This Week at YC

December 8th, 2023

When you’re an early stage startup founder in a world of mega companies, it’s easy to see your team's size of just two or three people as a disadvantage.

But being small and scrappy has its upsides! Just one of them: it’s still entirely reasonable for you, as the founder, to be the one talking with customers about support issues and feedback. And people love it!

Here’s Aaron Epstein discussing this in the latest episode of Design Review:

“I think a lot of the time, as [founders], you’re worried that your disadvantage is that you’re so small. This is actually one of the things that gives you an advantage! Your responsiveness, your personal availability, giving people your cell phone number, making yourself available on the website 24/7… no larger company is going to do that.”

And here’s Dalton Caldwell on the same topic in an episode of Dalton & Michael:

“A lot of folks — especially if they worked at one of these big companies — their first instinct, right when they start out, is to pretend that their startup is a big company, pretend that it has a bunch of employees, pretend that there’s a customer support rep that’s not them, and recreate that whole weird Rube Goldberg machine of talking to customers that they saw elsewhere.

And it makes intuitive sense — but! What if the opposite were the case? Something incredibly powerful is that people like to talk to the founders of companies. And they like to talk to people that make the software they use. And they like to feel listened to, and they like to feel heard. And the big companies can’t do that!”

Will you be able to do this forever? Probably not. But early on, it’s a tried-and-true way to have real conversations, learn fast, and make people want to root for you for life.

- Greg

📺 The Latest

Five DevTool Startups Get Their Websites Reviewed

Developer tools are more popular than ever. But building a great dev tool isn't enough — you have to be able to convince developers to try it out.

In this episode of Design Review, our host Aaron Epstein is joined by David Siegel (founder and CEO of the no-code app builder Glide) to look at five startup dev tool sites and breakdown the key aspects of pitching a product to developers.

🌎 YC Community

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