Divya Narayanan

Founders with capital that refuse to hire or add resources to alleviate constraints aren't preserving runway -- they're sabotaging growth velocity. I'm seeing this pattern more frequently: 20+ moths of runway, strong customer demand, a product that's delivering ROI but a founding team clearly spread too thin resulting in self-inflicting issues and paper cuts. I think founders feel that by doing everything you're evoking resiliency and capital discipline. Sometimes that's lauded. However, I think it's founders optimizing for control and comfort rather than scale and delegation. From the investor seat, here's how I'm trying to understand this behavior: (1) Avoiding 'role evolution.' - It's hard to graduate from scrappy founder that has to do everything to scrappy founder with the ability to delegate and deploy resources. Hiring means transitioning from building - - > manager - - > leader (2) Control-minded orientation - We naturally feel more accomplished when we can measure our own output (Ex: sales calls made, lines of code written, support tickets resolved, etc...). When you take time hiring and then ultimately unload these tasks, you have to reinterpret your own productivity and be okay with anchoring towards somebody else's. In reality, runway is not the lens to view your business. If capital is sitting idle on your balance sheet with clear use cases for deployment, all you're doing is suppressing momentum and growth. I care less if you were ultimately wrong where you deployed capital rather than running your business to optimize for more runway. Investors implicitly trust your judgment so just have a more growth-oriented mindset 🫡 🚀 .

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As some of you know, I’ve been working quietly on a new startup called elsie AI. It’s part of 1848 Ventures, where our mission is to help small and midsize businesses. The backbone of America. While I bring experience from consumer products and marketplaces that reached millions, building a B2B SaaS from zero to one is a (fun) new game for me. I’m learning fast. Here are a few early takeaways. 1. Building AI prototypes as lead gen and learning tools Tools like Replit and Lovable make it quick to test ideas and get feedback. We’ve been using small AI tools as both learning experiments and ways to attract early interest in elsie. Here are three we’ve built so far: https://lnkd.in/d3j65bjs - to create cool social posts based on your e-commerce products. www.site-roast.com - tongue-in-cheek website health checker https://lnkd.in/dzyj5ey6 - to help you monitor subreddits and find where to engage We’re still figuring out the right tactics, but it’s been a fun and scrappy process. 2. Community building on Reddit I never really used Reddit before, but our audience hangs out there. So that’s where I’ve been spending time. Two weeks in, 46 contributions, 37 karma points. No bans yet. That's good, right? It’s noisy, but when you find the right subreddits, the conversations are gold. 3. Learning from e-commerce experts and design partners I don’t pretend to be an e-commerce expert. Luckily, there are many who are. We’re spending time with solo e-commerce founders and industry experts who can test our ideas and help us shape the product. If you know someone I should talk to, please tag them or send them my way. 4. Building in public We’re a small but mighty team. And we want to bring people along from the very start. Even when our MVP isn’t all that “viable” yet. We’ll launch a public beta early, share what’s working (and what’s not), and keep learning from the feedback. 5. The advantage of being part of 1848 Ventures Being part of 1848V gives us access to best practices across the portfolio. The companies may look different on the surface, from food compliance to e-commerce, but the growth and GTM lessons overlap more than you’d think. It helps us move faster and more precisely. And luckily, my colleagues are way smarter than me. If you’d like to follow along, sign up for the waitlist at www.elsie-ai.com. And I’d love to hear from you. What strategies or tools helped you go from zero to one? #AI #Startups #B2B #SaaS #Entrepreneurship #Founders #BuildInPublic

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You can have customers saying nice things and still not have product market fit. Andy Greenfield, partner at TIA Ventures, spent decades doing qualitative research for major CPG brands. He pioneered a methodology to separate polite responses from visceral pain. Getting different audiences together in panels to understand if products were solving real problems. When they'd do these panels, they'd try to get to one specific question: "If this product were taken away tomorrow, would your life be okay or couldn't you live without it?" That's a very different question than "do you like this product?" Jesse Caesar from First Round Capital explains the difference: "If you want to know what your target is doing or how much, go for quantitative research. But if you want to know why they're doing it, or why they believe what they believe, qualitative research gets you that depth of perspective." Most founders confuse customers being polite with customers who actually care. It’s much easier to do that vs facing hard truths sometimes. You ask someone about your product and they'll say "Yeah, this is super useful." But when you dig deeper with the right questions, you realize they don't actually care that much. I can’t overstate the value of qualitative user research whether investing or building a product myself. Talking to 10 customers with very specific questions to gauge how important the problem really is.  It’s also very helpful to cross reference this with quantitative metrics with tools like PostHog or Mixpanel. “Trust but verify”. The real magic is when you do both of these things in concert. For example, a client you interview may say “I really love using your feature that lets me do XYZ” and they may be very specific about the value it delivers…so it may seem like a totally credible piece of feedback, but then when you look in PostHog or any user analytics platform, you see that they’ve only used the feature once. So this begs the question “if you find feature XYZ so valuable, why have you only used it once in the past month?”  This gap is often the difference between a company that scales and one that plateaus.

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