Simple Products That Became Big Companies

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:00)
A product that doesn't work with lots of features is infinitely worse than a product with one feature that works. And again, like people-

**Michael Seibel** (0:08)
Let's play that out. Let's play that out, right? Imagine if it's like, they were like, you get healthcare and you get benefits and you get 401k and payroll, and none of those features work.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:19)
And sometimes we lose the money.

**Michael Seibel** (0:21)
Yes, but you would hate them. You would hate them.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:26)
That sounds like Verizon or something, you know?

**Michael Seibel** (0:28)
Exactly. Hey, this is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell, and welcome to Rookie Mistakes. We asked YC founders for their rookie mistakes so we could share them with you and help you avoid them. Here's the first mistake that was written in.
In my company, we tried to accommodate more than one use case in our product before nailing a single use case and proving out that they even exist a business or business serving that customer.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:59)
Yeah, this is super common. It's definitely a problem. We call this boiling the ocean, right? It's you're trying to do something that's basically impossible or intractable. And all of your instincts are to build a complete fully formed product without getting a single user. In your mind, you have this elaborate plan.
And so your plan to start the elaborate plan is to build it all at once before getting a single user.

**Michael Seibel** (1:24)
I think that every founder starts their company with the lie in their head that they know about what their customer wants and they know how to solve the problem. And the more you build before putting your product in front of a user, the more you just let that lie go wild. Whereas as soon as you get something in front of a user, you can actually learn how many of my hypotheses were correct and how much of this stuff was just the lie that got me started doing my company. A useful lie, but maybe not the best lie if you want to solve your user's problem. I also think there's a little bit of...
I'll invent a term, Googleitis. Like people looking at companies that they use today and not understanding what they looked like at the beginning.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:08)
Yeah, they're copying a current product.
You're like, oh, we're the next Amazon, so we're going to build everything Amazon has. And hey, when Amazon started, it was like a really simple website that just sold books. It didn't do anything else. Like, I think-

**Michael Seibel** (2:23)
It didn't even do that that well.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:26)
Like, fair.

**Michael Seibel** (2:29)
Let's talk about some other examples, though. You were mentioning that OpenSea is a good example of something that started super simple.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:35)
Yeah, I mean, look, OpenSea is a company in the zeitgeist. It's really famous. It feels like it came out of nowhere. If you're like a normal person, you're like, wow, OpenSea, what a huge deal. Well, OpenSea was in YC in 2018
And it was a rough start. They changed their idea. They were working on something else to begin with, and they pivoted into OpenSea. And they actually spent something like a year to two years grinding it out with this really simple website that just let you buy and sell NFTs and barely worked.
And they shipped tons of features. They shipped once a day or once a week constantly.
They didn't build their own wallet. If you use OpenSea today, you'll notice this. You have to use a third-party wallet. There's all these other things they didn't build.
And by grinding away and being super focused on the simple use case, they got something that people wanted. They got network effects. And then boom, we all woke up one day, and this is one of the hottest companies in the world, and everyone wants to invest, and they're worth billions of dollars. Well, don't forget the two or three years they were grinding away in obscurity, just trying to make the dang thing work, doing the simplest thing that had basically no features. The feature was a website to buy an NFT and transfer to someone else.
You know what I'm saying? And it still has a lot of work to do on the basics before they add really complex features. There's a lot more basic work to do on that thing. And so again, like the story here is the reason that thing worked is they started simple and they made the simple thing work, and now they're adding more complexity to it. And so if someone wanted to like compete with them or make an NFT startup, they should be doing the simple fundamentals first and not try to get feature parity with all these other companies first, you know?