Founders

One mistake I see founders making (including myself) is improving internal infra to prepare to scale by X% - your primary focus should be scaling first, then building the infra

🕯️They/them. Scaled cos from 0-$300k in arr, 7-35 employees, 0-100k users. Now I’m making joyful candles at humankindcandles.com

Well, at a previous co, we spent a lot of time building a faster indexer of NPM. It was great for internal use, and impressive that one person had built a better indexer than NPM themselves, but ultimately didn’t  get us more customers. It definitely could’ve been a lead gen tool too but just didn’t push the needle forward.

Right now the mistake I made is looking for a different manufacturer for my vessels to make them prettier, without addressing that my demand is  not growing at an ideal rate. 

Both times I was too concerned about making a beautiful product “just in case” and sacrificing my brain space to grow the company.

What if that infra is a part of your product? Candles don’t expire either, so I’m not sure about universality here. What were some scaling sins you made once but never twice?

tech debt is a problem that you need to face in this journey, but still much better than building something optimally that no one wants

Pre-mature optimization, gets them every time!