Dear Reader,
Welcome to the 35th edition of the good reads newsletter by Malpani Ventures. Sharing your weekly dose of articles for this weekend’s reading!
Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Building Horizontal Products
A detailed read for founders launching a horizontal product. Some of my key takeaways:
“We'd sit down with our customers to see what they were using the product for. With horizontal products, you build this very generic thing and the cool part is seeing how people use it,”
You can build a horizontal product with a deep customer understanding of a specific use case. It's just a matter of not going too deep on it
We priced more against the Salesforces and ServiceNows of the world, as opposed to the Evernotes and Dropboxes. We did anticipate that people would build applications that power important company processes on Airtable, so we wanted to price accordingly
What happened to Myspace? How did Myspace kill itself?
https://buildd.co/startup/failure-stories/what-happened-to-myspace
Buildd has a great collection of simple, analytical posts on startup’s successes and failures
Lessons:
NOT all million-dollar acquisition offers are good for your startup!
Your startup doesn't have to fail fast. It can succeed slow
Don't try to solve for all problems at once. Figure the most critical ones & solve them first. Iterate and solve for the rest in later versions.
Software doesn't last forever. When you build something from scratch, don't expect it to run magically forever. Version upgrades, feature deprecation & other maintenance issues are bound to come up.
Unless you realise that the absence of a certain feature has created a bottleneck in business outcome, it is surely an unnecessary feature.
Startups are built by doing simple and "boring" things, consistently, over long periods of time.
Lastly, a thread explaining on how best to think about designing your landing pages
Until next time folks!