Top Three Lessons Since Starting My Start-up

Week 95 of Founding Typogram

Hi friends, it’s been almost two years since I quit my job and started my logo design tool startup, Typogram. When I started, I wrote a daily series documenting the first 30 days of my journey to build a startup. As you know, recently, we publicly launched our design tool. I returned to these early posts to remind myself of the lessons I learned when I started this journey. 

Here are the top three lessons I learned first 30 days that are still important:

Lesson № 1: Talk to users, even before coding anything

As an introvert, I easily fall into the trap of building and chasing the shiny object. However, we are building a tool for others to use - so I remind myself: talk to users. I recommend a brief face-to-face call over a survey and write a script with intros and a list of questions you want to ask before meeting up with the other party. Do “discovery” and avoid jumping to conclusions - listen to your potential users and try to understand their problem and process. 

Lesson № 2: Start selling earlier

Contrary to what I used to believe, selling is not shouting at top of my lung to promote my product. Selling is an art that needs practice. It only comes naturally to some people. Most of us introvert builder type need practice, and shouting is not helpful to anyone. Potential users and customers need persuasion to check out your product, and it’s good to think of a “funnel” or “pipeline.”

An example of how this “funnel” works for us: We share what we are building on Reddit in relevant communities, and interested folks either sign up for our newsletter or go to our homepage to check out the product.

Lesson № 3: Don’t worry about perfection

As a designer, this was tough. I aim for pixel perfection and have a high standard for myself. I have learned to set a deadline and meet it no matter what. Your product is a constant work in progress, evolving with user feedback. It won’t ever be “perfect.”

Hear from You

Do you have any thoughts on the lessons I learned, or have any valuable lessons you learned from a business or project you created in the past? I would love to hear about it.

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See you next week! If you have friends who are interested in founding startups, please consider sharing my newsletter with them!