I wanted to share what a typical week looks like as a co-founder of a pre-seed startup that hasn’t been announced yet. This is a new adventure for me and I look forward to sharing more with you.
Note: These areas of work are divided among the founding team, so individually the “plate” may be different for each co-founder – unless you are a solo founder.
Everything else doesn’t matter more than what you’re building.
Don’t obsess over team culture, brand, forecasts, or even competitors.
The only thing that matters is that you are building something new, innovative, and solving a real problem for a specific customer.
What this means is testing and using your own product every day, obsessing over the details of the problem, the user experience, the data, and the flows.
It’s supposed to be painful at first. Early-stage software is ugly. It’s full of bugs. It’s too manual and the opposite of pretty. If it’s not, that’s a red flag. Beautiful means you’re spending too much time on table stakes and polish when you should be focusing on solving harder problems. Polish comes after innovation.
Yes, early-stage software is rough, but getting through this phase is absolutely crucial before anything else. You’re building an MVP that’s never been built before; it takes time to understand it and build something of unique value.
Unless and until you have sticky customers, traction, or some strong signals of product-market fit, your product should be your #1 focus without a doubt.
The first step is impossible without this step. The only way to know what to build is to validate it with people who fit your PCI (ideal customer profile). This is something that many founders get wrong. Your first users have to be your target buyer, not anyone in your network. Otherwise, you will get empty positive feedback like “good idea” or “I like it”, but what you want to hear is “when will it be available?”, and “how much does it cost?”.
Keep track of these calls, create a call pipeline, and take 10+ calls a week in the early stages. Get your product and engineering team on these calls, share recordings and notes, and always do demos.
In the early stages of software development, prioritization is done by building for specific customer use cases and testing. You cannot build a product in isolation from end users. See the next phase.
From your customer discovery calls, a percentage of your customers will be ready to try your early-stage software.
This group should fit into your PCI and be comfortable with early technology adoption. Be prepared to give them plenty of pushback and warning. Your job as a founder is to sell them on the vision enough that they can overlook the bumps in the road and want to continue using the product over time.
These beta tests validate that what you’re building matches what you’re demonstrating. This is rarely the case.
But a tight feedback loop is critical to uncovering key product issues that need to be solved in engineering and that might have been overlooked in the design process.
Additionally, this testing phase is building your first library of case studies and logos that you will use in your GTM (go to market) launch.
Fundraising takes a long time and happens in waves: everything is quiet and calm and then suddenly everything happens at once. Venture capital firms talk to each other. So when they hear about an interesting deal or a deal that has been signed, they all come running and your calendar fills up quickly.
This distracts you from building the product and testing it with users. But don’t rush it. Take the time you need to properly prepare your company for success, with good conditions and a short enough path to reach PMF (product market fit).
I have found that early-stage investors are instrumental in helping you shape the narrative of what you are building, which you can use to inspire your customers and early recruits.
It is naive and arrogant to think that you have no competition.
Unless you’re building in a completely blue ocean, you’re inevitably going to have competition and your users and investors will ask you about this (i.e. what’s your moat?).
If your answer is weak, they won’t believe in you or your product. For example, if you’re on a call and someone listens to your pitch and says: “Oh, this sounds very similar to…” and name a competitor you’ve never heard of, you’ve already lost credibility.
You need to be an absolute expert in the market you’re working in and be able to clearly and concisely explain how your product is different. You can’t do this with confidence if you haven’t studied your competition. Don’t just look at them.
Spend time identifying niches, gaps, strengths and weaknesses in the market that you can use to guide you in early conversations. Reminder, this is only 4% of your time.
You should always think about the first 1-3 critical hires to fill any skills gaps in the founding team and keep them warm for when funding comes in, but in the early stages of building a startup, it should just be you and your co-founders and a handful of contractors.
You want to be efficient and find the innovation core to exploit before hiring ETC. Small teams move faster. Don’t risk adding too many cooks to the kitchen too soon and slowing down your decisions.
Go slow on hiring until you have a clearer signal of where to build, until you’re confident it will scale well. Then look for people you’ve worked with in the past, who you trust in times of chaos, and who you know do good work. Bring them in with equity.
In terms of culture, co-founders must be able to trust each other, build friendships, get used to each other’s way of working, and, above all, learn to disagree.
But don’t invest too much in building a team culture before you even have a product. The best team building I’ve seen is done in service of a beautiful, solid product. When everyone is interested in the product and the customer, not the culture. You’re building a very early-stage company with a handful of people. Don’t get distracted by LinkedIn fluff.
Poor branding at the start can be a hindrance to convincing early adopters to try your product – you want people to take your company seriously. Some tactics to achieve this include getting the dotcom for your domain, spending some time designing a decent logo, and crafting a professional-looking cover or landing page that tells a compelling story.
But don’t spend too much time building your brand, because in the beginning, the brand is the product. A brand without a quality product is an empty promise.
In later stages, this can change: when a company has several products, the brand carries the products. The unifying story is the brand, and it becomes a major focus of investment. But in the early stages, the brand is malleable and has to follow the product, hence the brand being 2% versus 45% of the product at this stage.
I’m going to piss some people off here, but there are a few areas that are intentionally missing from this list (i.e. 0%) at this pre-seed stage: Marketing, Product Management, Customer Success, Sales, Support, and BizOps. Co-founders are already wearing versions of these hats at this stage, but as formal areas to prioritize, they come later, with scale.
Ultimately, the final conclusion of this post is this:
What do you spend most of your time doing?
If it’s not Product and Customers, maybe it’s time to review your priorities.
Sam Altman puts it this way: Focus on building a 10X awesome product before you do anything else, because everything else becomes “significantly easier when you have a great product.”
