Startup Learnings

Things I’ve learned working in startups mid-sized startups. Recurring engineering & process patterns and learnings on how to work efficiently.

• If someone has you make a report and don’t read it, that effort and money was wasted. Stuff it down their throats, or don’t do it for them in future. “make sure the person who asked for it reads it”
• Single shared source of truth. No single local excel sheets. Not multiple reports without context. single source of truth.
• Document as if you’re leaving the company tomorrow, or your efforts will be undone.
• Get happy path working, make it as wide as possible, then worry about edge cases.
• Spend as much time spreading the content as you do making the content. Spend as much time marketing a feature as you do making the feature. The same amount of time should be spent spreading the product as building the product.
• If you don’t know, have a go!
• Take a mile-high view at the beginning of meetings, remind ourselves of what we’re trying to achieve here big-picture, what the story so far was, then dive into details.
• More water through existing pipes.
• Task was to build a new commercial loans product. But then we found out that for the existing commercial savings product the sales team
  • didn’t know who had funded the leads
  • were demoing with an empty broken account So we gave them better analytics to monetize the existing work, then built the new things.
• To start a big business, you first need to start a small business
• Follow the revenue.
• When building a new thing y that doesn’t fit into existing thing x, build the new thing y on a greenfield, and then merge x into it over time, piecemeal.