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

onchain reputation at karma3labs and @openrank

I have a hard time thinking of a partnership that's been meaningful in the last few years.

ideally, zero dependency is best if you can building all components of a launch yourself.

but when you're in a 'partner' vs build everything yourself scenario, coordination is unavoidable. what's worked for you to actually ship together in a fast and cheap way?

A big reason why large companies move so slow.

Everything is based on partnerships between different parts of the org and even between teams on the same org.

You count projects in terms of quarters when you need to convince another team to first add an OKR and then convince them to make it a P1 and not a P2. 🤮

CEO - Media3 Labs | Join us at /scoop3, an onchain podcast player | Host of The Blockchain Experience podcast /theblockexp | Ex-Samsung | Ex-Hewlett-Packard

Respectfully disagree.

First, not every partnership is product-focused and involves shipping something.

Second, even if it does include shipping, and they’re dragging their feet, then you have mismatched priorities.

Thats why you have people who specialize in partnerships. Their job is to vet the partnership, ensure synergies & alignment, and keep the train on the tracks.

Gosh I needed this reminder today. Thanks WC team.

I do agree, but I think it is a very product centric statement.
There are other ways to be partners, and they are as valuable as a product integration. 
Joint marketing, similar positions on market trends, non agression pacts, are also valuable.

are there examples. where you have seen them work and what made them work?

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

What is meant by partnerships?

Co-founder, or company?

(Do you’ mean something different than your relationship with @v ?)

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.