it.</p><p><strong>What came first: the idea for TigerEye or the desire to keep building [after PlanGrid]?</strong></p><p>The desire to keep building.</p><p>[My co-founder] Ralph and I were actually working at YC in between PlanGrid and TigerEye — we were both Visiting Group Partners. We saw a lot of really cool technology come through during interviews, and while reading thousands of applications from all of these ambitious, talented founders.</p><p>It was really clear to us there was so much low-hanging fruit in enterprise, but the only people who would build solutions there… let me tell you a quick story: I remember interviewing a really, <em>really</em> talented engineer. He must’ve been only 18 years old, and he was building.. I don’t even remember, some kind of vague thing around video. We were looking at him and asked: you can build anything! Why don’t you solve real problems for real people’s jobs?</p><p>He looked at us and said: enterprise software is for old people. </p><p><strong>Oh jeez. What was your response?</strong></p><p>I laughed, but it got me thinking that the only people who would build great solutions in the enterprise world are the people who saw it firsthand. </p><p>We had this unfair advantage of having built a startup for almost 10 years, seeing it grow the whole time, and deploying every solution under the sun to make our company scale and work.</p><p>Then we got the privilege to be acquired into a public company, and to form a new construction business unit [within that company], where we then replaced all of our startup tools with the [big brand] winners — we were paying millions of dollars to buy the software each year, and then another several hundred thousand to deploy it and administer it.</p><p>It was so clear to us: we could take any category [of Enterprise software] between CRMs and ERPs and there were ten good startup ideas in there, right? But the only people who would build that type of software are people who saw it fail them for years.</p><p><strong>For those who don’t know, can you explain what TigerEye does? What was the pitch?</strong></p><p>When Ralph pitched me the idea of TigerEye, he said, “Remember all of those spreadsheets we’d have people make [when building PlanGrid], and they’d never actually answer our questions? I think I can build a business simulator — and automatically generate that data through simulation theory.”</p><p>In a past life he worked at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory using simulation theory and he felt strongly that it could be applied to business. That was really interesting to me.</p><p><strong>Can you give me examples of what TigerEye is simulating, and what it bases its simulations on?</strong></p><p>Something that’s interesting about, say, Salesforce, is that it’s a flat database. When a sales rep hits save on an opportunity, it overrides the history. There’s no version control.</p><p>But that history is interesting! Especially if you have a lot of it, because now we can understand rep behavior over time. So we go into the CRM and snapshot everything every 15 minutes. We pick up every minor change that’s happening over time and use a bunch of AI, machine learning, and advanced statistics to use their historical [data] to predict their future. We’re like Moneyball but for business.</p><p>It gets even more important at public companies, where you’re trying to figure out: where are we going to clock out this quarter, or this month? Where’s our business going to be? </p><p>You constantly have really smart people munging numbers on a spreadsheet to try to predict the future, and these spreadsheets don’t work.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\"><iframe width=\"200\" height=\"113\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/embed/5eYN7-l6d_A?feature=oembed\%22 frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen title=\"Introducing TigerEye\"></iframe></figure><p><strong>What was it like for you to go from running your own startup for 10 years, moving at your own pace, to being within a larger corporate environment?</strong></p><p>It really sucked for me. I think everyone knew this.</p><p>Startups move at such a velocity. To get inserted into a 40+ year old public company… there’s a cultural difference. There’s definitely decision-making differences, and I think that was the hardest part. I felt like I couldn’t sneeze without asking permission from five head-of-somethings.</p><p><strong>Between your experiences with PlanGrid and then at a bigger company — how retrospective did you get about all of this before diving back in?</strong></p><p>We left Autodesk in March 2020 — and then, as you recall, went right into a worldwide lockdown. </p><p>I’m married to my co-founder [Ralph], so we ended up spending most of shelter-in-place and that COVID period dissecting the past. We suddenly didn’t have a job, we’d left Autodesk, we’re used to moving at such a velocity, and then we came to a complete standstill. </p><p>What we ended up doing is dissecting everything we felt we did wrong, and everything we did right. Everyone we thought we wanted to work with again, and everyone we for sure were not going to work with again. We mapped out the differences between those that we’d want to work with again, and those we didn’t. The first 24 or 25 people [at TigerEye] were people we’d worked with before.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"/blog/content/images/2024/06/tracy-and-ralph.png/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1388\" height=\"913\" srcset=\"/blog/content/images/size/w600/2024/06/tracy-and-ralph.png 600w, /blog/content/images/size/w1000/2024/06/tracy-and-ralph.png 1000w, /blog/content/images/2024/06/tracy-and-ralph.png 1388w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\"><figcaption><em>TigerEye co-founders Tracy Young and Ralph Gootee</em></figcaption></figure><p><strong>What determined whether or not you wanted to work with someone again?</strong></p><p>It was the people we thought were incredibly talented, and that we had a fun time building with. It’s as simple as that: looking back, yes, I would love to work with that person again. We had that core value in place before we even narrowed in on a product idea.</p><p><strong>Can you tell me a bit about what you’re doing differently as a founder this time, day-to-day?</strong></p><p>It’s a little bit different this time around; when I first started PlanGrid, I was in my mid-to-late 20s. I’m approaching 40 this year, and I have 3 young kids.</p><p>Getting the luxury of doing it a second time around, I know the things that are a higher value — the things that only I can do as a CEO and founder. There are certain decisions only I can make, and there are decisions that are better off made by someone else at the company.</p><h3 id=\"it-makes-people-feel-like-they-suck-at-their-job-when-the-ceo-jumps-in-and-does-it-for-them\"><em>\"It makes people feel like they suck at their job when the CEO jumps in and does it for them.\"</em><br></h3><p>I think in my 20s, as a founder and a first-time CEO, I honestly didn’t know what my job was. I always jumped onto support tickets; if customers had an issue, I’d be the first one to jump in. Companies get to a point where that’s not the best use of your time. We had really great support people on the team — and it feels really bad when the CEO is jumping in to do your job! It makes people feel like they suck at their job when the CEO jumps in and does it for them.</p><p>So this time I’m really deliberate in how I spend my time.</p><p><strong>What does that look like?</strong></p><p>These days it’s mostly product and sales. But it’s also about having really heavily protected family time, and really heavily protected work time.</p><p><strong>That dedicated family time… I generally don’t ask questions about founders being married to each other because it feels too personal, but since you mentioned it earlier: does that make it easier or harder to separate life and work? Easier because your partner already understands the things that are going on in your life, or harder because, in some way, work is always in the air?</strong></p><p>We’ve been doing this together for so long that it’s hard for me to even know what it’s like on the other side. We worked together [on PlanGrid] starting in 2011; we got married in 2013. With three kids, and now two startups — yeah, it’s hard.</p><p>It’s funny, but we often get founders who are thinking about starting a company with their partners, and the advice we give is: don’t do it. And the reason for that is that startups are hard. And marriage is hard. And having children is hard! So it’s this combinatorial explosion of problems that could come up.</p><p>But we’re also a good example that it can work, but we’ve done a lot of work on personal growth, and practicing patience, and practicing forgiveness to be able to do what we do. </p><p><strong>Last question here, but: you have an incredibly rare perspective on YC. You went through it as a founder multiple times, you were a Visiting Group Partner... for anyone going through the incoming YC batch, or applying in the future, what would you tell them to really maximize their time?</strong></p><p>It’s easy to get a bit obsessive — the goal is to make as much progress as you can in three months, so that you have a great Demo Day with as much revenue and progress as you can.</p><p>But I would encourage everyone to look at the people around them [in the batch], and the startups around them, and put in the effort to get to know them. Learn what they’re building.</p><p>I think back to YC Winter 2012 and Summer 2022, and it’s the people that really are the best part of YC. It’s the friendships I made; the partners that I got to work with. It’s really easy to be 100% heads down and obsessive over your thing — of course, talk to customers, make something people want! — but don’t forget that you are getting an incredible opportunity to meet people who are going through the exact same journey you are.</p><hr><p><em>Find out more <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.tigereye.com//">about TigerEye here</a>, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/predictable-growth-7018963257554046976//">find Tracy's newsletter \"Predictable Growth\" here</a>.</em></p>","comment_id":"6669d02f5df3e40001fdc874","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2024/06/tracy.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2024-06-12T09:43:27.000-07:00","updated_at":"2024-06-12T11:07:13.000-07:00","published_at":"2024-06-12T11:00:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"In 2018, Tracy Young and her co-founders sold PlanGrid for $875 million. 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These programs provide founders with the resources they need to build a company all the way through IPO. One area covered extensively is how to scale as a CEO of a growth-stage company. </p><p>Outside of the YC community, little has been documented on best practices to be an effective CEO. We want to help founders everywhere scale and build enduring companies — and today, we’re launching a new series to do just that: Learnings of a CEO. </p><p>We’re kicking off this series with Max Rhodes, the co-founder and CEO of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.faire.com//">Faire, a one-stop shop for wholesale. Before Faire, Max was an early product lead at Square, where he worked on the Cash App and was a founding member of Square Capital. Max and his co-founders were part of the <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/faire/">W17 batch</a> and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/growth-program/">F18 Growth Program</a>, and YC led Faire’s Series B and doubled down in their C-G rounds. Today, Faire has over 1,000 employees. </p><p><strong>How has your job as a CEO changed from seed stage to Series G?</strong></p><p>Much of my time is spent setting the vision and strategy for Faire and driving the execution of that strategy. This often feels like driving an aircraft carrier versus a speedboat, which is how I often describe leading a seed-stage company. In the early days, we were on a six-week product cycle, decisions were centralized (often with me making those decisions), and the entire company met daily for standups to stay aligned on our goals. Today, we are on a six-month product cycle, decisions are decentralized, and we have built systems that hold people accountable without needing consistent touchpoints. </p><p>As a thousand-person company, the number of products and features we can build has greatly increased, and we have to map out our strategy for the next 6-12 months to keep teams aligned. Communicating the strategy to the entire company requires multiple channels and repetition. We have a strategy doc that I collaborate on with the leadership team and share with the company; updates are provided at the half-year mark. We hold all-hands, where I share what is top of mind. We also have biweekly business review meetings, which are open to anyone; we also make the notes accessible. </p><p>Being able to decentralize decision making starts with hiring the best people and then arming them with the right information. Outside of meetings, we use OKR templates, track the history of our milestones, and create a collective body of work (in Notion and Google Slides) to provide everyone with direction. </p><p>We’ve organized the company in a way that lets us hold people accountable without needing constant touchpoints. The product development strategy is broken down into focus areas that each get assigned to a team. Each team is self-sufficient and has all of the technical and go-to-market people it needs. The team works autonomously to reach a metric. Every metric ties back to a top-level company goal, ensuring that teams are solving real customer problems.</p><p><strong>As you've grown, what changes have you had to make to keep everyone at your company aligned?</strong></p><p>We’ve experimented a lot: strategy docs, all-hands, documenting our 5Ss (the five most important initiatives across the company), and OKRs. There are pros and cons with OKRs. We use them as a guidepost rather than a measuring stick, to make sure we’re consistent in our planning and getting realigned on goals. </p><p>As we grow, some systems break. For example, I used to hold a biweekly business review meeting with each team. This was great when the company was broken up into three teams. With more than 15 teams, it became inefficient and borderline impossible. Eventually, these teams were organized into pillars, and each pillar was held accountable with a biweekly business review. My goal is to always find a balance between how much time it takes to coordinate versus execute, while designing information flows that don’t turn into silos. </p><p><strong>What's your advice to other founders on how to hire executives?</strong></p><p>First, clearly outline the outcomes you need the person to drive. Then, design a rigorous hiring process that evaluates whether they’ll be able to drive those outcomes and whether they share the same values as your company. We use a combination of behavioral interviews and work studies, where we see how they’ll perform at the job. We also extensively check references. </p><p><strong>What is Faire’s culture? What do you do to cultivate it?</strong></p><p>Our culture can be described by our five values. These underpin both why we are here and how we operate as a team. We’re still in the early days of building what this company will someday become and these operating principles help everyone at Faire maintain the spirit of entrepreneurship:</p><ol><li>We serve the community.</li><li>We seek the truth.</li><li>We are owners.</li><li>We embrace the adventure.</li><li>We are kind.</li></ol><p>To create this culture, it’s all about mechanisms. It starts with hiring. If we’re able to hire people who hold the same values and bring a new lens to the work, cultivating this culture is easy. We also embed the values into our feedback cycle and reward people for living them out. We give weekly shoutouts and recognize people, as well as hold quarterly value awards.</p><p><strong>Advice you would give to future leaders? </strong></p><p>Starting a company is hard, but it’s a lot easier if it’s something you care about, something that will impact the world. If you have a vision for how to make society better, don’t take that for granted.</p>","comment_id":"62d8038a3644180001d72a0d","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/07/BlogTwitter-Image-Template--3-.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-07-20T06:30:50.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-07-20T08:33:04.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-07-20T08:30:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Outside of the YC community, little has been documented on best practices to be an effective CEO. We want to help founders everywhere scale and build enduring companies — and today, we’re launching a new series to do just that: Learnings of a CEO.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71158","name":"Leadership","slug":"leadership","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/leadership/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"62d804e33644180001d72a1f","name":"#1543","slug":"hash-1543","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/learnings-of-a-ceo-max-rhodes-faire/","excerpt":"Every year, 200 YC companies go through our post-accelerator programs. These programs provide founders with the resources they need to build a company all the way through IPO. One area covered extensively is how to scale as a CEO of a growth-stage company. ","reading_time":4,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/07/BlogTwitter-Image-Template--3--1.jpg","twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":"Today, we're launching a new series to help founders everywhere scale and build enduring companies: Learnings of a CEO.\n\nWe're kicking it off with @MaxRhodesOK, co-founder and CEO of @faire_wholesale, a one-stop shop for wholesale.","meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"63d45276ba7a5900012d1cb7","uuid":"539ff8b7-1511-483b-aade-1dccd48511b1","title":"Learnings of a CEO: Snapdocs’ Aaron King on navigating market cycles","slug":"learnings-of-a-snapdocs-aaron-king-on-navigating-market-cycles","html":"<p>Welcome to the fourth edition of Learnings of a CEO. You can read previous editions <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog?query=learnings%20of%20a%20CEO\%22>here. </p><p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.snapdocs.com//">Snapdocs is the leading digital closing platform for the mortgage industry. Today, the company touches 25% of all US real estate transactions and is valued at $1.5B. Founder and CEO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/a_w_king/">Aaron King</a> and his team have expertly navigated fundraising and market cycles. We sat down with Aaron to hear his insight into getting a business up and running with minimal outside funding and building through volatile market conditions. </p><p><strong>Why did you decide to raise minimal funding early in the company’s history?</strong></p><p>I never considered funding to be a requirement for building — but I also didn't know much about fundraising early on in the company’s history. Snapdocs was started as a side project a couple of years before ever thinking about applying to YC. By the time I applied, we had a live product, customers, and revenue. Even after YC, we didn’t raise much immediately. We stayed focused on building and then raised a seed round later in the year.</p><p>It wasn’t until three years later that we raised our Series A. By then, we had spent about $1MM of our seed round and were at a $5MM revenue run rate. Around that time we started working with much larger customers, and it was clear we would need more capital to be successful in this bigger market. So, we raised our Series A. After we closed the round, our lead investor revealed how capital efficient we had been compared to our peers. </p><p><strong>Do you feel you had to ruthlessly prioritize when building the product because you didn't have the capital?</strong></p><p>Yes, and I’ve learned that you should take the same approach even when you do have the capital to be less disciplined. Back then, ruthless prioritization was our only option. We couldn’t afford to build features that weren’t essential. There were always a hundred distractions that would result in a broader, less focused product. But our capital constraints kept us focused on going deep with our paying customers. That helped us avoid the common trap of building products no one wanted. </p><p>It also meant that when we decided to build a product, we had to think about the smallest version of that product in order to quickly ship. That helped ensure we had a short feedback loop from our users and ensure our resources were continuously being invested in building the right features. Looking back, I’m amazed at how much we were able to accomplish without spending much capital. </p><p>Being capital constrained forced good behaviors that served us well even after we raised more funding. We continue to be thoughtful about every dollar we spend. But, there is a cost to this approach, and we’re paying for it today. We built many things that weren't engineered for scale or flexibility. However, now we can afford to reengineer those unscalable solutions because we built something people want.</p><p><strong>What did your product cycles look like before you raised your Series A?</strong></p><p>We were always heavy on customer involvement when building product. We spent a lot of time in our customers’ offices watching them use what we were building and understanding their work. We also kept a lot of our prospects in the loop as we built new features. Some of the best feedback came from people who had chosen to not yet work with us. Responding to that feedback with a killer feature was a great way to ultimately get them on board. </p><p>We built a lot of trust and rapport with these early customers, and the in-person interactions helped immensely. As a result, they would call one of us the moment they thought there was a problem or if they thought a competitor was doing something compelling. Customer churn for Snapdocs has always been incredibly low as a result. </p><p>We created a disciplined product release process, even in those early days, but we were still able to move quickly. We shipped code every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Customers were impressed by how quickly we could respond to issues and feedback. </p><p>Interestingly, not having too much pressure from investors early on allowed us to experiment more in an underappreciated part of our market. The Serviceable Available Market (SAM) of our initial product was roughly only $20MM, but we believed it would allow us to expand into more critical parts of the mortgage ecosystem. It was the type of opportunity that would be hard to discover through market analysis or spreadsheet exercises. You had to get deep into the problem set to see the opportunity and develop the right strategy—and that ultimately worked to our advantage. </p><p><strong>Founders need capital to hire employees. As a bootstrapped company, what was your strategy around hiring? </strong></p><p>Hiring was hard, but we did a few things that worked well. Even before the company could afford full-time employees, I worked with talented contractors. I also leaned on friends to help me work through both technical and business challenges. Someone would come over and whiteboard with me or we’d get into the code and work through a problem. </p><p>When I could afford to hire full-time employees, I treated them like founding team members. I was generous with equity and shared everything about the potential and challenges of the business. We built a lot of trust as a small team. Getting a few really good people into the company early on was foundational to the company’s success. </p><p>The first person to join full-time was an engineer I had worked with in a previous role (and one of the friends that would help in those early days). The second and third hires were applicants from job postings on Hacker News. All three turned out to be excellent. None of us initially had large networks in the startup world, so most of our early hiring involved lots of interviews and hiring a few of the wrong people. We couldn’t attract well-known talent and took risks; invested in people we thought had a lot of potential. </p><p>One mistake I made in the early years was being too timid to approach more of the people I respected. I should have tried to convince them to quit their successful jobs and join our small (yet risky at the time) startup. I’m fearless on this approach now, but back then I was intimidated to try to convince a friend to join a company that might fail. In hindsight, I did them a disservice by not trying to recruit them. The truth is that these people are smart and you’re not harming anyone by sharing your vision and the potential of the company with them. As long as you’re honest and transparent about the inherent challenges, you should give them the opportunity to take a risk on you. </p><p>As Snapdocs grew, it became easier to pull from the team’s networks. We continued to build a lot of trust within the team, and they started referring their friends to apply. Eventually, we attracted well-known investors, and that, along with our culture and growth, made hiring easier. </p><p>Because we were capital constrained, we also didn’t hire anyone until there was a clear and painful need. It made running the company harder because we were all spread thin but ultimately made us incredibly productive, as it meant we were always working on the most important things. </p><p><strong>How have you navigated different market conditions? When do you decide to react?</strong></p><p>A big part of our success has come from selectively ignoring some market changes while reacting quickly to others. It has always been a question of how the change aligns with our resources, vision, and north star metric of market share growth. </p><p>For example, the biggest and most dynamic change we regularly experience are fluctuations in the number of mortgages that happen in a given month or year. This can change quickly based on a host of economic factors. When we are well-resourced and growing fast, we can ignore some of those market downturns and stay focused on market share growth — knowing we have the momentum and capital to power through it. Other times we’ve had to scale up or scale back based on the size of the fluctuation.</p><p>But other market dynamics can change quickly too, like the industry’s appetite for new technologies and the competitive landscape. There have been times when the market was demanding a technology but we believed there were underlying factors in the industry that would prevent that tech from scaling. If we built the technology, it would pull resources away from the priorities that drove us toward our long-term goals. And so, sometimes to the protests of our sales team, we ignored it or invested minimally in these trendy areas. By doing so, we were able to stay focused on the things that were truly going to transform the industry. </p><p>It’s also worth noting that navigating change was relatively easy in the first few years of building the company. It was a lot easier to adjust course on company direction or strategy when the team was smaller and could all fit in the same room. The product cycles were relatively short and malleable. The cost of making a change was low. </p><p>As the company has grown, we’ve had to be a lot more thoughtful and methodical about changing the speed or direction of the business as we react to market changes. The cost of making a change has increased a lot. Investments take longer to play out. Changes to headcount take longer to scale up or down. There are more people on the team and more layers in the organization to communicate the change through. </p><p><strong>In March 2020, Snapdocs made a huge shift because of changes you were seeing in the housing market. How did you communicate this shift to your team and ensure their goals were aligned with the new priorities? </strong></p><p>COVID accelerated demand for our product, but with that came a shift in what our customers wanted from a platform like ours. We had to expand quickly to serve their needs, and we had to pivot our roadmap on a dime. It’s a testament to the team that we were able to pull that off. </p><p>To make decisions quickly and then communicate them, we worked in concentric circles. We started by discussing the change in a smaller group of 3-4 people. This is where the hardest and messiest conversations took place. We moved quickly to define the problems and opportunities and set a direction for the company. We then looped in the senior leadership team for further discussion and to arm them with everything they needed to share the directional changes with their teams. Finally, we held a company-wide meeting to share the new direction and answer questions. All of this happened over the course of about 2 weeks.</p><p>Now, our business required more speed and flexibility as information was coming in and changing week on week. We dealt with this by creating temporary pods of 4-5 team members focused on solving specific challenges that would spin up for a few weeks and then dissolve once the challenge was addressed. We also increased the frequency of our company-wide all-hands meetings from monthly to weekly so we could keep the whole company up to speed. </p><p>Luckily we had a deep culture of transparency that goes back to the beginning of the company. We’ve always tried to share everything with our entire team — our cash balance, monthly growth rate, burn, our biggest challenges. This got harder as the team grew, but we’ve largely continued this transparency to today. It’s much easier to be transparent in times of great change if you've laid a foundation of trust and transparency in the past. </p><p>We also worked hard to be intellectually honest about the growth we were experiencing. It’s easy to take credit when the business accelerates, but our message to the team wasn't, “Look at how great we're doing.” The message was closer to, “This industry works in cycles. We're in an up cycle now and that's great. There's going to be a down cycle. We don't know when or how strong it's going to be. But we should not overly congratulate ourselves for the current situation, just as we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves when we’re fighting through an inevitable downturn in the future.”</p><p><strong>In 2021, Snapdocs </strong><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.snapdocs.com/resource-center/blog/announcing-our-150m-series-d-funding-round/">announced a Series D round. How did this change your mentality around resources?</strong></p><p>It was clear that the pandemic would be an accelerator for our business, and we needed to move fast to stay ahead of the market. We went from being frugal to raising larger rounds of capital and hiring seasoned executives who could help us scale. It’s important for companies to evolve at the right points in time and ask themselves, “Is what I did yesterday the thing that's going to get me to where I need to be tomorrow?”. We asked that question and decided we needed to change parts of our culture and capital investment strategy if we wanted to win.</p><p>When we raised capital in 2021, transactions on Snapdocs had steadily increased to millions of closings a year and thousands of lenders and title companies were using our technology every month. Demand for mortgages throughout the pandemic was strong, and we deployed an intentional strategy of prioritizing effectiveness over efficiency. We needed to get aggressive and expand our market position, which required capital. </p><p>The market turned again later in the year, with demand for mortgages cooling. It was clear that it was time to go back to some of our old ways of doing things. We ditched the motto of being effective over being efficient. This meant a return to ruthless prioritization of our focus. We shifted away from investing so heavily in future scale as we wouldn’t need to tap into these systems for a few years.</p><p>I find it helpful to remember that market fluctuations are normal and unavoidable. Startups should scale up at times and scale back at others. It’s hard and painful. There’s nothing easy or enjoyable about being understaffed to meet customer demand on one side, or needing to let team members go on the other. But these ups and downs are natural and a necessary part of building an enduring company. In a startup, you’re always making hard decisions based on insufficient information. You’re never going to be able to perfectly predict the future. You need to keep making the best decisions you can — knowing all the while that you may be wrong and need to change course again once the future becomes clearer.</p>","comment_id":"63d45276ba7a5900012d1cb7","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/02/BlogTwitter-Image-Template--24-.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2023-01-27T14:38:46.000-08:00","updated_at":"2023-02-22T18:17:22.000-08:00","published_at":"2023-01-30T08:59:00.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":"Founder & CEO Aaron King expertly built Snapdocs through volatile market conditions and with minimal outside funding into the mortgage industry's leading digital closing platform, valued at $1.5B today. This is what he learned about navigating market cycles.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71158","name":"Leadership","slug":"leadership","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/leadership/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71170","name":"Startups","slug":"startups","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/startups/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"},{"id":"63d45389ba7a5900012d1ccf","name":"#622","slug":"hash-622","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/learnings-of-a-snapdocs-aaron-king-on-navigating-market-cycles/","excerpt":"Welcome to the fourth edition of Learnings of a CEO. You can read previous editions here. ","reading_time":9,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71af6","uuid":"686e1e7d-ad94-4ba6-9b90-31137e273ce7","title":"Hardware AMA with YC Partner Eric Migicovsky","slug":"hardware-ama-with-yc-partner-eric-migicovsky","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>YC Partner <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/ericmigi/">Eric Migicovsky</a> recently did a Hardware AMA with Startup School founders. It was so good that we wanted to share it here.</p>\n<p>Enjoy!</p>\n<hr />\n<p><strong>Software is easy to release and sell as a beta, but we’re worried it will be hard to sell our hardware if it looks too “prototype-y.”</strong></p>\n<p><strong>How can Hardware startups sell product as early as possible?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>Are preorders usually required, or is there a way to can sell product before setting up high-volume manufacturing?</strong></p>\n<p>I could help more if you describe what you’re working on. But in general, you should try to be as hacky and prototype-y as possible. I wrote about this here: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware//">https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/
/nFor example:<br />\n– Buy off the shelf hardware (eg RasPi + USB camera) and enclose it in a 3D printed case. Sell it. Many YC companies have done this in the past (eg Flock’s first gen device was exactly this – <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.flocksafety.com//">flocksafety.com, and Piccolo)<br />\n– Buy a device that already does 90% of what you want it to do, then work with the manufacturer to customize the last 10% (I explained it a bit in that TC post)</p>\n<p>You can sell preorders but I find it easier to simply build 2-3 units then actually sell them to early users. Then use the profits from that to build more units, sell them, repeat. That’s what we did for our first gen watch, inPulse. It worked great, we manufactured the first 1000 units one-by-one in the garage. Secondary benefit: you can immediately incorporate improvements into the product as you assemble them. Of the first 20 units we shipped – 4-5 were completely destroyed during shipping. We fixed that asap and never had the problem again.</p>\n<p><strong>Please tell your top must-read books for Hardware Startup entrepreneurs?</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.amazon.com/Piloting-Palm-Handspring-Billion-dollar-Handheld/dp/075678798X/">Piloting Palm</a> is the best, most accurate book about starting a consumer electronics company. A bit dated, but still highly recommended.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>+1 for <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.amazon.com/Hardware-Hacker-Adventures-Making-Breaking/dp/159327758X/">The Hardware Hacker by Bunnie</a>.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Also <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122//">Pirates of Silicon Valley</a>!</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>What tools/resources did you use to develop and manufacture prototype?</strong></p>\n<p>Our first prototype was just an Arduino (atmega) plus a screen from a Nokia 3310 smartphone. See the first proto here: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVZDx86Ft0o\%22>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVZDx86Ft0o For the next gen (called inPulse), we made the watch case out of CNC milled aluminium and designed a custom PCB. We actually manufactured this in our garage and sold several thousand units.</p>\n<p><strong>What did you change in your product after YC W11?</strong></p>\n<p>Biggest feedback we received from inPulse users was: longer battery life (was 24 hours), outdoor readable display, needs to work with iPhone, support for fitness tracking apps. We took the feedback and incorporated it into the first Pebble watch</p>\n<p><strong>Would be great if you share your YC Application</strong></p>\n<p>Sure, here it is: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CemwTH8UpInp6wqyv822Usu_PQR_Ho8s/view?usp=sharing\%22>https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CemwTH8UpInp6wqyv822Usu_PQR_Ho8s/view?usp=sharing
\nHow much did you spend on the Kickstarter campaign?</strong></p>\n<p>We spent $5k on prototypes for the first campaign. Borrowed a camera and filmed the video ourselves. No other spend.</p>\n<p><strong>When did you find the market fit, and how did YC and Kickstarter help you and your team with this?</strong></p>\n<p>YC heavily encouraged me to talk to my users more. I had definitely been bad at this before YC. We also moved much quicker during YC. PG asked why we didn’t have an SDK for devs to write apps for inPulse. I gave all kinds of excuses but eventually he just asked ‘how long would it take to write one?’. We said 2 weeks, and he convinced us to just f’n do it. We did and it turned out to be a critical part of product development that lead us towards Pebble (which reached product market fit).</p>\n<p><strong>Topic: How to be defensible?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>I applied for HAX accelerator and they rejected me saying: “Your product is good and innovative but not defensible. It can easily be copied”.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>My product is a completely mechanical wheelchair. How to proceed in this case for being defensible. Anything other than patents that can help me here?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>As without any electronics/codes/app I can’t go for achieving network effects. And being completely mechanical product, anyone can reverse engineer it.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>There also comes the fear of getting copied by someone in the market (soon if the product starts selling good).</strong></p>\n<p>One thing I’ve learned about rejections: listen to the ‘no’ but not the ‘why’. Often times investor (including YC) have no idea whether a company is going to be successful or not, but it’s easier to reject than accept. We come up with vague reasons why we shouldn’t fund the company and then move on. From the entrepreneurs side, it’s hard to understand because usually the reasons sound logical but the crazy part is the VC probably will not fund you even if you fix the problems that they outlined.</p>\n<p>Defensibility is my view is the ability to build some sort of moat around your product that either:<br />\na) disincentivizes customers from leaving for a competitor or<br />\nb) reduces/eliminates competition. There are many ways to build this into hardware companies:<br />\n– strong brand or great customer service<br />\n– hw built on a software platform<br />\n– access to a better supply chain, or cheaper/faster logistics<br />\n– many more…</p>\n<p>In your case, I bet the most defensible thing you could do is truly care about your customers base and move quickly to build products or features that your customers want. While this is not perfectly defensible, you’ll be surprised by how few companies actually do this 🙂</p>\n<p><strong>Assuming that your MVP is a SaaS that receives feedback from a few devices: what are your thoughts on going to market with a hardware solution where your core piece is a commercial single-board computer (Raspberry Pi Zero W)?</strong></p>\n<p>You are on the perfect track. Do exactly that. I wish more people would follow your exact plan! There is a ton of money to be made by using off the shelf hardware, writing great software and solving a real business need.</p>\n<p><strong>I build a scripting framework for bash which may have use cases for companies building systems on embedded Linux devices. Where can I find companies or strategic partners that are building hardware/IOT products on embedded Linux?</strong></p>\n<p>I recommend reading about some past attempts in this space. Most recently the $9 computer people (Next Thing Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer) tried to do this and it didn’t work out. Probably because they were making customer chips though.</p>\n<p>Honestly most hw companies are very resistant to using off the shelf software in their custom builds. Might be an extreme case of NIH. I am always surprised by few companies there are that make sw libraries or modules specifically for embedded systems.</p>\n<p>You can find potential customers on subreddits for embedded development, or on podcasts like EEVBlog or hackaday.</p>\n<p><strong>We’re a hardware startup building an interactive learning robot for kids. In the current funding environment, how much weight do you feel seed stage investors are assigning to a crowdfunding campaign?</strong></p>\n<p>I personally assign a lot more value to a company that has shipped <em>something</em> to paying customers. Doesn’t matter how many units, 1 is a great start! Shipping a product means the founders have:<br />\n– developed an idea into an actual solution to a problem<br />\n– figured out some basic marketing and found potential customers<br />\n– convinced those customers to part with their hard earned cash<br />\n– built and manufactured at least one working unit<br />\n– figured out the logistics of shipping and doing customer support<br />\n– have a happy customer</p>\n<p>It’s actually a lot cheaper (generally) to do this rather than execute a potentially expensive crowdfunding campaign. The best companies I’ve seen actually do the above, sell 50-100 units and then use the knowledge that they’ve gained from that process to create a fantastic crowdfunding campaign. They learn what potential customers actually want out of their product and how to correctly market it.</p>\n<p><strong>As you know, hardware startups are expensive. We are currently raising a SEED round and our ideal funding amount sometimes feels higher than we are comfortable asking for. When you are pitching your MVP product with a small number of users, how do you justify asking for the money required to take your hardware product from MVP to CVP? Especially when a software product can do it for so much less?</strong></p>\n<p>If you are already selling your product, why raise a seed round at all? Why not continue selling units to customers and grow your business organically off the profits from your sales? Raising money is super distracting from building product and talking to customers. I would recommend focusing on that.</p>\n<p>Hardware startups in general are slightly more expensive that sw startups, but actually not that much more. It does depend on what you’re making of course. We started shipping the first hundred units of the inPulse watch on total spend of less than $50k CAD in 2010.</p>\n<p><strong>We are also working on prototype of fitness band(Patch). We already released android fitness activity tracker app for the same with few active users.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>I want to know how to reduce the expenses while building an MVP & how to reach potential customers.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>Another question is what are the key points we have to consider while designing a hardware product?</strong></p>\n<p>What expenses do you have right now? Presumably not many. Hard to know what to reduce without knowing what you’re currently spending 🙂</p>\n<p>Key points: same as with a software product. Are you building something that people want? This above all is the most important thing you should be working on. Finding product-market fit. Everything (literally) else is secondary to this all important goal. Often times HW founders think that cost optimization, or beautiful industrial design, etc etc is important…at an early stage – it’s not. The only thing that truly matters is ‘do people want to pay for your product and do they like using it’</p>\n<p><strong>We are developing a 3Door device using 3D face reconstruction and recognition technology. 3Door will have features like video doorbell, video interphone, security camera and smart access system. In a one-liner, you will be able to unlock the door of your property using your face. We developed algorithm and now we are working on a hardware development. We have a prototype but now we are looking how to make it more <code>consumer friendly/fancy</code>.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>1) Do you have some advice on how to find a vendor for electronics and printed board instead of using Raspberry Pi3 or you think that Pi3 will work well in our case?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2) Also about the design of hardware, do you have a suggestion how to find the person that can help us with that task and anything else (advice/suggestions) related to this part will be very helpful for us.</strong></p>\n<p>Cool! I love smart door stuff. I’ve had a Lockitron on my door since Sept 2011 and haven’t carried a key since then 🙂</p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>Sounds like a Pi would be great for your use case. Just 3D print a nice case and make sure it can’t be easily stolen 🙂</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>which part of the hardware design do you need help with? You could try posting on this forum, another startup may know someone who could help. For example there are many industrial designers who can do case design remotely</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>Are there any resources you could recommend for quality control and do you have any tips for sourcing and working with manufacturers?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>I have an electronics client and they have ~10% return rate. Last batch they had a 24% return rate supposedly due to a defective batch. How can you tell between defective hardware and bad design? For QC, they have a team in China that checks random x items to determine the defect rate, but is there a way to automate the QC testing process, or more sophisticated and better ways for QC? Or is the only way having someone on the team there at the factory?</strong></p>\n<p>Is this an enterprise (b2b) or consumer product? Each group has different standards. If they are seeing 24% return rate, they have a big problem. One way to solve this is to institute 100% QC at the factory – meaning one of their team members, or someone they trust (not a factory working) is in-line at the factory checking each unit as it’s prepared. It’s a huge time sink and annoying but sometimes this is the only way to fix problems at the factory.</p>\n<p><strong>Do we need to get validation that the problem we are trying to solve is ‘hair on fire’-type before building the MVP? We are building an IOT cushion to correct user posture and increase physical activity. People we to talk so far don’t believe it as there is no product to show.</strong></p>\n<p>When looking for potential markets for a product I consider a venn diagram of 3 circles:<br />\n– severity of problem (how much money can be earned or saved)<br />\n– frequency of problem<br />\n– spending power (does the person with the problem have the power to buy a solution)</p>\n<p>The best hair on fire problems are people at the centre of all 3 circles. You can test your potential market by talking to customers and determining how willing they are to spend money to solve their problem. People with ‘hair on fire’ problems should be willing to prepay for a solution to their problem.</p>\n<p><strong>Outsourcing Advice: Which part of that hardware startup, one can be better off by getting it done by a third party and not necessarily from a founding team?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>Which one is preferred: Learning the activity self, and trying it first hand with the higher risk of failure at implementation or outsourcing it to a third party with the risk of beind dependent on outside at cost of some leverage?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>Things like Supply Chain, Web design, Industrial design, Aesthetics, Legal compliances etc.</strong></p>\n<p>This was a lesson I learned at the beginning of Pebble: it’s impossible to pay someone enough to care about your startup. You and your cofounders are the only ones who actually care. You are the ones who get up in the morning and throw 110% of your energy into making your vision come true.</p>\n<p>In the early days, I thought I could get by with contractors doing things but they invariably failed, charged too much (and then failed) or did shitty work. The most helpful non-founders were friends of mine who I con(vinc)ed into doing odd projects, helping with the early assembly line and such. Looking back, I wish I had offered to make them cofounders and encouraged them to come on full-time.</p>\n<p>In the early days, when money is super tight, founders have no choice but to do literally everything themselves. And that’s a good thing. Learning how to do something makes you better at outsourcing it later. Your naivety will also be an advantage – you may not know that something is ‘impossible’ and accidentally create a novel solution that an expert may have written off a long time ago. I benefited from a number of these situations.</p>\n<p>The one area that I would recommend cultivating is a network of advisors and startup founders that are a few years ahead of you in the process. These people are the best sounding boards for questions like ‘who should I use for FCC testing’ or ‘should I use Shopify or build my own ecommerce site?’ (answer: USE SHOPIFY).</p>\n<p><strong>I’d like to know the strategies you used to boost the success of your kickstarter campaign. If you had to do it all over again would you still go for crowdfunding (why/why not)? Thanks for your time.</strong></p>\n<p>People tend to overlook the fact that I started Pebble in 2008, shipped several thousand units of inPulse in 2010-2011 and only launched Pebble on Kickstarter in 2012. That was 5 years later. We learned a ton in those early years, improved the product and figured out how to market it. That’s the real reason why our Kickstarter was so successful in 2012. There are no silver bullets.</p>\n<p>If I were to do it all over again, I would definitely focus on shipping a working albeit alpha product to customers first, then only after shipping many units of that would I move onto a crowdfunding campaign.</p>\n<p><strong>In your experience, what is the minimum level of fidelity that a seed or an investor wants to see in a prototype/MVP? Any way to know it before pitching? Any recommendation? What was yours?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>Breaking the chicken and egg is really difficult, and wasting time on useless twitches is a very real problem for a hardware startup. But a fugly MVP seems to get you nowhere…</strong></p>\n<p>As a seed investor, I look first to see if the startup has shipped product to a paid customer. That’s the gold standard – if you can do that, you’re ahead of 99% of all other hw startups. So try to do that – don’t build a prototype just to impress investors.</p>\n<p>A fugly MVP with paying customers is no longer a prototype…it’s a real damn product with a market!</p>\n<p><strong>I and my friend are both web developers. Recently, we’re so passionate about the idea of autonomous robot charging. We know that it involves high technology of AI and Robotic, but we believe in the vision and so start learning AI and Self-driving, which has a lot of similarity to our idea in tech aspect. We really want to bring in another cofounder who has decent knowledge in tech.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>How do you bring in cofounders or hire technical people in these highly expertised engineering field?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>Since the learning curve is super steep, should we keep learning until we build a prototype to be more easily pitch in a new cofounder or go networking right the way, by just pitching the concept to try to bring in a new cofounder?</strong></p>\n<p>Since you both are already technical, you could consider researching and studying the technology and work to build it yourself. I’d recommend this route as it’s entirely within your control – you don’t rely on any outside forces to make it happen. Alternatively you could consider bringing on another cofounder, especially if you happen to have a friend or past colleague in the space! But oftentimes I find that technical and problem solving ability beats experience in a particular domain.</p>\n<p><strong>I’m a software engineer. I have 2 hardware product ideas but I don’t have the expertise on electronic/electrical field. What are the good ways I can find a like minded hardware expert as co-founder to research and bring out a product?</strong></p>\n<p>Sounds cool! What are the product ideas? Best way is to start by sharing your ideas with practically every person you meet. You never know who will be a) interested in the same stuff and b) have a complementary skill set that can help you make it a reality.</p>\n<p><strong>The key problem that I have right now is a manufacturing management. We got 6 months delay at the first batch and 4 months delay on the second production batch. Yes, we are still alive but I’m looking for a new manufacturer. I’m afraid that the problem is not in manufacturer but in my incompetence in managing them.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>QUESTION: Is there a proper way to deal (manage) with suppliers and manufacturers to get the product on time and with the expected quality?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>I know that we can set strict terms in a written contract/agreement, to cover the risks, but the manufacturer increases the price and increase the lead-time. Also, because the manufacturing cost is 2x-3x lower than the MSRP, I can’t assign the direct delay losses to the manufacturer as an equation MSRP * PO Quantity = Fines.</strong></p>\n<p>We had the same type of problems with Pebble – long lead time components really constrained us. If I were to do it again, I will try to design products specifically with easier to source components.</p>\n<p>Have you traveled to visit your supplier in person? Sometimes it takes in-person pressure to kick people into gear. Contracts will never have the right effect, they have to sense that you care and will stop at nothing to get it done. So it might be time to get on a plane and camp out at the factory until they get moving.</p>\n<p><strong>Do you have any advice on pitfalls hardware startups should avoid as they mature? I’m not sure if it’s a subject you want to broach as Pebble had a large sales success but was sold to Fitbit. There are also a lot of consumer electronics companies that do IPO but struggle to maintain financial success afterwards (notable exceptions exist).</strong></p>\n<p><strong>I just would like an idea of what to expect on the road ahead of a hardware startup after prototyping, manufacturing, and sales no longer become issues to contend with. Much thanks!</strong></p>\n<p>Really depends on the type of company. Consumer or enterprise? One-time sale or recurring subscription? The best advice for early stage companies is ‘how not to fail’ by Jessica Livingston <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-not-to-fail//">https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-not-to-fail/ and ‘how not to die’ by PG <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html/">http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
/nHardware startups usually die for the same proximate cause as non HW cos: they run out of money. It’s exacerbated for HW startups because they have inventory which locks of their cash early in the sales cycle. If I were to recommend one thing for hw startups – understand your cash conversion cycle and make sure you have the right ‘business model to company’ fit, which is just as important as PMF for hw companies.</p>\n<p><strong>My question is about the ethics of manufacture: Do you have any insights on how we could be more mindful of product impact on a long term basis?, the possible impact it could have on the planet, the ethics of the suppliers & manufacturing processes and long term repercussions, are there any tangible ways (you may have found) to measure or calculate the future impact of a product so it can be negated right at design stage? any resources would be very useful, as it is my goal to make my company among the most ethical on this planet.</strong></p>\n<p>Modern design thinking is centered around something called ‘cradle to grave’ product design. So you consider the materials going into your product and how the user will deal with the product after it’s lifespan is up. The easiest way to build this into your product is to design it to last and to be repairable. Then the user can continue to use it long into the future.</p>\n<p><strong>What’s the best way to outsource embedded electronics prototyping? Also, what resources do you recommend when looking for a manufacturing partner in China?</strong></p>\n<p>I wrote a post precisely about this: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware//">https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/
/nIt seems to be a catch-22 situation for a new company, as protecting product IP internationally, including design patents, brand IP etc, is cost-prohibitive at an early stage, yet without these in place, launching a product puts the founders in a non defensible position. How would you recommend tackling this challenge especially when your focus is creating a strong international ‘Brand image’?</strong></p>\n<p>I would not worry about IP in the early stage except for a very specific set of products (mainly pharmaceuticals). If you really care about patents then file a super broad provisional patent for $500 to $1000. This gives you 1 year period to file a full patent for anything that you actually end up building.</p>\n<p>“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”</p>\n<p><strong>My company is working on remote control cars for car sharing companies. We’re remotely piloting cars so that there’s no need for an in car driver. Right now we are in the very early stages of development but we had a few questions.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>1. Our team eventually will need to recruit someone with a mechanical engineering background as my co-founder and I are a bit weak in that department, but we’ve been debating on if that person should be an early hire or a founder. Do you have any advice on how we should evaluate that distinction?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2. Right now we’re bootstrapping development and we believe we have enough savings to get to an MVP though it might be cutting it close. Is there an ideal time to start the fundraising process?</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>Essentially the first 4-5 people at any company are cofounders. Sometimes they have the title, sometimes not. But they effectively are and should be treated as such with large amounts of equity. Think of it this way – if the first 4-5 people aren’t spending every waking second thinking about how to make the company a success, who else is going to? If you are relying on them to do this, they should be compensated as such. Some people need to make more money for personal reasons, that’s okay but the important thing is they still have a large % of equity. Don’t be stingy with equity to someone who is putting in 20% of the effort to make your company a raging success.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>No, fundraising basically always sucks. I would try to optimize for earning revenue over trying to time fundraising. If you earn revenue you have cash to fund further growth and the happy side effect of making investors want to invest in you!</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>1. How essential is it to figure out the manufacturing aspect very early on versus just making an MVP prototype as soon as you can?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2. Where can we go to read/learn about hardware startups and their product-market-fit process, and especially, how they scaled effectively? (including Pebble)</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>Speed speed speed! The one thing a startup needs to accomplish is prove that they have product market fit. Everything else is secondary. So make the MVP asap!</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>This is a great blog by a friend of mine. Fellow HW founder: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://marcbarros.com//">http://marcbarros.com/
/n/n/nWhat is your opinion in engaging product design companies if we can’t build the complete hardware all by ourselves? What are the documents needed to protect our IP?</strong></p>\n<p>First I would try to build it all yourselves without working with product design companies. Not because of IP, but because they’ll bleed you dry with fees and are generally slow. Now I don’t know what you’re trying to build (feel free to share!) but in general, I’d recommend pursuing a path more like this: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware//">https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/
/n (W12)Mobile applications for the construction industry.
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Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.
