Shawn Winters’ Post

One of the best metrics most early stage founders don’t track? Hint: it’s not revenue. How many sales or customer calls does the founder do per week? If you aren’t talking to current or potential users of your product, you’re building in a silo. Revenue is a lagging indicator. User calls are leading.

Before starting up full-time,  We built a few tools to experiment Most never saw light,  But Snoopie did. Mainly, we needed conviction that “building stuff” truly gave us happiness. Snoopie scaled to 190 installs, And 30 users who get value. After starting up full-time,  Chasing large(r) opportunities made most sense. So we ended up selling it. This obviously isn’t the multi-million acquisition post that’s typical on LinkedIn. It’s only an additional year of “Ramen Runway” and a small angel cheque we’ll write ourselves to find the next problem to solve. If you’re starting up, I recommend doing this once. Money isn’t important, But unlearning the time leverage, And learning the code leverage is.

early stage founders, you have to move fast and try things that push your comfort zone. send more personalized cold emails, post more content, make more calls, ask for more intros. early-stage GTM is about volume and speed, not perfection. every action, every outreach is a chance to learn, refine, and grow. comfort kills momentum. lean into the things that feel risky. the founders who go all in, who test relentlessly, are the ones who uncover what works faster.

Some of the most successful founders I met never post online. Others share every milestone. Build quietly or build in public - just build. And if sharing metrics helps you grow faster, do it without apology. Use every advantage you have.

First Five Hires: Building a Balanced Team with Developers and Financial Experts In this episode, we explore the rationale behind the first five hires of a startup. The discussion covers the importance of having Google developers, financial experts, and the integration of sales and marketing roles. Learn how combining the best practices and knowledge from different domains can enhance the overall performance of the team.

Hard truth for most early-stage founders on here: Nobody knows who you are. So you can't be precious about posting cadence. "I'll test posting 1x per week" Good luck! Instead: You need to ramp up VOLUME. The companies that don’t understand this will get left behind. Too many founders are afraid of posting too much. They should be afraid of nobody knowing who they are. You earn the right to focus on “quality over quantity.”

At Jive, I made a $20B mistake. That's not hyperbole—I can trace decisions around premature scaling that sent us down the wrong path to my own blind spots and negative thinking. It’s the same pattern I’ve worked through with hundreds of founders and CEOs today. It’s become the essence of my speaking events. We focus so much on objective issues such as lack of product-market fit, market headwinds, or fundraising, that we neglect the limiting beliefs and psychological blindspots that lie beneath our challenges. By my estimation, over 90% of stuck companies can be traced back to subconscious patterns. Confront this “source code” and your likelihood of success goes up dramatically. I talk about this mistake because I want other leaders to learn what took me years (and billions) to understand: Your company won’t transform until you do. 

I believe many early-stage founders handcuff their technical teams by being too excited. I’ll see cases where founders have developed a very detailed spec document of what they’re looking for. Sometimes, it’s 100s of pages long. Their eagerness is good. But the issue is that by going this deep this early on, they had to make a lot of assumptions. And those assumptions don’t pan out when their technical team starts building the product. And so there’s a lot of noise surrounding which path to take—the founder’s vision vs. what’s being worked on. That noise creates delays and misunderstandings. Want to get the most out of your technical resources? 1- Start with creating a rough outline. 2- Communicate the problem you’re trying to solve clearly. 3- What market it’s going to operate in. 4- Define the constraints. 5- Explain the ‘why’s behind the product or service. Create the environment for your dev team to create the product you want. Don’t try to go in and do it on their behalf before they even get a chance to start.

I’m astounded by the speed at which founders’ brains operate. They can conceive of ideas quickly. But the issue with that when creating a product is that they often change priorities. I’ve met with clients who develop a great idea and want to fast-track it into production. But the problem is that their idea hasn’t been fully fleshed out. There’s no roadmap on how to get the product to market. So, the technical team is building while the founder is iterating. The founder requests new features and may change their mind when a feature is 70%-80% done. This approach creates a lot of confusion and false starts. It leads to low morale and a wasted budget. Want to prevent this? Instead of asking, “When can we get this done?” ask yourself, “Can this wait?”

💡 "Be obsessed with your customer." At LA Tech Week, we asked founders and VCs: What’s the secret to building a successful company? Their answers came down to one thing: Know your customer. Here’s what they said: → "Understand their fears and address them head-on." → "Being transparent builds trust and drives revenue." → "Use empathy to truly understand their needs." It’s not just about knowing who they are today. It’s about what their needs will be tomorrow. And if you’re aiming to sell your company one day? Start by solving the problems of your future buyers. Then work backwards. ♻️Watch the video below & repost if you dig it.