They say hindsight is 20/20, and perhaps no one on the planet has better vision than founders of tech startups looking back as they head out the door to bigger and better things. Some of this insight comes from regret – decisions they wish they had made differently – but a lot of it comes from things they’ve always understood in their gut but can only confirm when they have some time for reflection.
Leaving can be bittersweet. Here is some wisdom we’ve recently gleaned from two influential tech founders/thought leaders about their departures.
David Mack, SketchDeck Founder and CTO
David Mack is a jack of all trades (his LinkedIn resume includes “lighting designer” for theatre!), and when he set out to form the core SketchDeck team, his focus was on solving problems for business users. This vision helped propel SketchDeck to become a product embraced by many corporate and business users.
But at the same time, solving problems for other business users created many new ones for the teams at SketchDeck. According to Mack, many of these issues resulted from choices he made early on. “Startups are agile boats, but the decisions you make on day one do have rippling consequences over time,” Mack revealed in this post on Medium. “I now appreciate that the infrastructure, frameworks and languages you choose will stick with you for a really long time (hence why cloud providers can offer $100,000 initial credit).”
Technical infrastructure choices, like which service provider to go with or which database tools to use, may seem to be simple, with only short-term consequences. In reality, they can be constricting. Rarely is switching to something else easy. “As the company grows there is an incredibly strong pressure to build more features and subsystems, each one further locking you into your choices. As you gain more momentum the feature-pressure grows and stopping to re-write things is unaffordable and unthinkable.”
In a similar vein, Mack cautions startup founders to be incredibly picky about the people they choose to work for their team. Ideally, they should not hire until there is a well-defined need that they are “completely desperate” to fulfill.
They should also avoid hiring people to perform work the startup doesn’t quite understand yet, since these people will dictate the solutions used, while making the company dependent upon their work. Just like committing to a technology stack, people can be easy to onboard but hard to terminate.
Finally, Mack advises being diligent about testing, automating the testing process and encouraging your developers to build their own tests.
Rand Fishkin, Moz Co-Founder
In an excellent interview on Databox’s Ground Up podcast, Fishkin revealed a few hard-won truths that many startup founders may not want to hear.
First, don’t seek out venture capital funding unless your product is a real moonshot that needs extensive support to become profitable. “Venture capital is rocket fuel,” Fishkin explained, paraphrasing a tweet he had read that morning. “If you’re building a car, or a house, or even a jet plane but one that doesn’t plan to go into orbit – rocket fuel is dangerous. It’s bad for you.”
The issue is that investors want their rocket fuel to power something that can really take them into out-of-this-world profitability and popularity. If you don’t end up becoming the next Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, they’ll consider it money wasted. So don’t seek out VC funding unless you are willing to tolerate the pressure that comes with it.
Secondly, strong digital marketing comes from focusing on the basics. Moz was a successful blog before it became a service, which helped it gain traction quickly. “The fact that we already had the audience meant that we didn’t have to get particularly good at marketing to get our first 100 customers or even our first 2,000 customers.”
Afterwards, the company always invested in its website first before anything else – something Fishkin recommends all larger organizations do. If you’re smaller, an email marketing list is more important. Ignore social media in most cases, since the platform owners are interested in keeping people on their site, not directing them to yours.
Hopefully these observations from two successful tech founders can help inform the decisions you make for your organization.
Be sure to check out our blog for more insights relevant to ISVs.
