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🎉 Hey Failories! It's Nico here.

This week with two new interviews and lots of resources for startup founders. Let's start!

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interviews & news 📢

📈 Growing a waitlist to 50k users and raising a $3.25M seed round. And being elected the "Product of the Year" by Product Hunt. And going through Y Combinator. All with a product in beta.

The story of Station, a B2B browser extension that organizes the resources shared by teams, is incredible: growth, fundraising, pivots, product-market fit. One of the best interviews published in Failory lately. Here's the story.​

💀 A juicy $3k mistake: starting with a product before validation. The opposite extreme to what Station's founders have done. It's an entertaining story on how Wit failed to build a juice business in Bangkok and how those learnings impacted his idea validation process. Here's the story.​

Starting today and for the following month, Failory will be sponsored by No Code MBA. I'm particularly excited about this sponsor, as it's a website I really like, around a topic I'm interested in (no code). And if that wasn't enough, they are offering Failory's subscribers a 50% discount 🤯

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We launched the referral program last week and 9 people have already won this prize. A few have won a free copy of our PMF eBook, which you can get by referring 8 friends. And an amazing Nigerian entrepreneur, called Ajulu, has referred +90 people into the list 🥰

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what I'm reading 👀

We've seen in the above interview with Wit how lack of idea validation can lead to startup failure (it's actually one of the most common reasons). In this article, the writer shares her approach to validating an education startup idea with less than $1,000.

Lack of idea validation is strongly related to a lack of product-market fit, which we have claimed to be the reason why 34% of startups fail. Here's a conference talk on how Weebly, a website builder which has been acquired by Squarespace, achieved PMF.

Last week, I shared an article from Erik Torenberg on how to validate startup ideas. This other one from him, on frameworks for hiring on startups, is even better. He knows what he's writing about - OnDeck, his startup, has grown its team a lot lately and they're currently hiring for 30 positions.

If you run a marketplace or eCommerce, you should check a16z's recent analysis on marketplaces in 2021 and their ranking of the top 100 ones.

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That's all for this week. I hope you enjoyed this week's newsletter.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Cheers,

Nico

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