Temporary user engagement is insufficient; if users eventually churn, the product is a 'leaky bucket' and fails to build compounding value. Founders must actively monitor and ensure their cohort retention curves flatten, meaning a significant portion of users remain engaged indefinitely.
A product is worthless if its cohort retention curve doesn't flatten
Temporary user engagement is insufficient; if users eventually churn, the product is a 'leaky bucket' and fails to build compounding value. Founders must actively monitor and ensure their cohort retention curves flatten, meaning a significant portion of users remain engaged indefinitely.
This means that you need to have confidence and prove that your cohort curves flatten.
Customer feedback, not internal vision, dictates the product roadmap
Founders often believe they should dictate the product vision, but YC advocates for a roadmap built directly from customer input. This means actively engaging with users, even manually onboarding the first 100 customers, to uncover pain points and refine the product experience before automating processes.
And it's the idea that you as a founder are not the one who writes your product road map.
Ship the version of your product that you're embarrassed by
Founders often delay product launches striving for perfection, but this prevents real users from interacting with the product and providing critical feedback. Launching an imperfect, even 'embarrassing,' version allows for much faster identification of issues and opportunities for improvement, accelerating the product's evolution.
This next one is the most classic piece of advice that everybody still rejects, which is the idea that you should ship the version of your product that you're embarrassed by.