Successful Founders Are OK With Rejection

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:00)
And so, I just noticed a lot of these teams, the really core thing going on is ego protection.
And nothing else. And like, you can come up with all these intellectual arguments on why actually, you know, but when you really talk to someone, you get down to the core, it's being okay with getting rejection.

**Michael Seibel** (0:25)
Hey, this is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. 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 the beginning, when you're still figuring out your idea or product, get in as many user or potential user calls as possible, at least one per day and ideally multiple. It seems obvious, but it's something that we personally failed at in the beginning. Don't brainstorm ideas in a silo. You don't know what people want.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:58)
We have all these ideas in our heads as founders about what people want, that the moment they are subjected to reality are embarrassingly wrong.
Like, there's nothing more humbling. There's nothing that makes you feel shittier than seeing real people using this thing that you built, that you spent a bunch of time on, and just ripping it to shreds and not understanding it, or using none of the features or clicking on the wrong thing. It's horrible. So, talking to users is like the inoculation against this spending inordinate amounts of time doing something that is completely irrelevant to your end users, okay?

**Michael Seibel** (1:37)
So you're suggesting, then, that I take surveys, right? I mean, what's the most efficient way to learn what my customers want? I should survey them, right?

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:47)
So this may be offensive to some folks listening to this video, but I don't think that user surveys are that valuable when choosing a startup idea. Surveys are a useful way to get certain kinds of feedback. I would think of it as sort of micro-optimizations or trying to choose directions or say you had four names for a company, you want to choose which name was the best of the four choices. Yeah, great, run a survey. But when you're looking for fundamental truths or you're trying to find your first customer market validation, you want to be harsher or harder. Well, what does that mean? That means get someone to give you money for it.
Do you see how it's a much higher bar to get someone to pay you money than to fill out a survey or to get someone to actually use your thing every day or to get them to install it on site?
Think about how many products that we would all in a survey say, oh, that sounds useful, like, oh, it's a very useful idea that you have that you would never in a million years actually pay a dollar for.

**Michael Seibel** (2:54)
I think the second thing about a survey that I've seen really be horrible is there is a tiny subset of your potential users who actually have expertise.
They've actually tried 27 different products. This is actually a really important problem for them. But if you treat everyone you talk to the same and they felt the same question, so you never get exposed to the expertise. And the best example I saw of this was early days Airbnb. Airbnb did this fun thing to get users in the very early days where they offered people who were putting their homes online for rental on other platforms, free digital photos, high res digital photos, back when digital cameras weren't a thing yet, in order to list on Airbnb. And then instead of hiring a photographer, they went out, they got digital cameras, they went out and they took the photos. And to this day, I still remember that there was one guy who they met, they took photos of this house.
He loved the photos. He asked them, hey, do you want to sit down for coffee or tea or whatever? They started talking. And then he said, you know, I've been renting out my house on all of the platforms and the internet for a decade. And I have a notebook of all of my notes on all the things they do bad and all the things they do well for the last decade.
Do you want to see it? And so in the Dalton scenario A, he would have received an e-mail survey. He would have signed up for Airbnb, not had a listing, not used it. He would have sent an e-mail survey, like, how do you like Airbnb? Suggest things to improve, right? In the real world example, they got a book of all the things they needed to do.