Building Codiga: Building an Iteration Engine
Note: This post is part of a series about building Codiga.
Your first idea is unlikely to be your final idea
When you start your startup, you likely think you have the best idea; you know the space and what is needed. The truth is that we have biases that make us bend reality to fit our view of the world.
The reality and the historical data show that the initial idea is rarely the idea that will make your startup a success:
Slack (the messaging app) did not start as a messaging application but as a video game company. Only when the video game failed did the company think of monetizing a messaging product they developed internally. Salesforce acquired Slack in 2020 for $27.7B.
Uber did not start by offering a convenient drive to everybody. It started by offering luxury rides in San Francisco (the black cars) and kept analyzing the market to adapt its product. Uber is a public company with a $57B market cap (at the time of writing this paragraph).
Instagram did not start by letting users take pictures. It started as a better version of Foursquare, called Burbn. It was only when the founders analyzed the app usage, they realized the main feature people loved was the photo-sharing feature. They pivoted into an app to share pictures, and Instagram was born. Instagram was acquired by Facebook (now Meta) in 2012. Meta is now a public company with a $297B market cap at the time of writing this section.
Like dating and relationships: you will rarely marry your high-school sweetheart. But flirting and dating other people will help you to know yourself, get into new relationships and meet the person you will spend your life with.
What matters is the pace of iteration
What matters is not your initial product, but how quickly you learn from your mistakes and improve. You do not need to have interviews with your users to learn. You can automate your learnings by analyzing user behaviors. Add metrics to know how often a feature is used, the usage pattern, how users interact with your product, and what can make it viral. Application metrics tell you more about the user than what they are telling you.
You need to build a culture where change is welcome but also necessary. Companies usually take days or weeks to implement product changes. In a startup, it should be done in a matter of hours or days. Your advantage as a startup is to be small, lean, and more agile than bigger corporations bloated with politics and internal processes. You rarely compete with another company: your startup is so niche that it really competes with a team inside a company: this team is slowed down by processes and office politics and others, your advantage as a startup is the speed at which you can adapt and iterate.
Usual corporate wisdom may tell you more people means implementing faster. In fact, nothing is more wrong than this: you run faster if you lean. You never need many people: what you need is a set of passionate and motivated people.
Two great examples illustrate this fact: SpaceX and Figma.
SpaceX started in early 2000. At this time, it was a small company started by a person obsessed with the idea. With less than $200M, the company managed to get rockets into space and launch satellites. In less than 20 years, SpaceX managed to build reusable rockets, an idea that was mocked by scientists at the European Space Agency, an institutional dinosaur that has a $7B annual budget! (in comparison, SpaceX burned $1B in the first ten years of existence). SpaceX is set to launch more than 50 rockets in 2022. The European Space Agency is set to launch two (2!) rockets in 2022. SpaceX did not take over the market because it had more people: they did it because they were passionate people who wanted to solve a hard problem.
Figma started in 2012. The founder, Dylan Field, was 19 years old and was named a Thiel fellow: he dropped from school to start his company. The company formation was rocky (imagine meetings between a 30-year-old engineer managed by a 19-year-old). But Dylan's vision was clear: design will be multi-player in the future, and no tool had this capability. Once released, the product became a hit, and existing players were too late to realize their mistakes. Every company in the space had more resources than Figma. Figma won because of their ability to iterate quickly and deliver a great product. Figma was acquired by Abode in 2022 for $20B (the deal did not close).
Build an iteration engine
As a startup, your objective is to build an iteration engine. This needs to be rooted in your culture and how you work.
Keep daily meetings (e.g., standups) with your team to report on what people are working on. Keep these meetings 30 minutes at most. Have one person (ideally, the founder) look at product metrics daily (engagement, usage, etc.). Learn from them and plan product changes accordingly.
When designing a new feature in your product, always add metrics to track and understand how the feature is used. Collecting usage metrics does not prevent you from talking to your users. Always talk to users and learn from them. But be conscious that users have their biases and may not be honest with you. Unlike people, data doesn’t lie.
One specific section on privacy: make sure the data is collected solely to improve your product. Never sell user metrics, and make sure you delete them when you no longer need them. For once, you must be respectful of your user's privacy. It totally fine to use data to build a better product, it should not be done at the cost of user privacy.