Marketing Assistant

Three years ago I told my co-founder I'd quit if we didn't hit 100 paying customers in six months.

We hit 27. He didn't let me quit.

Last week we crossed 10,000.

A few honest things I want to write down, because I won't remember them in two years:

On product. The thing customers paid for in year one is not the thing they pay for now. The first 100 customers bought the demo. The next 1,000 bought the integrations. The 10,000 bought reliability — and that's a different company.

On hiring. Our first six engineers came from referrals. Our next sixty came from a process we built in month nine that I'd rejected three times before. The lesson wasn't "build a hiring process." The lesson was: the thing you're avoiding is usually the thing that breaks the next ceiling.

On founders. I have a co-founder I will work with forever. When we disagreed in month four, we wrote it down. When we disagreed in month forty, we wrote it down. We have a shared doc with 89 disagreements, with the outcome of each one noted. Nine of mine were wrong. Eighteen of his were. Most disagreements aged into agreement; that's the magic.

On customers. Customers will lie to you politely. Their friends will lie to you enthusiastically. The only honest signal is whether the credit card renews.

A lot of people deserve credit here — I'll write that thread separately. For now: thank you to the 10,000 teams who bet on us. The first 100 of you got an unreliable product and a panicked founder; the next 9,900 are the reason we're still here.

Onto the next decimal point.