
Having a launched product is hard - martinkl
http://martin.kleppmann.com/2010/12/21/i-didnt-really-enjoy-y-combinator.html
======
jnovek
Something that I think a lot of people don't realize about YC is that it's not
very fun. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of great YC memories, but the
pressure was enormous. We had yet to raise and so we were operating on
shoestring. My co-founder and I fought more during YC than any other time,
before or after (and often over nonsensical and petty stuff).

That being said, you don't go through YC because it's fun. You go through it
because it's good for your company. It gave us exposure to investors who
probably wouldn't have given two first-time-entrepreneur yokels from Minnesota
the time of day. We met a lot of people who had been through the pain of
building a company before.

More than anything YC forced us to take a hard look at our company and a hard
look at ourselves and decide that we could do this thing even when it wasn't
always fun.

~~~
kirinkalia
This gets to a critical question about incubators -- what is the value you
actually get from the process? (the followup is, how does it compare to what
was promised?) As you point out, "You go through it because it's good for your
company," and that mainly means meeting the right people and figuring out
where your company is going.

Martin, was YC ultimately good for your company even though Rapportive was in
a different stage than your batchmates? Would you do it again?

~~~
martinkl
YC was (and is continuing to be) very valuable for us. Sachin Rekhi has
written up a good summary, which I broadly agree with:
[http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2009/02/26/the-value-of-
the-...](http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2009/02/26/the-value-of-the-
ycombinator-experience) \-- and I would add to the list of benefits the
massive network of the YC partners, who will happily make valuable intros.

Many other companies in our batch soon launched too, so we soon all ended up
at pretty much the same stage.

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edw519
_Our product development was almost stalled for months on end._

Then you're doing something wrong.

Scaling, debugging, refactoring, customer support, prospect interaction, and
even raising investment must all be done _in support of_ product development,
not _instead of_ product development.

I am a notorious single tasker who loves coding more than anything else, so I
used to have the same problem. If some other task took priority, all product
development stopped.

Until a artist friend of mine told me the secret of his success, 4 words I
have never forgotten, "I paint every day."

Now I code every day. No matter what else happens.

With 3 of you, I would expect that at least one of you could keep building
_something_ every day without any of you dropping any of the other eggs you
must juggle.

~~~
martinkl
Yes, we probably were doing something wrong. That's the point of the post: to
explain how easy it is to get into a situation where you are making little
progress, and our story of getting out of it. I sincerely hope that others
will be able to cope better when faced with a similar situation.

It's easier said than done, though. Development takes significant ramp-up
time; if you spend 10 hours a day on it, you get much more than 5 times as
much done than if you spend 2 hours a day. We already did what we could in
terms of distributing workload amongst people to minimize context-switching.

~~~
edw519
_It's easier said than done, though._

No kidding!

Sometimes I think that the definition of success has less to do with
intelligence, hard work, and breaks and more to do with finding a way to do
that which is easier said than done.

Didn't mean to be negative in grandparent, just to take advantage of sharing
some of the best advice I ever got. There's a lot to be said for making
progress every day, no matter how hard it is.

Best wishes for your continued success!

~~~
pzxc
Just wanted to add I concur wholeheartedly, that's why my #1 commandment is
"make progress every day". <http://pzxc.com/ten-commandments-of-business-and-
life>

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rdl
I think it's interesting how different people view the same tasks as pleasant
or unpleasant. I find breaking things, scaling infrastructure, and talking to
(potential and current) customers vastly more pleasant than planning/managing
development or writing code. Logistics (for moving bits, boxes, and people) is
great fun too.

Recruiting is amazingly fun when you're not already under the gun for a
specific position, because it's basically selling your idea and meeting
someone new. It sucks if you're behind and need to hire a lot of people
quickly, because you're going to have to make a lot of compromises you
shouldn't be making, and you know it.

I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy admin, accounting, and
immigration bureaucracy, but those people are not me.

Maybe figuring out what things your team enjoys (and presumably is good at
doing) should inform what kind of product you build more than it usually does.

~~~
benologist
It all depends on the circumstances. I love hacking away on Playtomic and
scaling it and talking to my users or potential ones, and everything else.

Until things go wrong. Logs aren't being processed, 100s of megabytes a minute
are piling up, shit keeps on crashing... compile again ... deploy again ...
hope this time the problem's fixed ... hope it really is this time cause it's
2am and I've been up since 7am. It looks like it's working finally ... I'm
going to bed at last ... if it's not fixed tomorrow will be a fuck of a day
racing to get those logs processing again before that server runs out of disk
space, while people ask when their reports will be updating again or tell me
there's some problem.

Then it's not so fun.

------
gnok
On a somewhat un-related note, I am interested in hearing about your
immigration issues. I realize an immigration attorney's advice is probably
golden, but I would like to hear what visa categories you considered and
applied for and what problems you encountered while applying/gathering
paperwork.

~~~
martinkl
I was planning another post on that topic :) in a nutshell, we got H-1B visas.
With a good attorney the paperwork is mostly tedium, but lots and lots of
tedium. The process is very opaque and full of uncertainties.

~~~
blizkreeg
If you think H-1B is tedium and kafkaesque, wait until you have to apply for
permanent residency :)

~~~
ameyamk
I am also interested in knowing how u get H1 when u start a start up.
Immigration issues are keeping us away from doing anything full time.

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Sukotto
Were you able to leverage the YC "old boys" network? (I mean that in the
positive sense, not the negative one)

That is, did having access to talented former-YC people help you get over the
technical humps and hurdles? I believe one of the main pros to joining YC
(apart from getting mentoring from PG et. al.) is that many of the people that
went before you are on tap to help resolve things in a "pay it forward"
fashion.

~~~
martinkl
Yes. The guys at Heroku were incredibly helpful, to name just one example.

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davidu
What does any of this have to do with YCombinator? It sounds like you just
needed to hire a customer support rep and scale your organization.

~~~
frossie
Erm, the OP was explaining that if you have already launched, your YC
experience differs from what you might expect. Fair point I thought, and might
be useful for those considering the timing of their YC application. I have
noticed that some people feel that having launched already gives them more
"cred" in the process, and the OP points the downside to that.

~~~
ScottBurson
The funny thing about it, though, is that most of their problems during this
time came from the fact that they _were_ getting traction. I think these
probably pale against the problems one has when one is _not_ getting traction.
Yes, not having users lets you keep building the product... but this is of
rather less comfort when you're simultaneously wondering if anyone is going to
use it.

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mmaunder
"Acquisition of liquidity"?

<http://adam.heroku.com/images/posts/startup_curve.jpg>

Are all YC startups encouraged to get acquired?

~~~
pg
Trevor put that on the graph as a joke. Actually all the labels are ones
Trevor added as jokes, except the "Trough of sorrow."

~~~
elblanco
For a second I thought that was graph of the company I work for...right now
we're in the wiggles of false hope having just come out of a very rough crash
of ineptitude under a previous administration.

------
razin
Your ordeal with immigration reminded me of the importance of the startup
visa.

------
batasrki
On an unrelated note, that whiteboard graph disturbed me a bit. Does every YC
startup hope to get bought out? Why would that even be a goal or something to
aspire to?

~~~
pclark
it says "liquidity" which can imply IPO.

------
araneae
On a mostly unrelated note, I installed rapportive and discovered that someone
had signed up for a social network with my e-mail address that wasn't me. So I
had the site send me a new password and deleted the account. Why do people
_do_ that?

------
jedc
Great post, Martin. In chatting with other YC starrtups that had already
launched, is this a common feeling?

The entrepreneurial mindset seems more geared toward building cool stuff,
which makes the next stage of scaling/support much less fun.

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rick_2047

        * Answering many, many support emails and tweets
        * Raising our seed round
        * Stopping our infrastructure from collapsing under our user growth
        * Responding to press and bloggers
        * Reading resumés and interviewing job candidates
        * Fixing gnarly bugs in production
        * Applying for visas, so that we could work in the US
        * Attending YC dinners and office hours
    

How is all this not moving the product forward? I am genuinely curious, to an
outsider like me, this is what is the growth of the company. All these things
have to be done one time or another.

~~~
LiveTheDream
The article mentions other companies frequently rolling out new features. In
that context, the product wasn't moving forward because no new features were
added during the YC phase. While scaling and bugfixing probably count as
moving the product forward, the rest is arguably moving the _company_ forward.

~~~
rick_2047
wouldn't the company die if there is too much focus on the product part and
not much on the selling part. I mean if you stop customer support, many users
will move out. Also if the solution fails often, why the heck will one use it?

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shareme
Martin, I enjoyed the post as it was from a different perspective..

The product is great too I use it every day..

