기술 스타트업 시작하기 핵심 원칙과 인사이트

### 성공적인 기술 스타트업을 시작하기 위한 필수 단계
* 🚀 기술 스타트업을 시작하려면 **2~4명의 공동 창업자 중 최소 50%가 엔지니어링 배경**을 가지고 있어야 하며, 모두 **1년치 생활비를 저축**하고 검소하게 생활하는 것이 이상적입니다.
* 💡 팀원 중 한 명이 회사로 성장할 수 있는 아이디어의 씨앗을 가지고 있는 경우가 많으므로 **팀으로 아이디어를 브레인스토밍**하는 것이 중요하며, 모두가 아이디어에 대한 주인의식을 가져야 합니다.
* 📈 월별 또는 연간 문제보다는 일별 또는 주별 문제 해결에 집중하면 성공 가능성이 높아지므로, 예를 들어 **Uber와 같은 서비스는 일상적인 교통 수요**를 해결합니다.
* 🔍 철저한 시장 조사를 통해 **목표 시장에 수십억 달러 규모의 시장**이 있는지 확인하고, 경쟁사의 제품을 활용하여 전략을 수립하세요.
* 💼 미국 내 법인 설립은 **약 250달러의 비용**이 드는 간단한 절차로 **미국 투자자로부터 자금을 조달**할 수 있습니다.
* 🚀 MVP(최소 실행 가능한 제품)를 출시하는 데는 **2개월 이상 걸리지 않는 것**이 이상적입니다. 사용자에게 빠르게 제품을 선보이는 것이 초기 피드백과 성장의 핵심이기 때문입니다.
* 📊 성장은 투자자에게 가장 중요한 지표이므로 처음부터 **자연스럽게 공유와 입소문**을 유도할 수 있는 제품을 만드는 데 집중하세요.
* 💰 효과적으로 자금을 조달하려면 **투자자 미팅 일정을 긴밀하게 조율**하여 긴박감을 조성하고, **회사의 성장과 언론 보도 내용**을 논의하여 관심을 끌 수 있는 모멘텀을 구축하세요.

기술 스타트업이 성공하려면 강력한 엔지니어링 팀, 문제 해결에 대한 집중력, 효율적인 지출이 필요합니다.

but this is it. Like, literally, this is all the smart stuff I know, period, and it's all in like maybe 14 slides, so it's really fast. All right, let's go. How to start a technical startup. First one, two to four co-founders, at least 50% engineering. They all have to have somewhat around a year's worth of money in the bank, but that doesn't mean a year's worth of money living in a one-bedroom apartment like in a high-rise. That means a year's worth of money eating ramen noodles and being very poor. And everyone has to have quit their job. This is what you need to start a startup. Notice no idea is required; you just need this. That's it. Second idea: I always think that it's better to start brainstorming with your teammates. Typically, one member of the team has the kernel of an idea that'll become the company, but it's always best before that gets too solidified to discuss it with your teammates so that everyone buys in and gets ownership. We tend to like

companies who are trying to solve personal problems. Every investor says that the real thing is we like companies where the founders know what the hell the companies are doing and know what the problem is. So if it's not solving your problem, it should be solving a problem that you're very, very aware of. And then the other thing I tell Founders is try to focus on daily and weekly problems as opposed to monthly or yearly problems. It's a lot easier to do something like Uber. The typical person in America has to figure out how to get somewhere three times a day. It's a lot harder to do a car sales website. The typical person in America only buys a car once every seven years. Try to focus on daily and weekly problems. It tends to be a lot more successful. Market, this is an area that like people talk so much about. Do an hour of research, figure out whether there are billions of dollars being made in your market, and use your competitor's product. After that, I don't care legal if you guys are interested in raising money in the US.

You're going to have to incorporate in the US. That is a very, very, very simple process for $250 and clerk.com. You can have an American company, and you can raise money from American investors. Yeah, it's that easy. Let's demystify that MVP, most viable product. This is where most companies will screw up. Actually, sorry, where most companies will screw up is on the team. This is the second place most companies will screw up. How can you get something into people's hands? I can't tell you. I've done this many times myself. The number one piece of advice we give to YC companies before they launch is launch. I can't tell you how many people will just sit there and iterate and iterate before users ever see anything. So when I ask a company how long it's going to take to launch, I always just ask them, Why does it take longer than two months? Like, I don't care what it is. I don't care if they haven't started yet. You should be able to build something in two months and get it in

front of users. This is just saying it one more time. You're nothing into your launch. So, how do you achieve growth? I would say that for the typical Silicon Valley investor, this is the number one metric for determining whether you're going to raise money. It's not team, it's not past experience, it's not fancy investors, it's growth. So, um, typically you're going to go one of three places. One, you're going to experiment with ads. I tend to like that strategy the least. The second, if you're B2B, you really want to focus on reference customers, the customers who you can provide amazing service to, who's going to talk to other people in their industry and spread the word about you. The last one, if you're doing anything related to Consumer, whether it's consumer services, social media, etc., usage should equal sharing. I can't tell you how many Founders I've talked to said, Oh, I'm going to make my thing go viral. Well, if you want to make your thing go viral, it doesn't mean just adding a share.

button. The very fact that people are using your product has to create some type of sharing that has to be built in from day one. And so, don't think of sharing as an extra activity or a side activity; think of it as 100% part of using your product. All right, press. A lot of people think that they need to hire someone to do their PR. At Justin TV, my co-founder had a little competition on how much money we've wasted, and we'd write it up on a whiteboard. And every time we wasted money, we'd write it up there and add it up. I've wasted over $150,000 on PR firms, so I'm giving this advice because I don't want you to do the same thing. 99% of PR in the early stage you can do yourself. The best piece of advice I've been given about PR, the thing that completely changed my whole perception, is that PR is exactly like business development. When you're trying to do a BD deal, you get a warm introduction. You

follow up. You build a relationship, and you provide something of value when you're dealing with press. It's the exact same thing. You need to get an introduction from someone, hopefully who that reporter has always written about. You need to be able to structure your pitch so that it's real news: something launching, money being raised, a significant hire, a significant new BD deal. You can't just expect the profile piece, and what you need to do is make sure you treat that as a relationship. Once you have a reporter who's written about you, you've got to follow up with them. That becomes a very, very important relationship that can continue to provide value if you continue to follow up. PR is very simple and don't spend money fundraising. Typically, companies will come to YC and ask, How do we start fundraising? and the number one thing we say to them is that if you don't need money, people love to give it to you. So how do you put yourself in the position of not needing money? One, let's not start the company with a $1 million marketing.

and advertising plan, right? That's you need money for that. Um, think about how you can structure your company so all you have to do is pay for the living expenses of your co-founders. That's it. Hopefully, your MVP requires so little money to get up and running that you can produce some growth without needing it. The second thing is that people don't quite understand that speed when it comes to fundraising is extremely important. Um, when you have meetings with investors, you want them to be scheduled as tightly as possible, like one week, every single introduction meeting you have with an investor. Um, the purpose of this is that one, it creates Buzz around your fundraise, two, it lines all the investors up. So, if one investor wants to take a step forward, you can contact everyone else you just met in the previous week and said, Hey, look, we've got someone on hook here. Do you want to come along or not? The biggest mistake we see people make is doing investing these investment meetings serially. I'll take one this week, I'll take one next

week. I'll take one the week after that. Investors move because they have a fear of missing out (FOMO). You're not creating a fear of missing out if you're only talking to them one at a time. The last thing is having growth. Having growth is like the solution to every single problem. The more you're growing, the more investors are going to invest time finding you as opposed to the other way around. So, you're having problems fundraising. How many people right now are looking to fundraise in this audience? Okay, all right, beautiful. Four things to think about. One, are you growing? I should have asked, have you launched? If you have a launch plan that requires fundraising, change it. Two, are you talking to the press? It's investors' jobs when they wake up every morning to find a company to invest in. That's their job. They try to trick you into thinking that their job is to sit at their desk and wait for you to walk in the front door, but that's not their job. So, you need to be getting the word

out about your company so that they hear about your company from someone else, not just you. Three, build momentum. Make sure you're talking to as many investors at the same time as possible. Sometimes this means cheating, like oftentimes this means doing stuff like telling the investor you're really busy and you can only meet a month from now so you can spend a whole month lining up other investors for that week. That's totally fine. That's totally fine. The last thing is that try to focus on people, especially for your first money, people who understand your problem because they've had it or they have it right now. Oftentimes, customers and potential customers can be great initial investors early stage. So, operations super, super fast. The number one problem that companies have is they spend too much money. That's the number one problem they have. So, spend less money, pay yourself less, get a crappier office, just suck it up and use less money. This is the number one way you can extend your runway, and it's 100% dependent on you. No

one else. The second thing, and I can't tell you how many people do this, look at how much you spend every month. It's very simple. Just go to your bank account, download your, you know, the spreadsheet that says exactly every line item what you spent, and read it every month. If you're the CEO and you don't know what your expenses are, you're not doing your job. Then figure out how to spend less money. That seems pretty simple. All right, hiring. One of the goals I like to kind of instill in people in hiring is figure out how you can increase the average talent with each hire. Oftentimes, founders think that they are like the smartest people in the universe. Founders tend to be pretty smart, but very, very, very willing to take on risk. And so your first couple of employees should be a lot smarter and just a little bit more risk-averse than you are. If when you're hiring someone you don't think you're increasing the average intelligence of the company, you made a mistake because those people are

basically your hiring advertisement. If those people are smart, other smart people going to want to come to your company. If those people are not smart, everyone knows it. So don't. I mean, one of the things I always think about is like, if you can't hire someone who's smarter than you, just do it yourself. You know, it doesn't. Hiring a lot of people is not required. Be fair and transparent when you give someone an offer. You need to tell them how much stock they're getting. They should get stock. Need to tell them how much stock is outstanding. Need to tell them whether their salary is, you know, typical for what you give. And if not, be honest. A lot of the times, your first employees are your most viable. And if you show them loyalty, they'll show you loyalty back. And then the last thing is hire slow. My second company, Social Cam, had three founders. When we sold, we had three founders, no employees. We didn't necessarily want it to be that way, but we were able to grow a product to over 20 million downloads.

with three people, so don't tell me that you can't do a lot with just your founding team. You can do a whole lot. I think Instagram sold for a billion, and they were under 20, so high or slow, you can do it.

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기술 스타트업 시작하기: 주요 단계

성공적인 기술 스타트업을 위해서는 최소 50% 이상의 엔지니어링 배경을 가진 2~4명의 공동 창업자와 1년간의 저렴한 생활비가 필요합니다.

팀원들과의 브레인스토밍은 아이디어 소유권을 위해 매우 중요하며, 매일 또는 매주 문제를 해결하는 데 집중하면 성공 가능성이 높아집니다.

시장 조사, 미국 내 법인 설립, 2개월 내 제품 출시는 스타트업을 시작하기 위한 필수 단계입니다.

실리콘밸리 투자자들이 자금 지원을 결정할 때 가장 중요하게 고려하는 지표는 성장성입니다.

스타트업은 성장을 위해 광고를 실험하고, B2B의 경우 레퍼런스 고객에 집중하며, 소비자 관련 서비스의 경우 공유와 사용을 통합할 수 있습니다.

초기 단계에서는 홍보를 직접 담당하여 기자들과 관계를 구축하고 실제 뉴스를 제공하여 보도를 확보하는 동시에 자금 조달의 필요성을 최소화하는 방식으로 회사를 포지셔닝해야 합니다.

성공적인 모금을 위한 주요 전략

공동 창업자의 생활비를 충당할 수 있도록 회사를 구조화하면 초기 자금 수요를 최소화하는 데 도움이 될 수 있습니다.

투자자 미팅 일정을 빡빡하게 잡으면 소문과 긴박감을 조성하여 자금을 확보할 가능성이 높아집니다.

비즈니스를 성장시키고 언론과 적극적으로 소통하면 투자자를 유치하고 자금 모금에 유리한 고지를 선점할 수 있습니다.

스타트업 성공을 위한 핵심 전략

강력한 네트워크를 구축하는 것이 중요하므로 동시에 여러 투자자를 확보하는 것을 목표로 하세요.

비용을 효과적으로 관리하는 것이 중요하므로 지출을 줄이고, 급여를 적게 지급하며, 월별 지출을 정기적으로 검토하세요.

채용할 때는 나보다 더 현명하고 위험을 회피하는 인재를 영입하여 회사의 전반적인 인텔리전스를 높이는 데 집중하세요.

성공을 위한 스마트한 채용 전략

똑똑한 인재를 채용하는 것은 다른 유능한 인재를 회사로 끌어들이는 중요한 일입니다.

주식과 급여에 대한 세부 사항을 포함하여 채용 제안을 공정하고 투명하게 하는 것이 중요합니다.

천천히 채용하고 강력한 창업 팀에 의존하면 상당한 성장과 성공으로 이어질 수 있습니다.