We could easily have slammed together off the shelf components and potentially grown at a similar rate. Also potentially not, sales is hard!
Seeing founders with less care for detail and more for the sheer growth of their user base was impressive and deflating.
It felt like everyone I compared myself to, they were devoting 90% of their time to selling and 10% to building.
I share the feeling. There's success stories of companies doing the same (e.g. Notion, Replit), so I know it's not completely off-book, but I constantly wonder whether there is downside to that approach of focusing on sales in the beginning. I can guess things like less likely to be innovative, but is that true? Maybe since they average being alive longer than the ones that focused on product in the beginning, any potential downsides are negated in the long term (e.g. just innovate later with the infinite runway they now have). Would love to see some study/survey on this.
Seeing founders with less care for detail and more for the sheer growth of their user base was impressive and deflating.
It felt like everyone I compared myself to, they were devoting 90% of their time to selling and 10% to building.
I share the feeling. There's success stories of companies doing the same (e.g. Notion, Replit), so I know it's not completely off-book, but I constantly wonder whether there is downside to that approach of focusing on sales in the beginning. I can guess things like less likely to be innovative, but is that true? Maybe since they average being alive longer than the ones that focused on product in the beginning, any potential downsides are negated in the long term (e.g. just innovate later with the infinite runway they now have). Would love to see some study/survey on this.