Category: Essays

Entrepreneur’s Puberty

I’ve always wondered why typical first-time employees go through something similar two to three years into their careers. You start to have doubts, feel like you are not growing fast anymore, find the temptation to jump to another company, or start studying again in a graduate school. I’ve felt it and many of my colleagues and friends have went through something similar. Some people call this (roughly translated) worker puberty, where one feels like she needs a big change in her career.

After working on my first startup for a bit more than four years, many of the entrepreneurs I’ve met seemed to have gone through something I’d like to call entrepreneur’s puberty. Assuming the pressure coming from doing a startup is bit more than that of a typical employee at a big firm, it seems like entrepreneur’s puberty hits a bit earlier in life — usually around 1.5 to 2 years into a startup.

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Your User Base is Part of Your Product

It’s super important to keep your company lean until you hit product-market fit, but as Ben Silbermann mentions in his Startup School speech, the problem may not be your product itself, but a community problem.

It’s important to keep in mind that sometimes, your user base is part of your product. It takes certain amount of users to actually reach MVP.

Questions like…

  • How many users does it take to get the ecosystem going?
  • How many avg. # of friends/followers do you need to get the product run on its own?
  • How many avg. comments per post do you need to get the engagement up
  • … and so forth

There’s no one magic number for these kinds of questions, but obviously there will be a key threshold for almost all products that need some sort of networking effect to kick-in based on their product’s DNA.

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