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Scaling, pressure cookers, and startup killers

Scaling, pressure cookers, and startup killers

Juliette Chevalier
April 25, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Hi nerds -

I salute you from Miami, as I arrive back from a weekend-long yoga retreat in California.

I felt recharged and restored, until I took the red-eye flight back from LAX. Reminder to never do one of those again.

The consequences…

brain farts

🕰️ Pressure cookers: I learned about the Y Combinator deadline 5 days before it happened. Within that time, I:

Designed an end-to-end user journey and built a working prototype
Worked out company financials for how to reach $1B valuation
Recorded and edited 2 demo videos
Wrote this newsletter and got the first few clients
Got friends to send in YC referrals for me

Lesson: if you ever need a productivity boost, craft arbitrary deadline.

Source: Weekend Creative

🚀 Scaling: One of the biggest lessons I learned from working in Developer Relations is that nothing scales if we don’t do the things that don’t scale first.

To build a 100k community, we need strong 1:1 relationships
To scale a product to 100k users, we must dive into the pain points of the first 100 users
To recruit the best 100 people, we must spend time hiring right the 10-20 hires

As a dev, I tend to want to automate everything. But if we don’t do the things that don’t scale first, it’s hard to get the important nuances right early on.

Source: MindJournal

🧘🏻‍♀️ Yoga lessons: This weekend I went to a yoga retreat and reflected a lot about how the lessons from my yoga practice transcend beyond my mat:

I know I can stand back up, after I fall
I am more flexible than I think I am
Reaching balance requires strength and focus
The rewards of my hard work are felt when we rest at the end
We sleep better when we work hard

Source: Peta Pixel

smart goodies

“Startup killers: Multi-tasking, too much capital, too little capital, perfectionism, not obsessed enough over details, too obsessed over competition, team burnout, constant pivots, no distribution, no fun anymore.”

~ Greg Isenberg