There's that quote, "hindsight is 20/20", meaning it's easier to understand what went well/poorly when looking back. It's easy for us to reflect on what went well, and share just that.
Doesn't mean it was easy/obvious in the moment, but hopefully our post helps others with their journey!
a) How relevant was your experience (as engineers) in building and growing startups?
b) Looking back, what skills would you have liked to acquire before starting up?
c) How much of startups is marketing and networking compared to product and growth?
Thanks,
Super relevant to building the product. I feel like to be successful, you have to be really, really good at a couple things. For us that was engineering + design. For another team it might be that they're good enough at sales that they can close big deals right off the bat.
Being great at engineering + design meant we could build the best product in our market, with a robust codebase that's free of errors (unit tests, CI/CD) and easy to scale.
> b) Looking back, what skills would you have liked to acquire before starting up?
Hmm. It might have been good to work at an early-stage SaaS startup before starting one. This would have given us a lot of context into pricing, sales, marketing, recruiting, etc. Problems that we kind of just had to figure out from scratch.
> c) How much of startups is marketing and networking compared to product and growth?
Most of our success can be attributed to a) building a great product, and b) getting it in front of people. B is all marketing. Ads, SEO, content, etc.
Now, some startups rely entirely on product + sales, and some startups are able to attract all of their customers with just product (esp consumer). It really depends on your product/market/company, and how your customers want to buy.