Dani Grant
@thedanigrant
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CEO – helping 150K+ builders and 32 of the Fortune 100 fix bugs faster. ⚡️ We're hiring!
San Francisco, CA
Joined February 2012
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Excited to announce our $8.9M Series A led by
@ggvcapital
, along with
@figma
and several key industry leaders who’ve changed software engineering before us.
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Telegram is a 30 person team with 1 billion users.
Small teams are mighty.
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9K
"Move fast and break things" is outdated advice for startups.
Software ate the world—and there's more competition than ever.
Our startup learned the hard way to ignore this advice, and this is what happened:
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This is the cold email that got me my first job in tech.
Shoot your shot. You never know.
Here’s the template:
• 1 sentence: why them
• 1 sentence: your intent
• 2 sentences: why you
• Last sentence: let’s chat
Hope this helps someone!
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Figma started as a drone company.
Twitter started as a podcast app.
Instagram was a location-based social network.
We went through 7 failures until we hit PMF.
And just crossed 80K users!
Sometimes a change of direction is exactly what you need to get to your destination.
82
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2K
Amazon and Calendly both didn't have technical co-founders
Our startup just hit 40,000+ users without a technical co-founder
Don't let not having a technical co-founder stop you from launching a startup.
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Midjourney is a 40 person company making $200M/yr in revenue.
Small teams are mighty.
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1K
It took Jeff Bezos 60 investor meetings and nearly a year to raise the first $1M of venture for Amazon.
If you have conviction, just keep going.
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It’s still important to ship fast to learn.
But you won’t learn anything if your product is too buggy.
The key is to cut product scope so much that you actually can ship something bug-free.
Cut every non-essential feature.
Ship fast, with small scope, high quality.
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158
1K
"You need a technical co-founder" is outdated advice for startups
Product Hunt and Calendly didn't have technical co-founders
Our startup hit 40,000+ users without a technical co-founder, here's what I've realized:
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Finding PMF is a game of delayed gratification.
Notion: 3 yrs
Airtable: 4 yrs
Figma: 5 yrs
Don't go so fast you tire out your ability to think non-linearly.
In PMF, go slower to go fast.
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Early stage founders, find patient capital.
- Notion took 3 years to PMF
- Airtable took 4 years to PMF
You need early VCs who are up for a long adventure.
Feel lucky to have VCs on board who didn't give up on us when we didn't hit PMF right away. It makes such a difference.
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Small teams are mighty.
13 people built Instagram to $1B acquisition
17 people built Linear to 1,000 customers
40 people built Notion to 1M+ users
When you bring together a small & senior team - amazing things can happen.
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🦕 My latest weekend project is a game to guess which tweets are from Kanye and which are from Elon.
➡️
😜 It’s harder than it sounds.
🎉 Good luck.
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Instagram and Notion have ex-PM founders.
So I thought it’d be easy to jump from PM to founder.
Here’s everything I wish I knew going from PM to founder:
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Hire people who love what they do so much they listen to podcasts about it.
(Or read, go to meetups, etc)
It’s infectious and amazing
And makes it so fun to build things together
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We just crossed 100,000 users!
From 20k a year ago.
Marketing is a lot harder than I expected.
Here's how we figured out marketing at Jam - a play by play you can use for your own startup:
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Startups can’t afford to ship fast but buggy anymore.
15 yrs ago,
@reidhoffman
said "if you’re not embarrassed, you’ve shipped too late."
But in 2024, people can't use a buggy product.
Yes, you need to go fast, but keep scope small so you can actually deliver great quality.
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“Move fast and break things” and “you should be embarrassed by your product” was great startup advice 10 years ago.
But not today.
Even Sam Altman admits it:
sam altman: “honestly, i feel so bad about the advice i gave while running YC i’ve been thinking about deleting my entire blog”
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Finally, we decided to try something new
We took our time to squash bugs. We didn't let in users until we had quality.
Then we re-opened the product. And something different happened. It started to grow.
And in the year since, we grew through word of mouth from 1 -> 30K+ users
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40% of unicorn founders are non-technical.
Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not technical enough to start your company— especially in the age of AI and no-code.
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"Cold emailing VCs is a waste of time"
Nope, Outdoor Voices got their first VC meetings from cold emails
As a VC, I read every cold email
Here's my 4 tips to send cold emails to VCs:
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When you start a startup, so many people tell you to ship fast and ship messy.
They tell you: you’ll know you have product market fit when people are willing to jump through hoops to use your broken product.
This was great advice in 2013.
But not in 2023.
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The startup stack we use to build Jam
Finance –
@tryramp
+
@mercury
Data –
@metabase
+
@_hex_tech
HR –
@justworks
+
@rippling
+
@useplane
Dev tools –
@githubcopilot
+
@jamdotdev
Knowledge base –
@NotionHQ
Internal apps –
@zapier
+
@coda_hq
Creative suite –
@figma
+
@screenstudio
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an idea
@usv
team has been tinkering with:
brands make promises to their users
trusted brands keep those promises
that's important b/c trust can be a strategy:
in offense, it's positioning to fill a trust gap
in defense, it's a moat and why users stay
➡️
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There's an idea in crypto that we need tools before we can build apps. But usually, apps come first and inspire us to build tools. Not the other way around.
💡 lightbulbs => the grid
✈️ planes => airports
🌈 sites => javascript
@nickgrossman
& I wrote:
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When you’re an early stage startup, your
#1
job is to get clarity on what you’re building.
When your product has bugs, it obscures your clarity.
Bugs and lack of PMF both lead to low retention. So how can you tell: should we keep going or pivot?
Impossible. You need clarity.
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🧠 There's a big opportunity to reinvent the syllabus for the web.
🤓 It would overlay other talks and papers like a map for self-learning.
📚 “First read X, think about Y. Now read Z, think how it relates to X”.
🌈 On our quest to find Syllabus 2.0:
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The hardest part of finding PMF is not giving up.
The 2nd hardest part of finding PMF is not running out of money.
Airtable, Miro, and Figma all took 4+ years to PMF.
Stay in the game. Survive, keep trying, and you'll get there.
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Zoom is an $18B company
But no VC wanted to fund their seed round
VCs told
@ericsyuan
his idea was “crazy”
“The world does not need more video conferencing software”
But it turns out the world needs founders with “crazy” ideas and the conviction to keep going 🚀
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Splitting PMF into 2 steps made it easier for us to tackle
Step 1. Get to "Promise Market Fit"
Does the promise compel people to sign up?
Step 2. Iterate until the product fulfills the promise
When users retain, you’ve got PMF: a Promise people want & Product that delivers it
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This is a career first! 🤯 Thank you
@Nasdaq
– what a way to celebrate today's big news w/
@GGVCapital
+
@JamDotDev
!
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The key to hitting product-market fit is hiring a team with ~0 drama.
Most people don't realize Jam is the 8th product iteration we tried.
That's a lot of failures. Not everyone can do that with a smile.
Hire a team who happily embraces failure and iterating with ~0 drama.
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We are launching our first company today. (high five
@_irtefa
!!) We can’t wait to show you the dev tool we’ve built — . We’ve been brainstorming ways to get the word out. Latest 3am idea:
RT if you love dogs.
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I’ve heard a version of this story from so many founders: “we had to fix 100 bugs to get to PMF”.
And it makes sense:
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We just crossed 1,000,000 Jams created!
From 100K a year ago.
Getting users to adopt a new product is hard.
Here's how –– everything we did to grow from 0 → 1M:
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Growing a company = learning on turbo mode
In 2023, we 10x'ed growth and hit 1M+ Jams - exciting year!
Here are the 10 most important startup lessons I learned:
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200 people at GitHub HQ right now for Jam AI demo night. Wow, let’s go!!
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10 years ago,
@reidhoffman
said if you aren't embarrassed by your early product, you've launched too late.
And that was what people kept telling us, and what we believed.
So we kept launching and re-launching, each time fast and embarrassed.
And it wasn't working.
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I felt super lucky to go from VC to founder
It’s a lot easier to build a pitch deck if you’ve seen others do it first.
That's why we kept the original Jam pitch deck online
Here’s the real deck we used to raise our seed round
I hope it helps someone!
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1 bad line of code can cost $100,000,000+
Don't believe me?
Here's the 4 craziest software bugs in history:
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The biggest
@OpenAI
launch no one is talking about:
It's one tiny field –– `seed`
But it makes apps built with GPT-4 Turbo 100x more debuggable.
Here's how to auto-include it for engineers in every ticket:
Add 1 line of code in your app:
Jam.metadata({ seed,
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We just crossed 50,000 users this weekend
@jamdotdev
!! In 18 months.
Just getting started, but it’s motivating to hit the milestones along the way. Thanks to the 51,133 of you Jamming with us 💜
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Excited to be a part of the
@usv
team (it’s official now - based on Proof of Blog). I’m two weeks in, here’s some of what I’ve learned so far.
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Figma, Pixar, and Cloudflare's product team have 1 thing in common
They make a first draft that gets deleted before the real thing is made
When you build 0 to 1, it can be helpful to delete & restart
You can learn more from a prototype than a PRD
(h/t
@mihikapoor
+
@lennysan
)
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How we grew from to 1,000 to 20,000 users in 1 year:
We raised VC and have money to spend on marketing, but most of this growth is from word of mouth.
Here’s how we did it - and what I wish I knew on day one:
1. Because it’s Product-Led Growth (PLG), marketing didn’t grow Jam.
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Great engineering teams do the boring things well:
- Internal docs
- Code organization
- Bugs & testing
- Local env
- Deployment
- Team coordination
Hard to do well, but when you do, it's so much faster and more fun to build!
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In our pre-PMF days, it was hard to get churned users to give us feedback!
It makes sense: why reply if you don't like the product?
We pivoted to dogfooding and giving ourselves feedback, which led to a 10x faster iteration cycle
If you can't get user feedback, do it yourself!
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People have tried building distributed compute platforms for 25+ years, and tokens are finally making it feasible. Here’s what we’re seeing in the space so far:
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Future founders - choose a startup idea where you’ll love talking to your users every day.
One highlight of building Jam is getting to meet so many people working to change some corner of the world through software. It’s so awesome.
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In 10 years, I bet there will be 100x more engineers than now.
I gave a talk on this topic at
@Sourcegraph
this week
Here's 5 big predictions on how AI will impact engineers:
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I built a game this weekend that you can play over sms. If you text +1 (575) 223-1415 it will enter you into the game and send you some number puzzles. Enjoy and good luck.
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😻 This weekend I built Gravity (). It's gravatar for ethereum - run and stored in a smart contract. You can create your ETH gravatar at . So excited for you to try it.
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Reminder: Founders don't have to be the ones to build their V1s.
Calendly was originally built by contractors (as was Jam)
You need to bring domain expertise, the what
But you can hire for the how
Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not technical enough to start your company
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Just gave a talk to 50 engineers
I asked: raise your hand if you’ve started using a new product in the last year
One hand raised.
The bar is SO high to get people to try something and stick with it.
Retention is the hardest metric, but it’s also the
#1
metric that matters.
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One of the highlights of building a company is getting to do it alongside such an awesome, curious co-founder.
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When I was a PM, the Cloudflare team taught me 3 main things:
1. Your job is to do anything in your power to make the product succeed
2. You are the internal advocate for users (fight for what users want)
3. Ship
Be a PM who fights for your product and users.
And ships.
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When we started Jam, we first followed that advice.
We got software into users’ hands our first week of being a company.
But it wasn’t reliable software.
And so people couldn’t use it.
We were told: “That means you don’t have PMF. People will use a buggy app if you have PMF”
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Hiring a Growth Chief of Staff at Jam!
If you're:
- an idea generation machine
- obsessed w/ biz strategy & growth
Learn more + apply here:
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There was almost no Notion.
In 2015, the company was running out of money.
So the founders moved to Kyoto to live cheap and code all day.
This story inspired me so much as we were building Jam—so I'm sharing it with you:
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I was lucky to join Cloudflare as hire
#132
after college
Joining a startup = Growing up on turbo mode
- you challenge yourself
- meet insanely smart people
- take on a lot of responsibility
If you want to up-level really fast, join a fast-growing startup — and grow with them
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Great PMs do whatever it takes to make a product succeed
- If customers need docs, they write docs
- If support needs training, they do training
No tasks beneath them
Then when milestones are hit, they celebrate every engineer, designer, QA, support rep, etc behind the feature
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Team is everything.
Hire people who inspire you. People you enjoy collaborating with. People who obsess about their craft. People who are kind and humble and drama free.
And a lot of things get easier.
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NFTs are so fun. This weekend I built a little chrome extension that shows you a person’s NFTs when you view their profile on twitter.
➡️
it’s built on
@humanitydao
,
@graphprotocol
and
@opensea
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Most young founders don't realize that if their idea works, the journey will be 10+ years.
You do NOT need to jump in without thinking—it’s okay to take your time to figure out what you want to work on.
The joy of spending years on something you actually love is so worth it.
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Hire people who are obsessive (even if it's about their garden or remodel)
I've found that if someone takes joy in every detail of something outside of work, they bring that obsessive delight to the startup too
These are such incredibly fun people to work with
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Do one thing, do it well.
And earn your users’ trust to do the next thing and the next.
And over time that’s how narrow products can become industry changing platforms.
Your startup shouldn't start as a platform.
Step 1. Solve 1 problem
Step 2. Earn the trust of users
Step 3. Solve more problems and become a platform.
Salesforce, Facebook, and Figma all started by solving 1 problem.
Wisdom from
@thedanigrant
(founder of
@jamdotdev
)
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Today we launched 15 open-source DevTools for devs who don't like ads!
These are private, local, simple and fast – plus cmd+k menu ⚡️
Super excited, let me show you my favorites! ↓
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Pre-PMF, we got stuck in a "1 more feature" trap
“Just 1 more feature!”
But when we started taking things away, that’s when we hit PMF
When it's complex to learn a new tool, you make someone‘s life harder; when it's simple, their life is easier
Going simple speeds up PMF
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🕵️♀️ My latest project is like a detective agency, only geekier. It's a math and science mystery hotline.
You can submit mysteries at and
#globalmysteryinc
will search for the best explanations to your mysteries.
Can't wait to play detective with you all.
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The journey of 0 → 950K Jams
Can't believe it's going to hit 1 million this month.
1M debuggable bug reports. That's so crazy. I'm so excited. Go y'all –– thanks for Jamming!
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Cold emailing got me my first job in startups
Hope this template helps someone!
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Many people choose their co-founder based on skill
But: find a co-founder who is endlessly curious
Your jobs will change every few months as the company grows
And if you're lucky to have a co-founder with a beginner’s mindset, it makes even the challenges more enjoyable
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“Ask your users what they want and they'll say a faster horse. You need to make them a car"
We followed this advice and failed 7x.
Then we made a faster horse (exactly what users were asking for)—and we hit PMF and took off.
Sometimes users know exactly what they want.
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It's a myth that VCs need you to have a technical co-founder
You just need an answer to "How are you going to build your product?"
“We'll prototype with no-code tools then hire an engineer” is 100% OK.
VCs want to see you can build a team, not write code
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PMs build products, founders build companies.
Company = product + go to market + brand + customer + business model + team + processes + culture.
You’re building a set of stories and a vision for the future aimed at a specific set of people who need to hear those stories.
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If you report bugs to engineers, you've probably experienced:
- you report an issue
- engineer picks up ticket
- engineer closes ticket
- writes "works fine on my end"
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I really like the startups building communities of learners who support and encourage each other’s learning.
We’ve been calling this edu category free learning, because it’s like free diving or free climbing, but for free-form adventures in learning.
➡️
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Last week at Jam was a little surreal
Crossed 1.5M Jams created 🤯
And 80K users
Plus, 75K Jams debugged just last week
Thanks to all of you Jamming, it's really humbling to get to build this with you! 💜
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The product you think of first wins.
You don’t search for a knowledge base, you just use Notion
You don’t search for a chat app, you just use Slack
You don’t search for a CRM, you just use Salesforce
Brand is a powerful moat.
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8 yrs later, I got to go back and share what I wish I knew when I was in school:
1. People want to hire people who make things happen. Be a person who makes things happen. Start podcasts. Build apps. Host hack nights. Do things.
2. Don’t apply to jobs online. Cold email
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Notion, Airtable, and Figma took 3+ yrs to hit product-market fit
It takes years, so what's the sign to keep going?
I think a good first clue is "Promise market fit"
Do people share your landing page, pay to sign up, etc?
If you know people want the promise, keep iterating on
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Packed house at Mercury HQ for AI Night w/ Jam & Product Hunt! 🤩
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What would you do if you raised $10M and still failed?
Michael Acton Smith started meditating.
Then he started Calm—a $2B meditation app.
A story for founders on not giving up:
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One of the applications of cryptocurrency I'm still most excited about is distributed compute. Here's what we're seeing happen in this space:
The big open questions are: shared vs isolated networks, layer 1 vs layer 2 compute, and 1 token model vs 2.
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When you’re a PM, the solution to problems is product.
When you're a founder, the solution to problems is people.
When you’re a PM you need to spend all your time on product.
When you’re a founder you need to spend all your time on recruiting.
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Hard truth no one is telling you: people can tell if you're using ChatGPT
Here's the
#1
reason why you should NOT fully rely on ChatGPT in 2023:
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Hire marketers from companies you’ve never heard of.
"Wait, doesn't this mean they're bad marketers?"
No, they've had to train the hard way.
Marketing a rocketship is easy mode, marketing a startup with no reputation is hard work.
Hire relentless > Rocketship passenger
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Woww it's live! We just launched Jam Edit on ProductHunt. Now you can edit your website, right from the page. 🥳
If you’re up for it, would love your help with an upvote! ❤️
👉
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under-hyped: product-led retention
everyone talks about adding new users, few people talk about keeping them
here’s 7 features to remix to make your product stickier
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Just crossed 1,000 signups in a day for the first time ever 🤯❤️ I feel so excited 1,000 people experienced a new faster way to resolve bugs for the first time today.
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Hire people who care
And one day you will open the Intercom dashboard and learn your company has a 2 min response time to all customer support issues!! 🤯
Lucky to work with such a dedicated team 💜
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One lesson I learned as a PM:
Define the word: "ready"
If an engineer says: it'll be ready today
Does it mean: ready for production? Or ready for code review?
"Ready" means something different on every team
But if you define it, you align and can get a lot more done
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Our product turned 18 months old today.
From 1 → 51K users and nearly 700K debuggable bug reports
I feel so lucky - getting to meet amazing builders shaping Jam with their feedback every day, and working with this super hardworking, positive team. It’s been a dream.
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