Thread by @sachinrekhi

I’ve become convinced that the very best founders don’t launch MVPs, but instead rely on conviction built through domain experience to commit to a main attack and put all their resources behind it. @hulu, @zoom_us, @joinHandshake all being great examples buff.ly/2yCMt9n

The challenge I have with MVPs is that teams rarely give themselves enough time to iterate on their initial concept before demanding short-term metrics to build conviction that the current direction is worth continuing to pursue.

We’re also now in a place where the tech industry has matured so much that new frontier land grabs are rare. So many markets have strong incumbents or strong alternatives so often light MVPs are no longer sufficient for driving adoption

I hated the idea of the fat startup when I first came across it. But now think it can be the right approach depending on the market dynamics you are specifically dealing with a16z.com/2010/03/17/the…

@rabois often echos this belief when he talks about the idea that the best startups are like movies: you cast an all star team, you spend a bunch upfront trying to realize the founding teams vision, and then you ultimately see if it works. But the low budget movie rarely works.

It’s not that the lean startup / MVP approach can’t work. There are plenty of success stories there. And it’s not like startups like Color didn’t raise a ton of money and ultimately completely fail.

But what Thinking in Bets taught me is we should all be looking for far more predictable paths to success and having deep conviction on a startup idea based on unique insights typically garnered through experience in and around the space is the best path ive discovered to date

It’s not that experiments are bad, but they are traditionally coupled with short-termism, gauging their success in an incredibly tight timeline. I’ve always loved the Bezos mentality of being willing to fail and make long-term bets (Alexa being a prime example w/ 1K+ team size)

Through my startup advising, I’ve run into a bunch of teams that have thoughtfully done hypothesis testing, pivoted when the metrics suggested it wasn’t working, and ultimately run out of money. I often wonder whether conviction on a given direction would have saved them.

We thought a lot about all of this when starting @NotejoyApp. We had seen a ton of failures in the next-gen document collaboration space that launched and failed like Canvas, Bold, Memo.ai. All raised millions in seed funding but couldn’t raise their next round.

What we realized is even if you raised a $4M seed, you needed to get to $1M ARR to justify the next round. But when the incumbents in your space are Microsoft Office and Google Docs, this is just not possible in the typical 18-24 month seed cycle.

In this market you needed an approach that gave you the runway to build out both unique differentiation as well as sufficient functional parity to attract customers. That left two approaches: the fat startup or the cockroach approach.

Many startups in our space chose the fat startup approach. @coda_hq is a great example, raising over $60M early on to attempt to take on Office. With @notejoyapp we took the cockroach approach, self-funding it to create a path of unlimited runway to find product/market fit

We spent two years in private beta before we launched @notejoyapp publicly because of the requirements needed to build a usable document collaboration solution with real-time editing, apps for Mac/Win/iOS/Android/Web, and a ton more required features notejoy.com/features

Don’t get me wrong, we had hundreds of users on our private beta before we ever launched it giving us feedback and helping us improve the product. But my god, there have been so many times we could have called it quits based on launching an MVP and reviewing our poor metrics

We initially launched an alpha release which we followed with a beta. We were excited about our beta and planned to launch v1 right after it. We got 30 teams on it and 6 weeks later none were retained. @adachen and I were absolutely devastated. We could have quite right then.

We instead decided to launch a gamma release attacking the critical issues we heard and try, try again. And this time we had retained teams and finally felt we were ready to launch our V1.

Now, 3.5 years after starting @notejoyapp we are so happy we didn’t launch an MVP and just give up. We’ve finally gotten to product/market fit with a +40 NPS, 67% of our users being very disappointed if Notejoy no longer existed, and over 50% of signups from organic/WoM channels

So next time you find yourself about to pivot off your current MVP, ask yourself if you’ve really done enough to prove out your current path if you still have conviction on it