Founders

How to ship fast as a small company looking for product-market fit

1. Avoid side quests. If you aren't coding, selling or talking to users, it's a side quest. 

2. Eliminate process. Don't cargo cult your team into sprint planning, offsites or recurring 1:1s. Gather once a day, talk about what to ship and ship it.  

3. Hire people who love to ship fast all the time. Most people cannot do this correctly or do not enjoy doing it. 

4. Don't hire people who can't ship. It's temping to get an ea, bd rep or community manager to offload work. This usually just creates more work for you. 

5. Have a simple and fast tech stack. A new hire should be able to write a feature in a day and deploy it to users in 30 minutes.

Related: partnerships almost never work and especially harmful for moving fast.

1. If you're a fast-moving startup, most if not all companies will move slower than you. Waiting on another company to hold up their end of the deadline is de-motivating for your team. 

2. Coordinating a "big bang" launch takes a lot of work and usually doesn't make a huge impact.

Instead, a better way to do partnerships:

1. Tell the other party what your plans are and the deadline for being included. Be clear that you will ship whether ready or not.

2. If they miss the deadline but finish a few days / week later, just announce as a follow on.

Related: partnerships almost never work and especially harmful for moving fast.

1. If you're a fast-moving startup, most if not all companies will move slower than you. Waiting on another company to hold up their end of the deadline is de-motivating for your team. 

2. Coordinating a "big bang" launch takes a lot of work and usually doesn't make a huge impact.

Instead, a better way to do partnerships:

1. Tell the other party what your plans are and the deadline for being included. Be clear that you will ship whether ready or not.

2. If they miss the deadline but finish a few days / week later, just announce as a follow on.

https://warpcast.com/v/0x5f08d01e

Agreed. This has been a brutal wake up call for me in the first year of marketing our products.

Any collaboration was just too much waiting on the other party. The partnerships were there, but product collaboration takes time and getting the word out is always the last thing to go.