John Rush, Neo Kim, and AlphaSignal AI posted new notes
͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
| | | | John Rush, Neo Kim, and AlphaSignal AI posted new notes | |  | | | | I built 30 startups in 20 years. VC-backed, Bootstrapped, Apps, SaaS, B2B, B2C, AI Agents. 99 mistakes I regret making: Doing consumer apps. The failure rate here is 100x of b2b rates, nearly a lottery. Raising VC money too early. It shifted all our focus from "happy users" to the headcount, media coverage, conferences, LOIs, partnerships, networking and the next funding round. Hiring too early. Employees and contractors are like an average nanny for your kid. They do the bare minimum, they dont take any risk. But not taking risks means no innovation. Only founders have enough incentives to take risks. SO the founders should do all the work until they gain traction. 4. Ignoring SEO. None of the people in my network did SEO. We all thought it was something for later and we kept postponing it forever. Paid ads were easy and predictable and having too much money in the bank basically spoils you. 5. Ignoring content marketing. Never took blogging seriously. Big mistake. I thought blogging is a full time job, but it's actually possible to spend an hour a day on it and still do a good job. 6. Social Media Marketing. This is my biggest regret. I started using X just 2 years ago. Nearing 100k followers now. What if I started 20 years ago? Could I have 1M followers now? I think so. 7. Skipping idea validation. I'd always assume for the audience. Anticipate what they need. It almost never turned out to be true. My best projects were those I thought will fail and failed projects had my highest hopes at the start. 8. Hiring managers. I haven't yet seen any useful manager in a startup. They might be useful for corporations, but for startup I should have hired only doers. 9. Chasing Investors. For every startup I'd spend 40% of my time fundraising. I'd succeed in most of the cases, but at what cost? I haven't done a single outreach to investors in 2 years, but I get VCs knocking my doors, because I have good traction and they search for such projects daily. So, don't chase VCs, just make users happy and VCs are gonna find you. 10. Hiring specialized developers. Nothing is less efficient than a team of specialized… | | Read More %26strokeWidth%3D2) |
| | | | |
|
| |  | |  | | Gregor Ojstersek liked |
 | | | | If you want to become good at system design (in 1 month), learn these case studies: 1 How YouTube Supports 2.49 Billion Users With MySQL ↳https://newsletter.systemdesign.one/p/vitess-mysql 2 How Google Ads Supports 4.77 Billion Users with SQL ↳https://newsletter.systemdesign.one/p/cloud-spanner-database 3 Slack Messenger Architecture ↳https://systemdesign.one/slack-architecture/ 4 How Meta Achieves 99.99999999% Cache Consistency ↳https://newsletter.systemdesign.one/p/cache-consistency 5 Bitly Shortener Architecture ↳https://systemdesign.one/url-shortening-system-design/ 6 Real Time Gaming Leaderboard Architecture ↳https://systemdesign.one/leaderboard-system-design/ 7 How to Scale an App to 10… | | Read More |
| | | | |
|
| |  | | | | Anthropic just released a free interactive… | | Read More |
| | | | |
|
|
| | | | See 27 more notes in the Substack app |
|
|
| | | | 851 |
| |
