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Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: • A public chat...

45,833 views • 5 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe “We started working on Stripe in the Fall of 2009, and we launched Stripe in September 2011,” John Collison reflects. “I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it I said to Patrick [Collison], ‘Yeah let’s do it. How hard can it be?’ Which gives you a sense of our mindset. And the answer was: two years of difficulty. We had not predicted that.” John remembers feeling dejected when Stripe only had 50 users two years later: “When you spend two years getting 50 users, it doesn’t feel like a whole lot of progress. It feels like things are going pretty slow.” But this is one of the challenges of startups, he argues: “If you’re working on a startup that’s a bad idea, it’s going to feel like slow-going. But if you’re working on a startup that’s a good idea, it may feel like slow-going too.” Yet slow growth has a silver lining: “I think the thing that allowed us to take off in the subsequent years was the fact that since we were spending so much time on each one of those users; since we were hyper-focused on building a great product; and since we weren’t dealing with problems of scale yet, that allowed us to build the product that we wanted. Part of the culture that set in really early on was taking abnormally good care of those early users.” The Stripe founders would get an email or phone call anytime a user ran into a bug. When they sent the customer an email moments later alerting them that the bug was now fixed, people’s minds were blown. They set up a Campfire room that any customer could join and use to message John and Patrick at any hour of the day or night. And if a user was based in the Bay Area, the founders would invite them to come by the office and help integrate Stripe for them. In the Stripe dashboard they would prompt their customers for feedback and feature requests. Then the Stripe founders would reply to that feedback within 10 minutes. “What this meant was that even though the user growth was happening quite slowly in the early days,” John explains, “it actually had a pretty surprising viral effect where people had a good experience, they told their friends about it, and we were able to spread entirely through word-of-mouth even to this day.” Video source: Stanford eCorner (2015)

Startup Archive

190,896 views • 8 months ago

Patrick Collison on what he wishes he did differently when scaling Stripe “I think one of the most pernicious mental models you can have is that you are on some growth curve… I think a much better mental model to have is that you’re serving some market, and then there’s the percentage of the market that you’re serving. And whatever percentage you are not serving, you just haven’t built the go-to-market functions and organization that’s brought the product to those market segments.” In the early days of Stripe, they assumed they were on some growth curve, but Patrick believes they could’ve accelerated their growth by viewing growth as a function of their go-to-market apparatus: “What we did not do, but what I wish we did, is six months after launch, we should’ve mapped out the concentric circles of our market.” As he suggests, Stripe should’ve started with very early stage startups then mapped out the larger set of all technical startups - not necessarily very early stage. Then continue this process in successive increments until they got to all companies handling online payments. Each step along the way, figuring out the size of each market, the fraction Stripe was currently serving, what it would take to serve more, and so on. And then work backwards from there: “What would the organization look like that was serving the entire market? Let’s just start building that organization, because the growth curve is under my control. Of course, it’s not 100% under your control, but I think it’s much more under your control than people tend to think.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

64,296 views • 3 months ago

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed. It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it: “If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.” 40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat. For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case. Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too: “I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”

Michael McGuiness

67,106 views • 2 years ago

The founders of Stripe and Pinterest on how to convince people to join your startup Stripe CEO Patrick Collison argues that part of the reason startups resonate so much is because the outcome is not guaranteed: "If it were guaranteed, it would be boring... Whether or not you're the best person in the world at what you do, you're probably not going to alter Google's trajectory. But if you really want to benchmark yourself and see how much of a contribution and impact you can make--which is a really compelling prospect for a lot of the best people--a startup is a much better place to test that." Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann emphasized this as well: "No smart person that you're hiring is under the illusion that you have a crystal ball into the future and that joining is a guaranteed thing. In fact, if you're telling them that and they select in, you shouldn't hire them because they didn't pass a basic intelligence test. I think it's important to tell them what's exciting and where you think the company can go. But also tell them where it will be hard and chart your best plan. And then tell them why their role can be instrumental--because it will be... What I would discourage doing is whitewashing all of that. If people are joining your company because they want all of the certainty and safety of working at Google but also the perks of working at a small startup with lots of responsibility and transparency, that's a really negative sign." Apparently in the early days of PayPal, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin would tell people after they interviewed all the reasons that the company would fail: "Visa and MasterCard want to kill us. We also might be doing something that's illegal. But if we succeed, we'll redefine payments." Don't whitewash the risks. Instead tell them how your startup will change the world if you succeed and how their role will be instrumental in affecting that change. Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

Startup Archive

11,811 views • 7 months ago

Q: How do you decide which customers to listen to? As Superhuman founder & CEO Rahul Vohra puts it: “In a world where you’re drowning in feedback—and most startups are drowning in feedback—you have to filter it down to only the stuff that’s going to increase the number of people who fall in love with your product.” Most startups will listen to all feedback from on-the-fence customers, but this isn’t targeted enough and will often lead to a muddled, incoherent product. As Rahul argues in the clip below, you need to identify the main benefit of your product—for Superhuman this was speed. And then focus on the feedback of on-the-fence users who also view this as the main benefit—there’s often something small holding them back. Users for whom your main benefit does not resonate (e.g. Superhuman users who value offline capabilities rather than speed), are unlikely to ever fall in love with your product. When Superhuman ran this analysis in 2015, they found that the main thing holding back users who viewed speed as the main benefit was their lack of a mobile app. Probing further, they found some less obvious and more interesting requests, such as integrations, attachment handling, calendering, unified inbox and read receipts. With a clear understanding of their main benefit and missing features, they were able to move this cohort of users from on-the-fence into the territory of enthusiastic advocates. As Rahul puts it in his Product Market Fit Engine article: “To increase your product/market fit score, spend half your time doubling down on what users already love and the other half on addressing what’s holding others back.” But make sure you’re focusing on users who love the main benefit of your product. Users who don’t are unlikely to ever fall in love with your product.

Michael McGuiness

89,869 views • 2 years ago

Chamath Palihapitiya on the growth principles that got Facebook to billions of users “The most important thing we did was I teased out virality, and said, ‘You cannot do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t touch it. I don’t want you to give me any product plans that revolve around this idea of virality. I don’t want to hear it.” Instead, Chamath urged the growth team at Facebook to focus on “the three most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with”: 1. How do you get people in the front door? 2. How do you get them to an aha moment as quickly as possible? 3. How do you deliver core product value as often as possible? Chamath warns that focusing on virality is why you see so many startups experience this amazingly steep rise and then fall off a cliff. The second thing he set out to do at Facebook was invalidate all of the lore: “In any given product, there’s always people who strut out around the office like, ‘I have this gut feeling.’ It’s all about gut feeling. And most people’s gut feelings are morons. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Gut feel is not useful because most people can’t predict correctly. We know this. So one of the most important things that we did was just invalidate all of the lore… You can’t believe your own BS. Because when you do, you start to compound these massively structural mistakes that don’t expose core product value… You don’t listen to customers because you think it’s all about your gut. You don’t bother doing any of the traditional, straightforward, obvious things, and you lose yourself.” As Chamath explains, a maniacal focus on delivering core product value as frequently and fast as possible is what led Facebook to its most important realization: “The single biggest thing we realized was to get any individual to 7 friends in 10 days. That was it… There was not much more complexity than that. There’s an entire team now of hundreds of people that have helped ramp this product to a billion users, based on that one simple rule — a very elegant statement of what it was to capture core product value… And then what we did at the company was talk about nothing else. Every Q&A. Every all-hands… It was the single, sole focus.” He continues: “You have to work backwards from: What is the thing that people are here to do? What is the ‘aha moment’ that they want? Why can I not give that to them as fast as possible? That’s how you win.” Chamath recommends starting with a cohort of your most engaged users — What features are they using? What pathways in your product did they take? Then work backwards and try to get all of your other users to that same state.

Startup Archive

156,392 views • 6 months ago

Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup “Nothing but a great product will save you; you can get everything else right and it still won’t work.” He points out that almost all startup founders get the following wrong: “It is more important to have a small number of users that love you than a lot of users that like you… Eventually what you want of course is a lot of users that really love your product, but that’s almost impossible to do.” In practice, you have two choices: Deep and Narrow: “You have a small number of users that really love you and then find out how to find more and more of those users and broaden the appeal of the product.” Shallow and Wide: “You can have a lot of people that sort of use the product once or twice and kind of like it and try to figure out how to get them more engaged over time.” “With high confidence, I can say that you want to start with a small number of users that really love you. Almost all great companies have products that start this way.” He argues that a good indicator of users loving your product is retention and frequency of use: “In fact, I think this is so important that you actually shouldn’t track absolute growth in number of users in the early days of a startup. You should just track how often they’re using it… That’s a good early indicator of users that love you—better still is them spontaneously telling their friends to buy your product.” Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!

Startup Archive

565,758 views • 2 years ago

Aman Sanger on scaling Cursor to $100M in revenue in 12 months The four co-founders started working on Cursor in January 2023. “It was about 2-4 months of experimenting, trying different things and finding something that fit,” Aman recalls. “Then we shipped it and it had an okay launch.” The initial version of Cursor got some initial buzz because they shipped it with GPT-4 at a time where very few products were using Open AI’s latest model. But then usage tanked. The team began to doubt their approach after the failed launch. Aman explains: “The entirety of that summer was just incredibly slow growth, and that was somewhat demoralizing. The big question in our minds was, ‘Are we being too ambitious?’ We were trying to build this general purpose thing for all engineers, but with this really small team, maybe we should focus more narrowly on some particular use case like tests or bug detection.” But the fact that they were users of the product gave the team the confidence to keep going down their initial path: “The really magical thing about this product was that we were users of it. So we could iterate incredibly quickly, and we tried all these different things that summer. Then we found this core set of features that worked incredibly well.” The two key features were Command K for instructed edit ability and code-based indexing that let you ask questions about your whole code base. “After we integrated those two features and launched them, growth kind of just took off.” Aman continues: “A lot of the work of Cursor has been just experimenting with what is possible. For everything you see in the product, there’s like 10 failed experiments that didn’t work… All of our work for the first 6 months to a year was trying to find new ways to harness these models and make these models better for programming.” Another factor that contributed to Cursor’s success was their willingness to ship half-finished features: “We released these half-finished things, which a lot of our competitors refused to do. The first version of Copilot++ and Cursor Tab sucked. But once you release it to the world and see how people react to it, you can improve on it a ton… We biased toward releasing as soon as something shows signs of usefulness to the team.” Video source: Peak XV Partners (2025)

Startup Archive

56,166 views • 1 year ago

Scott Belsky on the most common mistake founders make when building a product “Every product has what we call a ‘first-mile experience’, which is the part of your product that the most customers will see. And it’s all drop-off from there. What gets people through the first-mile experience? First, you have to empathize with where that customer is at — whether they’re a consumer or an enterprise customer, in the first 30 seconds of that first mile of your product, I guarantee you, they’re lazy, vain, and selfish. They want to get through it fast. They want to look good to their boss or their friends or feel good about themselves. There needs to be some quick hit of feeling successful in that first mile for them to engage further.” Ironically, the first-mile experience is the last thing many companies and product people will focus on. “Typically it’s the final mile before you launch where you’re like, ‘Oh wait, what should the onboarding be?’ or ‘What should the defaults be?’ That’s like a happenstance conversation towards the end of shipping when in fact that’s the only thing that every customer will ever see. So why not nail that?” Scott takes this point even further: “If you can really just nail the first-mile experience of your product — even if after that it’s all kind of crappy — you’re probably in the top 1% of products out there.” Another interesting point Scott makes here is that optimizing the first-mile experience is something that you’ll have to continually work on because your customers change over time. “Your first cohort of customers that used your product, those were early adopters — and your first-mile experience was nailed for them. But [as you’ve grown] this new cohort of customers that started using your product are no longer early adopters. They’re pragmatists. They’re not coming because they like to test and try new products. They’re coming because their boss told them they had to or they read some blog that said this was the best product in the space, and the first-mile needs to be different for them.” Scott sums his point up as follows: “Spend consistent time, forever on that first-mile experience of your product.” Video source: South Park Commons (2025)

Startup Archive

32,450 views • 1 year ago

Stripe co-founder John Collison on the two types of people who will thrive in the AI era over the next 10 to 20 years: He identifies two categories of people he's "super bullish on": First: high-agency people. "We know this at Stripe. The people who are like, I've been talking to customers. I know exactly what we should do. We got to go fix this. But the people who have that pep in their step and they want to go make Stripe better." The idea is simple. The people who don't wait around for permission, who figure out what needs doing and go do it, now have leverage they've never had before. AI lets them execute faster without needing to assemble a huge team behind them. Second: double majors. "I think if you understand software and understand finance or if you understand software and understand marketing, you now can go massively improve the entire marketing funnel for your company and one person can do." John Collison connects this to a famous Paul Graham observation: "Typically an entrepreneurship team a founding team has a collection of like five or six skills between two founders three founders." He also points to Charlie Munger's case for multidisciplinary thinking, noting it's easier than ever to pick up a functional grasp of new fields: "He thinks getting a functional understanding of many disciplines is not that hard you can just go read the books now you know you can talk to your AI about it and so I think multidisciplinary thinkers are going to do incredibly well." The throughline is the same for both: AI closes the gap between knowing what to do and being able to do it. One person can now move at the pace of a full team, and combine skills that used to require entire departments.

Big Brain AI

96,301 views • 1 month ago

Jack Zhang on why he said no to Stripe’s $1.2 billion offer to buy Airwallex “In October 2018, Stripe reached out to buy us,” Airwallex co-founder Jack Zhang (Jack Zhang) begins. Patrick Collison flew out to Shanghai to meet Jack and his co-founder, and they spent the day together. After the meeting, Patrick sent over a Google Doc that was 10-20 pages long and asked Jack to make comments. “I was like, ‘Wow, the vision of the companies over the next decade is very much the same.’ We both wanted to build the AWS of financial services, and obviously Stripe was much further ahead of us. But this was before COVID. Stripe was like a $9 billion company — very similar to the scale of Airwallex today. I also really liked Patrick. It was like this guy is so smart.” Asked what makes Patrick Collison so smart, Jack replies: “He’s intellectually honest about everything, and he’s able to go deep in multiple dimensions.” Eventually Stripe offered $1.2 billion for Airwallex, and according to Jack, he and his co-founders would’ve walked away with $350 million. “I met with the whole team, and I was really impressed,” Jack recalls. “I basically said I think we’re going to do it.” But when he flew back to Melbourne, Jack decided against it. And it was actually Patrick Collison who inspired him to reject the offer. Jack explains: “So one of the things that really inspired me from talking and spending time with Patrick was I asked, ‘What’s the long-term thing for Stripe and yourself? Are you going to be here forever?’ And Patrick said to me that he’s going to build Stripe for the next 20-40 years. And I just never heard a founder tell me they will dedicate their entire life to building a business. And so that was inspiring to me, and I’m like that’s what I want to do.” Today, Airwallex (Airwallex) is an $8B company, with more than $1B in ARR. Video source: The Twenty Minute VC Harry Stebbings (2025)

Startup Archive

696,639 views • 5 months ago

Jack Dorsey: I think of the CEO role as “Chief Editor” of the company “I think of my role as CEO of Square as an editorial function,” Jack Dorsey explains. “By editorial, I mean there are a thousand things we could be doing, but there’s only one or two that are important.” He continues: “All of these ideas and stories from users, engineers, support people, designers, are going to constantly flood what we should be doing. We need to choose the one or two that are really going to drive and sustain the product. As an editor, I’m constantly taking all these inputs and deciding on that one — or the intersection of a few — that makes sense for what we’re doing.” There are three “access points” that Jack pays attention to in particular: 1. The team. “We have to bring the best people in and edit away any negative elements… At the end of the day, we’re just a group of people working on one single goal, and if we can’t step in a cohesive, coordinated fashion, we’re going to trip all over the place. Recruiting is no. 1.” 2. Internal & External Communication. “Internal communication is just the coordination of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it… If you have the vision, the next 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, and year maybe, it makes it very easy to set priorities and for all the edges of the company to do the right thing. The external communication is the product, and the product is the story we’re telling the world… We don’t want it to be about a person. We want it to be about how people are using it, fitting it into their lives, and what they’re doing with it. That’s the strongest story we have.” 3. Editing the “money in the bank” story. “This comes in two ways: 1) through investment… or 2) through revenue.” Jack concludes: “My three priorities and focus areas are in that order. That’s what I’m constantly editing as CEO, and I think it makes managing a growing company in a fast-paced environment very easy because there’s basically one thing you have to do: You have to make every single detail perfect and you have to limit the number of details. That’s it. If you can do that well… you’re going to succeed because you’re paying attention to the smallest things. And if you pay attention to the smallest things while knowing what’s important, then everything else takes care of itself.” Video source: Stanford University (2011)

Startup Archive

46,836 views • 10 months ago

Jessica Livingston on investing in Stripe when the Collison Brothers were teenagers Jessica reflects on a 19-year old Patrick Collison telling her and the other co-founders of Y Combinator that he wanted to take on the financial industry with his younger brother John. “We were like, ‘Do you realize how hard this is? And you don’t have connections.’ But they were intrepid. They were like, ‘Well, we don’t have connections, but we’ll find connections.’” She recalls their determination and focus: “You think the head of a bank is going to take a 19-year old startup founder seriously? It seems pretty implausible, right? But they were good enough that they were able to convince these banks to work with them.” Determination, Jessica argues, is “by far the most important quality. More than intelligence. More than previous success in school.” When she co-founded Y Combinator, the hypothesis was that they’d just fund all the best hackers from MIT and Harvard and they’d turn out to be great startup founders. But that turned out to not be true. “Determination is the most important thing. Understanding your users and building a product with a great user experience is second most important.” Jessica also believes being flexible minded is very important: “You have this idea, you test it out, and it doesn’t always work the first time. You have to be able to say, ‘Okay, I thought I was going to do this, but let’s try this, even though I have a lot of energy vested in this, let’s try this direction. You really have to be open minded.” And then you have to be convincing and a good leader: “You are going to be convincing employees to join you. You’re going to be convincing investors to invest in you. When you get to the point where you’re doing deals with bigger companies, you have to convince them. Your whole world is convincing people, and so you have to be able to communicate your idea and convince people why they should care about you more than any of the other hundreds of startups out there.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

Startup Archive

163,439 views • 1 year ago