Having a launched product is hard

Something that I think a lot of people don't realize about YC is that it's not very fun. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of great YC memories, but the pressure was enormous. We had yet to raise and so we were operating on shoestring. My co-founder and I fought more during YC than any other time, before or after (and often over nonsensical and petty stuff).<p>That being said, you don't go through YC because it's fun. You go through it because it's good for your company. It gave us exposure to investors who probably wouldn't have given two first-time-entrepreneur yokels from Minnesota the time of day. We met a lot of people who had been through the pain of building a company before.<p>More than anything YC forced us to take a hard look at our company and a hard look at ourselves and decide that we could do this thing even when it wasn't always fun.

<i>Our product development was almost stalled for months on end.</i><p>Then you're doing something wrong.<p>Scaling, debugging, refactoring, customer support, prospect interaction, and even raising investment must all be done <i>in support of</i> product development, not <i>instead of</i> product development.<p>I am a notorious single tasker who loves coding more than anything else, so I used to have the same problem. If some other task took priority, all product development stopped.<p>Until a artist friend of mine told me the secret of his success, 4 words I have never forgotten, "I paint every day."<p>Now I code every day. No matter what else happens.<p>With 3 of you, I would expect that at least one of you could keep building <i>something</i> every day without any of you dropping any of the other eggs you must juggle.

I think it's interesting how different people view the same tasks as pleasant or unpleasant. I find breaking things, scaling infrastructure, and talking to (potential and current) customers vastly more pleasant than planning/managing development or writing code. Logistics (for moving bits, boxes, and people) is great fun too.<p>Recruiting is amazingly fun when you're not already under the gun for a specific position, because it's basically selling your idea and meeting someone new. It sucks if you're behind and need to hire a lot of people quickly, because you're going to have to make a lot of compromises you shouldn't be making, and you know it.<p>I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy admin, accounting, and immigration bureaucracy, but those people are not me.<p>Maybe figuring out what things your team enjoys (and presumably is good at doing) should inform what kind of product you build more than it usually does.

On a somewhat un-related note, I am interested in hearing about your immigration issues. I realize an immigration attorney's advice is probably golden, but I would like to hear what visa categories you considered and applied for and what problems you encountered while applying/gathering paperwork.

Were you able to leverage the YC "old boys" network? (I mean that in the positive sense, not the negative one)<p>That is, did having access to talented former-YC people help you get over the technical humps and hurdles? I believe one of the main pros to joining YC (apart from getting mentoring from PG et. al.) is that many of the people that went before you are on tap to help resolve things in a "pay it forward" fashion.

What does any of this have to do with YCombinator? It sounds like you just needed to hire a customer support rep and scale your organization.

"Acquisition of liquidity"?<p><a href="http://adam.heroku.com/images/posts/startup_curve.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://adam.heroku.com/images/posts/startup_curve.jpg</a><p>Are all YC startups encouraged to get acquired?

Your ordeal with immigration reminded me of the importance of the startup visa.

On an unrelated note, that whiteboard graph disturbed me a bit. Does every YC startup hope to get bought out? Why would that even be a goal or something to aspire to?

On a mostly unrelated note, I installed rapportive and discovered that someone had signed up for a social network with my e-mail address that wasn't me. So I had the site send me a new password and deleted the account. Why do people <i>do</i> that?

Great post, Martin. In chatting with other YC starrtups that had already launched, is this a common feeling?<p>The entrepreneurial mindset seems more geared toward building cool stuff, which makes the next stage of scaling/support much less fun.

<p><pre><code> * Answering many, many support emails and tweets * Raising our seed round * Stopping our infrastructure from collapsing under our user growth * Responding to press and bloggers * Reading resumés and interviewing job candidates * Fixing gnarly bugs in production * Applying for visas, so that we could work in the US * Attending YC dinners and office hours </code></pre> How is all this not moving the product forward? I am genuinely curious, to an outsider like me, this is what is the growth of the company. All these things have to be done one time or another.

Martin, I enjoyed the post as it was from a different perspective..<p>The product is great too I use it every day..