Beginner Startups: Stop Suffering

This is a translation of an article from TechCrunch, written by Paul Stomatio, co-founder of the Picplum photo printing service supported by Y Combinator. In this impressively motivating post, Paul talks about how he thinks start-ups should be done right .

A small excursion into history. Do you remember the first time you connected to the Internet? Even before your computer was always connected and when you needed to plan online. The joy of seeing new browsers, for example, the appearance of Phoenix. Your excitement when you first tried working on the Internet with your new high-speed connection. It was a time when websites rarely used JavaScript, and DHTML was the buzzword of the year. Now it's hard to believe that Chrome is only a few years old.

When I first came to California for an internship at Yahoo! (news of which Valleywag immediately exploded . Remember this site?), I knew that in the end I would have to move here. I returned there every year visiting friends and praising startups .

Every time I come to San Francisco and look at the horizon, I remember that I was lucky to be at that time and place where I so long wanted to be, next to such a vibrant and strong technical community. And I'd rather not screw up, wasting my time and working unproductively. I'm not here to discuss your ideas for start-ups, give advice on Backbone.js, talk about how to find your first customers and advise how to set up your profile in AngelList. I just want to say a few words about how to work. This message is for novice startups about how the hell to do everything right.
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It all started with my tweet. I was annoyed that my friends, who had just started working on a startup, gave up. After more than 150 retweets, I decided to tell you more about my ideas here.

I'm going to teach a course for beginning startups, which is called “Stop suffering garbage, keep up the work.”

- Paul Stamatiou (@Stammy) April 23, 2012

We live in an amazing time - perhaps the ideal time to build a company . And it hurts me to see aspiring entrepreneurs miss this huge chance, falling into the trap of what it is cool to do a startup, participating in endless meetings and spending too much time on unnecessary things ( known as problems with Maserati ), while they are completely not busy fanatical programming . Stratapes are hard work. This may result in the need to look for work, or it may result in a wide smile and section 280G in the tax return, but somehow you will gain a lot of experience.

Your work days are sacred

Here, think about the possible costs. You could be satisfied, making a fortune with six zeros, but you decided to screw up a fever with your startup. It takes courage. Then why do you give up and waste your time? This is not work from 9 to 5. You only hurt yourself if you do not understand this and do not make your ass work. Please avoid all these endless meetings you go to just for the meetings themselves. As Michael Arrington says : "Use all your free time to start spending it with serious people, doing serious things."

Anyone want to meet in a week? If they are not related to your business, cancel them , or move them over the weekend. If they really want to meet, they will also donate their weekends.

However, I will make one exception. I am a big fan of pay-ahead ideas. If someone needs real help, I am always ready to lend a hand. In this way, I return the assistance that people like George Zachary, Dan Martell, Hiten Shah and Noah Kagan provided to aspiring entrepreneurs like me, spending countless hours with them as long as I can remember.

Get ready for ups and downs

You will have bad days. Getting used to this will not be easy for any new entrepreneur. One day, I began to monitor my daily mood for several months while I was working on my last startup ( this was when we raised funds ).

Find your chip

This is what Marissa Mayer talked about when she told how to prevent burnout and I think it looks like the truth. What do you need to do every week in order to keep your mind clear ? It helps me to run a few hours a week and rarely see shows of electronic dance music with my business partner. These chips make me feel more energetic and happy, which you can't say about attending endless technical meetings and conferences.

What is your plan?

Picplum is my third startup and if there is any significant difference between my latest startups, this is definitely our planning. I’ll be the first to say that I have the bad habit of always wanting to build something first. New idea? Let's start with javascript. Wrong! Fortunately, I have a wonderful co-founder who keeps me in check and reminds me to define the tasks first. If you are not lucky enough to create a product that solves your own problems and you are the target user, you need to take a step back and throw away all your assumptions.

Choose any project management tool and start using it. Whether it be Trello, Hackpad, Asana, Flow, Sprintly or something else - just pick one. Continue to track every idea, wish or mistake, but keep a close eye on priorities. Do not allow anyone to use their own systems, because they will never restrain Asana and will always be one step behind.

Not sure if it's really worth your time to fix it right now? Kissmetrics Hiten Shah once told me a few years ago that put me in a dead end:

For those customers who email small requests for adding features and settings: do not correct anything until you receive an email from one short-tempered user in the form of a whole essay.

I learned one thing about myself: when we decide how long a new function or update will take, I most often think about everything connected with it and write down every step. This applies at least to everything related to the user interface. For example, we recently developed and created a new common page for the new Picplum . When I first started working on it, I thought it would be a simple half-day project, which I would simply connect with the current layouts and maybe add one main view. Easy.

Although this could be the way we would choose, we decided to take a step back and define the purpose of this page. What do we want the user to do right away? Does he need to use the same templates as on other pages? Then followed a productive 30-minute chat with a few sketches, as a result of which we got a much better understanding that we wanted the user to get. I figured 5 options in Photoshop, worked a bit on the design and made one, which we then chose.

You can achieve a more stable result if you change your idea of ​​the duration of this task from a hasty “I need to do it today” to a more effective “let's plan it and take a little more time if necessary”. The best product and the best code that you don’t have to redo twice later.

This method has another side: to spend days and weeks, “planning” a single function and thinking that this is the real work. To think about how to do something does not mean the action itself. I have seen too many startups who really like all the notes they did last week about what they wanted to do. Just go do them, and surprise me with your real progress .

Get more feedback

What I used to do all this time: to spend many hours and days, ideally doing the work, only to understand that we have two different points of view on how the parts should work together.

Get feedback as often as possible.

But how can you quickly get feedback, so as not to seem indulgent and not beg for updates in the affairs of the co-founders? Just make it a habit. When one of us asks: “What are you working on?” Or “How are you doing with X?” It is unchanged “why the hell is he doing this”, but only some friendly oversight and an offer to help. Make sure you and your co-founder control each other with this simple habit.

What is good about these small status updates here and there? Less meetings.

Keep it clear and iterative. For me, it's often sending a screenshot to Campfire from Akshay or turning my monitor to make it easier to talk about something. The only thing that attached to me was Jeffrey Veen's Speech on Design for Disasters . He talked about how to conduct product reviews and keep them constructive:

Review is not a forum for expression. This is a forum for solving problems.

Instead of saying “I don't like blue,” ask, “For what reason should it be blue?”. Ask if this is a constructive conversation or not. If you need to make a decision, do it. If you need ideas, clarify this and engage in constructive conversation.

Be decisive

There is nothing worse than trying to paint a new feature or product and end up with even more questions. “Yes, we can do it” is not an acceptable answer. Entrepreneurs should be able to make quick decisions and move forward with their help. Deferrals will not make it easier to make a decision (unless, of course, you wait a few days for more detailed data on A / B testing or more complete visitor statistics for your data management decision). Make a decision, write it down in the Asana list, appoint those responsible, and get back to work.

When you get stuck

If you can’t figure it out for 20 minutes, ignore it, if it doesn’t stop you from moving on, or ask your co-founders. My co-founder, Akshay, succeeded in fulfilling this 20-minute rule. If you spend 2 hours trying to properly link events together or find out why your optimized RequireJS build does not work, you both waste your time and do not use your resources at full power. In terms of resources, I mean your smart co-founders. A fresh look always helps.

Respect private space

Think of how you work better . It may look a little unusual, but when I really want to do the work, I start closing the clock in OS X, close everything that can produce sounds (except for Spotify, of course), close all browser tabs that are not related to work, and make sure that nothing distracts my mind, for example, small urgent tasks that need to be solved first. Perhaps you need to improve your workplace .


Make sure you know what you and your co-founder need in order to be productive. If this means lining up at work every day and it does not drive you crazy, then so be it.

Good luck!

You can be bad at many things ... and as long as you stay focused on what value you carry to users and customers, and you have something unique and valuable ... you go through it all.

- Mark Zuckerberg