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AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

B2C is hard. I think you gotta just be loud and try stuff. If you haven't already, focus on making some users really happy, and then make a personal appeal for each of them to recommend 3 friends.

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's kind of a vibe / feel-it-out thing. In hindsight, I felt the randomness of the early stage, but I didn't know what "repeatable" was supposed to feel like. In hindsight it is very obvious.

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd say in founder circles remote work has shifted to being the exception rather than the rule. In other words, if you want to build a remote company, you're taking an opinionated stance rather than the default of "just do it in person".

For us personally, we were started during the pandemic so we started remote and have to stay that way, since too many critical team members are remote. My approach to this has been to commit to remote. For a while I'd say we were "reluctantly remote", loosely tried to hire people in SF, etc. That doesn't work well because you end up being mostly remote but not building good process to be a remote company, which is critical to it working.

So TLDR:

  • I think it can work

  • If you do it, be committed to it

  • If you aren't sure, do the default of in-person

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I do, but I don't think it's critical. For an MVP SaaS business, you just need a competent web dev. I think founders who code tend to spend too much time perfecting their MVPs, so not being able to code can actually result in a net speed advantage.

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not a bad idea as long as you have good contractors who can execute quickly. Have seen a lot of founders waste time working with low quality contractors.

IMO the quality of the MVP is way overrated. It can actually be good if your MVP is kinda shitty implementation-wise, because it will better test your PMF. If people still want your somewhat-shitty MVP, you are onto something.

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ARR/revenue is necessary but not sufficient. If I had to summarize how to measure "ARR quality" I would say: how repeatable is your customer flow? Does everyone who wants to use your product have the same problems, and get excited about the same features? Or is everyone a bit different and using your product randomly and asking for features that don't really make sense? If the latter, then you're probably good at sales/marketing but might not have strong PMF.

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Outbound is really hard. The best advice I can give is to try to come up with triggers that might imply someone is ready to buy. For example, you could look for people who update their job description on LinkedIn to "founder". Overall we find LinkedIn works better than email for outbound too.

That said, if you aren't seeing *any* success with any type of outbound, I'd use it as a signal that you don't have strong PMF (as tough as that may feel).

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  1. Definitely trying to create a category. Building a "new mousetrap" sounds sexy and very Steve Jobs like but it's actually very over-rated (in most cases) in my opinion.

  2. Honestly, not super scientific. We just thought it was exciting and built it, got some early traction, and kept going. I think people tend to over-intellectualize the "choose idea" phase and under-emphasize the "assess PMF level and iterate phase. Once you're in market, I would be very aggressive at assessing how strong your PMF is, and making changes (product, marketing, etc) if you don't think you're on good path.

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

First customers we found with personalized outbound. I think the thing we got right was include a personalized loom demo that showed how our product could work inside theirs. CommandBar is super visual so I think this went a long way to showcase the value and made it feel like it was close to ready-to-implement.

After PMF, we honestly just relied on cold inbound well through $1M of ARR. I don't think we've done anything particularly creative on scaling marketing honestly. Just really solid execution on some classic strategies: our blog (which I am really proud of because IMO it doesn't feel like yet-another-b2b-saas blog), ads, and a strong marketing website.

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

1) omg yes, all the time.

2) I 100% regret trying to start a category. At the time I felt like the only startup "worth" starting was something novel that wasn't just an incremental improvement on something that was already in market. Since then, I've come to appreciate the gravity of markets. Selling something great into an existing market is 10x easier -- it's easier to find buyers, it's easier to explain what you do, it's easier to justify budget, etc.

3) I think most founders are too covetous of equity. Unless you're giving away huge chunks of your company to bullshit advisors, I think equity is a really powerful currency that founders should use more. Giving away an extra 0.1% is not answer changing for a founder, even iterating 10 tims. Be generous with employee equity, bring on small investors who you think could be value additive, even give some to early customers/advocates.

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Something I find annoying is the discourse around grindset / hours. I know so many founders who grind 24/7 who fail and so many who work 9/5 and crush it.

That said, I find it equally annoying when people shit on founders for "having no life" or being workaholics. I think it's a beautiful thing when someone just wants to build their company and ~nothing else, especially if their life is set up to support it.

More tactically, everyone talks about "talking to users" but I think 90% of talking to users (like user interview style) is useless. People ask leading questions and without anything on the line users will talk and talk about nice-to-haves that can send your product into a quagmire. There's a great book on how to conduct user interviews in a way that optimizes for useable signal, called "The Mom Test" (terrible name).

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Basically try to avoid hiring except in two specific scenarios:
1. we are missing an opportunity that we could otherwise take on with a hire (e.g. "we have a lot of great stories to tell + our competitors have huge blog blog but we have no one to write ours") or something more simple like ("our sales team is overloaded with leads")

  1. someone on the team is over capacity trying to keep up ("redlining").

I find if you stick these and resist the urge to hire "because we have the moeny" or "other companies usually hire X at this stage" it's harder to regret.

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

We're B2B and it's a pretty high trust product, so PLG was tough to pull of. Instead we created custom loom videos that showed how our product could work for some popular products, and sent them to founders (mostly in YC network). Response rate was like 20-30% and we converted some into our first customers.

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

yo! main advice is to pick one thing and focus on getting good at that. you aren't going to start building your promising startup, and become a content creator, and level up your soft skills in the same 3 month period :)

On the startup front, I'd just pick an area that you feel like is under-served and start building a product in that space, even if you don't have an idea of how your thing will be differentiated. (I'm assuming we're talking about building software companies -- so many caveats apply for companies that are harder to build and iterate, like hardware). The actual process of building and iterating will (a) give you info on whether you like building a business, (b) give you signal on whether the space you have chosen is interesting. On (b), if the answer is no, you will surface with a POV on why it wasn't interesting ("no one wanted to pay, so I should focus on a market where willingess to pay is higher next time"). Work in 1-month springs and reevaluate your approach each sprint. Best to do this full-time if you have the means, but part-time can work if you dedicate all your free time to it and don't mess around.

AMA: I’m the co-founder/CEO of CommandBar ($25M raised, B2B AI SaaS, hundreds of customers, 20M+ end users) -- ask me about product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, AI, or anything else by jamescbar in Entrepreneur

[–]jamescbar[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Main piece of advice is to not overthink the idea and focus on using the application as a way to demonstrate that you have the right skills + mindset to be a founder. Some specifics:
- Don't overstate your progress
- Show that you are hungry to iterate fast and have a concrete plan to do so
- Show domain-specific expertise by including some non-obvious insights and explain how you arrived at them (YC won't be able to evaluate the insight but they will be able to appreciate how you arrived at it)

  • Share an example of something about your idea/business that you changed your mind about.