Reacting to MOST CONTROVERSIAL Opinions About Startups on X... 🤭

0:00the world is full of opinions so when I asked on Twitter about your most controversial opinions on starting a startup I was bombarded with over50 responses a lot of them were in line with my thinking some I wholeheartedly disagree with so I thought it'd be fun to dig through them to see what we can find our first comes from Derek Martin loving your Niche isn't necessary all that matters is Happy customers and good margins so I could go both ways on this one and in fact I've had companies I've started where I didn't like the niche and I didn't really care about the I was solving but that was in a great little

0:32lifestyle business if I'm going to spend 5 or 10 years personally working on a problem and working with customers I want to really love what I'm doing I have met people like Derek Martin who can work on any problem and it doesn't really matter to them but I actually want to hear from you I want to know what you think so Post in the comments if you think you could start a company in a niche that you don't love or don't really care about in our next response Don Felker says 50/50 co-founders rarely ever work there need to be a decision maker with veto power to move the ball

1:02forward although I respect Don a lot we've known each other for more than a decade I have to disagree with this one I've been in four business Partnerships and one marital partnership and all of them except for one have been 50/50 and I've seen across the 170 something companies I've invested in the vast majority of them have an even split between co-founders if it's two co-founders it's usually 50/50 if it's three 33 and a third each I'm not saying it's the right way just cuz because a lot of people do it but I do think that getting everyone on the same page and getting people on board with a decision

1:36and not needing to exercise a veto power can totally work and it's something that I've used day-to-day in my businesses and so while I see the logic here and I've actually heard this from a lawyer or two saying someone should own 51 someone should own 49 it's not something I agree with lane from boot. deev says you need hard skills yourself you can't just hire for everything and I would agree with that now Craig HT responded and he says I have to disagree I have no discernable skills but we've made it so far at least and Craig HT has a seven fig SAS company now I think Craig is

2:07doing himself a diservice he does have discernable skills he is great at sales he's actually good at hiring he knows marketing well enough to be dangerous like he's good at operations he's good at starting companies and so he does have skills the thing where I see people failing is where they come in to start a SAS and they're not a developer and they're not a product person all they have is an idea and that's where like what hard skill do you have at that point if you're not able to sell if you're not able to Market if you don't know the space if you can't even if you

2:34do know the space I guess if you can't build your own product if you can't Market it like SAS is so intensive when it comes to these hard skills that you need that I do wholeheartedly agree with Lane on this one Nicholas overloop says hire only senior people in the beginning juniors are cheap but a waste of time and money so I will say in my last SAS company drip I hired a handful of Juniors I also had a senior who was my co-founder but we hired Juniors cuz we didn't have the money and it took us a tremendous amount of time I'm talking hours per week and I'm talking months

3:06and months to get them up to speed I kind of wished I had just hired some mid-level or some seniors and once we had the budget once we got Acquired and we had all of this budget behind us we pretty much only hired seniors beyond that with the exception of some support people and some folks to train them up we wanted to give back to the community and so we did let some juniors in purely not purely but almost for their benefit more than ours but I can't disagree with Nicholas that if you have the budget and that's the key seniors are expensive so it's and it's hard to find them right

3:35it's hard to find really good seniors that aren't super expensive but with those things in mind I think Nicholas is on to something I don't even think that's controversial is is that controversial I ask for controversial takes some of these are not controversial at all our next one comes from Alexa Tess they say building 12 products in 12 months and other similar challenges are just a waste of time in my opinion you cannot do anything meaningful in a month except maybe get lucky with a prototype and even those require some form of iteration with users first thank you someone speaking my is this controversial though this is

4:05that thing of like in Silicon Valley they want you to go all in on things so it's not controversial there it's certainly not controversial in my Circles of the bootstrapped mostly bootstrapped software Founders who are being ambitious and trying to build a seven or eight figure company I think it might be with more of the Indie hacker types where it's like I want to move to Bali and make 5 Grand 10 grand 20 grand a month I'm just going to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall see which one gets there fastest and that's you know making a bunch buch of little bets and trying

4:31to make this work with that crew I think that this would be controversial but I have to agree with Alexa I mean I've been harping on this and ranting on it online and offline and on the podcast and on this YouTube channel about putting a bunch of things 12 things in 12 months in my opinion is do it as a circus do it because it's fun do it as a performance all that's fine but to expect that you're going to start a software company that's going to get to a million dollars by doing that is delusional and I don't know anyone the 170 something companies I've invested in

4:58and the dozens that have hit that million doll 10 million hundred million or more Mark they didn't start by launching 12 things in 12 months and so we can see the flip side of that coin when drw bota says don't go all in for a while hedge your bets this is interesting because it's don't go all in for a while and see I don't like the hedging your bet if you truly are trying to build a seven or eight figure company I think again if you're trying to build that 10 20 30k lifestyle business you know you can do a lot of things wrong and still still get there and so you can

5:26hedge your bets all you want just realize that you are I think limiting your success you're also hampering your learning you're not learning as much by pushing something forward and learning how to Pivot and move it and talk to customers you just thrown it out there oh if it works great and if it doesn't I'm going to walk away and move on to the next thing I just don't love the approach Danny postm says most people want to play startup instead of actually building one thank you is this controversial cuz I have heard other people say this and I've said it myself but I wholeheartedly agree I I need it

5:56to be spicier but I I'm going to admit I just like the take here Rosie Sherry says it's a lonely world as a Founder but it's even lonlier for women Founders and will often end up surrounded by entitled men who take advantage yeah I mean I guess that's controversial probably there are men out there who don't realize that this is going on but being a marginalized individual an underrepresented founder an underrepresented person in any group is hard and I think that whether you're a woman trying to start a startup whether you're just someone who the the rest of the people in the room don't look like

6:28you I think that's a it's a real uphill battle and I I don't know that it's talked about enough I think this is a reason that from the microcom stage I say things like if you're in this room you belong here as much as any of us do because I want microcom and the bootstrapper community to be as uh diverse and inclusive as possible I don't just want it to be a bunch of people who look like me anything we can do to encourage underrepresented Founders to become more involved and feel less intimidated by our bootstrap scene I think we should do it and that's why we started our microcom scholarship

7:00program where we provide scholarships to folks who otherwise wouldn't be able to attend and we've been focused on diversity equity and inclusion for well over a decade here's a spicy take from Yan Philip Peters you can bootstrap two-sided marketplaces no you cannot Yan so I and for people who know me I say constantly don't bootstrap a two-sided Marketplace unless you have one side of the marketplace already and in fact the conversation goes on for a couple steps and I say Yan have you done it and he said yes I have so Bravo and it's like I feel like Yan is the exception that proves the rule obviously it is humanly

7:37possible to bootstrap a two-sided Marketplace it is just not putting fortune in your favor if you're going to do it it means you're fighting a war on two sides I bet if I interviewed Yan he would say yeah I did it but I wouldn't recommend others do it that's usually what happens it's like I did things wrong and we succeeded anyway but we stacked the odds against us you know we really made it difficult on ourselves so obviously it is possible but it's still a piece of advice I'm going to continue to give it's not never do it it's really to do something else first and then

8:07think about two-sided Marketplace if that's really where you want to go I wouldn't even have an issue with this if so many people didn't want to do it it's just such a common question that I get on startups for the rest of us if I'm looking to do a two- set of marketplace and it's like have you ever started a startup do you realize how hard that is Fraser says b Toc products are a waste of time and you should not build them focus on B2B and you will make money and that's not that controversial if you follow this channel right we have an entire video which you should check out

8:34if you haven't already my Tiny Seed co-founder Anar volet weighed in with plg which is product L growth is where Founders too scared to do sales go to hide spicy take here I actually I like I like this take for anr it's that the product Le growth meaning I'm going to build my product and it's going to infiltrate these large companies and it's just going to kind of sell itself is it a myth it's as close to a myth as a lot of these things are much like premium well if if I just have premium I'm just going to have this viral Loop and my product will Market itself I'm

9:03just going to build a great product and it will Market itself it's a thing that has developers and makers and Builders we want to believe so yeah if you're scared to do marketing or sales just don't start a startup right just go do something else work a full-time job or build a video course or go build an audience you know do something that doesn't require you to do marketing and sales because if you think you're going to rely on plg you're probably wrong there are very very few companies that make it work and those that do are highly skilled at it and they have budgets and they do it very deliberately

9:31they don't accidentally fall into the pit of success with product Le growth they really focus on it and my last one for today Jen's schoemer says don't hire an agency to build your prototype find a technical co-founder instead I can't disagree with this I mean we have seen maybe 10 or 15% of the companies we fund with tiny seed that don't have a technical co-founder and the ones who don't have a technical co-founder really run into headwinds because hiring an agency they're expensive they don't care about your project in the long term it's unfortunate they care in the short term but they will cut Corners to hit

10:04deadlines or to hit budgets and then you wind up two three years down the road with a code base that can't support itself and it's like building a skyscraper on a shaky Foundation I'm not saying every agency and I'm not saying never use an agency of course but if you can get a technical co-founder who can then at least even if you hire it out they can at least manage those developers or if you do hire an agency they can manage the agency and they can look at and maintain the code quality then you're in such a better place it's like I wouldn't start a venture fund

10:32without a co-founder who knows the business and finance world knows all the stuff about private equity and venture capital and how to raise funds and how to deal with it I didn't want to do that I didn't want to learn that it's complicated it's Technical and it's not my gifting and so when I started Tiny Seed I found a co-founder anr volet who had that piece of it it's similar with SAS personally if I was a non-technical Founder I wouldn't start a SAS without a technical co-founder now am I saying no one should ever do it or you shouldn't do it or never never never always always

11:01always I'm not obviously but as a rule of thumb which is a lot of the things that I talk about dayto day I think that if you're going to start a sass you're better off if you learn to code yourself or you find a technical co-founder if you aren't following me on Twitter you can join the conversation over there it's twitter.com/randymckown

11:29couple of videos about the mistakes that I often see Founders make check out this next video particularly the third mistake if you want to make your next project a successful one thanks for watching