We went from 0 to 1,000+ paid customers in our first 20 weeks by religiously following these @ycombinator 12 rules: 1/ grow retention before growth. we didn't run a single growth campaign until we hit 90% weekly retention. scaling a leaky bucket just means you fail faster 2/ ignore everyone who isn't your customer. i stopped reading competitor blogs, industry news, and most of twitter. the only company that can kill you in year one is your own 3/ manual is faster than perfect. our first 50 users each got a personal onboarding call from me. you can't automate what you don't understand yet 4/ validate before you build. we put a credit card gate on @origamichat on day 2. it's easy to convince yourself people want your product when nobody's paying 5/ ugly product > no product. we shipped a barely-working version to 30 people in a week. real users teach you more in 7 days than 6 months of polishing in the dark 6/ your customers write your roadmap. i still spend 3 hours a day on user calls. every feature we've shipped came from a conversation, not a planning session 7/ fire bad fits early. we've fired customers who were wrong for our product. 10 people who love you beat 1,000 who kind of like you. every time 8/ ship every week without exception. we push code to production every friday. consistency compounds in ways you can't see at first 9/ stay small longer than feels comfortable. we were 2 people for a very longtime. Headcount is not progress. every great startup was embarrassingly small for embarrassingly long 10/ know your burn, know your runway. we track default alive on a whiteboard every week. scary but necessary. most startups don't die from the market, they die from running out of time 11/ expect things to break constantly. we've had 3 near-death moments. the game isn't avoiding fires, it's how fast you put them out 12/ honest conflict > polite silence. brutal honesty with your cofounder is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy good luck and dont forget to have fun