I wanted to find out how @Bouazizalex and @shuooo built a decacorn @deel grew from $1M ARR to $100M in 20 months. For some context, it takes the median startup 33 months to reach $1M ARR. As of 2024, they’re at $500M ARR (5 years after founding). This doesn’t just put Deel in the top percentile, it makes them one of the fastest-growing startups in history. Turns out there's no secret sauce, just doing the "boring" things extremely well. Ya know, like talking to your customers and building something people want. Alex is the perfect example of “do things that don’t scale.” I’ve rarely (or ever?) seen a founder/CEO of a company valued at $12B+ handle support tickets or encourage folks to DM him with feedback/questions about his company. He knows what he’s doing. Not in an evil, elaborate marketing stunt to get their NPS up kind of way. He’s always been helpful and approachable. I remember asking him how EOR worked years ago (before Deel was this big)—he gave me a super detailed reply on WhatsApp, minutes later. He knows no amount of paid ads, influencer campaigns, or growth hacks get you the value of regularly talking to your customers. He understands the power of the superfan, even 40k+ customers later. I dive deeper into what I've seen work well for them and how founders can learn from it. Check out the thread for the link.

I can bet you good money @CommandBar has some of the best product docs around. But 5 months ago, this wasn’t the case (shoutout to @dazzeloid for crafting these). They were boring, outdated, and just not that useful anymore. It seems like that’s the fate of most product docs. Maintaining them is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge; the moment you finish, it's time to start all over again because they’re already outdated (if you ship as fast as we do, that is, lol). So we built a handy tool to help rate your docs and give you suggestions on how to improve them. You can use this whenever you’re getting the feeling that your users might find spiderwebs instead of useful information. We’re launching on @ProductHunt today and would really appreciate your support! (check the 🧵) Also, a big shoutout for the products that made it possible for us to build this as quickly as we did: 👩‍💻 @supabase for backend and storage 📷 @nextjs for the frontend 📷@figma and @canva for design and launch assets 💜 @linear and @excalidraw for planning

we got our seed deck roasted by @Haje at @TechCrunch and it was actually fun. especially this part, lol: "my AI-powered pitch deck tool gave this deck a 16.9% chance at raising funding." bottom line: pretty slides aren't going to raise $$ for you. techcrunch.com/2024/03/01/co…

I’m still baffled by the success of @arcinternet by @browsercompany. Building a browser in 2024 shouldn’t work… here’s why (and why Arc works anyway): There’s a concept in @ycombinator called “tar pit ideas”: Business ideas that look tempting, but most founders shouldn’t do (e.g. “Uber for X” type of stuff). @daltonc recently put this well in a video with @mwseibel: “It’s a very popular set of ideas, so the bar is higher if you’re going to be working in this kind of space.” Browsers are one of those ideas: No major UI innovations since the tab switcher in 1997. Google, Microsoft, and Apple’s combined market share is 88+%. And nobody’s complaining about their browser. But if you’re in tech, you’re probably reading this in Arc (or your coworkers are wondering why you haven’t switched yet). Arc is growing like a wildfire. How do they do it? It looks like they’re just meeting that incredibly high bar, but that’s not the full truth. Arc is based on a core insight: Most apps now run in the browser, which means browsers are now operating systems. My colleague @FLobsien recently wrote a breakdown of how this insight lets The Browser Company break all the rules and still succeed. Want to find out how to succeed in an impossible category? Read the full breakdown under the link in the thread.

come grab one at the @bluebottleroast near south park

In 2013, WhatsApp had 35 engineers and 400M MAUs. In 2015, while its team only grew to 50, MAUs skyrocketed to 900M. Not bloating a team if things aren’t breaking is almost always a good idea. We open-sourced @CommandBar 's algorithm for when it's time to hire. While obviously biased, I'd say it's done a pretty damn good job so far. If any of you remember @sarahtavel's story about "The Mitochondria in Startups"—CB is one of the few examples I've seen where this type of employee DNA is so prevalent. commandbar.com/blog/hiring-w…