6 Months at Strac [Reflection]

For those who don't know, in March of 2023, I made the difficult decision to stop working on momo and join Strac. I wasn't very public about this decision, and to this day, it remains one of the most challenging choices I've ever made. The experience feels much like a difficult breakup; I find myself tossing and turning most nights, pondering a myriad of "what-ifs" and "could-have-been."

Fortunately, I had the opportunity to join Strac, a Y combinator company that uses machine learning to provide cybersecurity services. I had initially intended to write a post-mortem on momo, offering some parting thoughts and a plea for someone else to continue building in the same space—a space that I believe has the potential to house a generational company. However, I didn't feel I could immediately write that post-mortem because I wasn't confident that my insights would necessarily guide someone in the right direction rather than lead them astray.

After spending some time at Strac, I feel better equipped to share my contrasting learnings from what I have experienced at Strac vs. with momo. My intention with this post is to highlight the key lessons I've learned, shedding light on the blind spots we at had with momo. My time so far at Strac has been enlightening, offering me a chance to learn from an amazing team (@Aatish, @Peter, and @Hans) of executors and continue to grow as a founder. In light of this, I'll share insights that, although prevalent in the startup ecosystem, hadn't completely resonated with me.

Lesson 1: Metrics Matter Most

To begin this reflection, I need to take responsibility for the very core of what went wrong—our metrics fucking sucked. We were growing incrementally week over week, our revenue was low, and our churn rate was high. I was preoccupied with networking, meeting other founders, investor discussions, and strategizing about what would happen with our theoretical growth (I spent way too much time on the what-ifs). I had a lot of big ideas but wasn't executing them despite my best intentions.

Contrastly—At Strac, we are rarely interacting with investors or future growth plans, we maintain our core focus on metrics. We refrain from unnecessary immersion in chic startup theories or secret success formulas. My realization has been honed into a singular truth: growth is paramount. If you're a hyper-growth company, why would anyone—investors, partners, employees—not want to join the next rocketship?

Metrics are simply king. There's no uncertainty about whether you're on the right path; metrics give a clear answer. While many founders (like myself) dream of being visionaries with revolutionary ideas, few want to write cold customer emails (and I was certainly guilty of this). Chasing recognition through podcasts, Forbes 30 Under 30, LinkedIn Top Startups, or TechCrunch funding announcements is always tempting. What I needed to be more excited about was doing the hard things.

I've learned that the simple truth is, at the end of the day, that the best company in the world is simply the one that survives. And the only way to guarantee survival is to have exceptional metrics. You can always craft a (self) convincing narrative about why things didn't work out, but you can never lie to yourself about your metrics. I did this a lot.

Lesson 2: Be Customer Obsessed

Playing again on the breakup analogy, there are some fights that you can finally admit you were wrong about only after the relationship is over. In the moment, there is too much pride to take a step back and examine where things truly went fundamentally wrong. To me with momo, this specific "fight" was on whether or not we were truly listening to our users - I thought we were, but in practice, we were not. During one user interview, I ignored a feature request that a user ready to go through our purchase event was requesting simply because a competitor already offered it. If I could go back and change 1 single thing about momo - I would have listened to only what our users were actually saying. Not what I thought they meant, not what the market said they meant, not what non-users of the product said — simply what our existing user was actually saying.

My obsession was with market trends and competitor moves, not what our users were actually telling me. I deeply misunderstood the Ford quote about building a faster horse and needed to believe much more about what Bezos built Amazon's about-customer obsession. It sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but I was focused on what thousands of users could want, not one single user. The quality of one user interview is more important than the quantity of user interviews—doing thousands of user interviews to do them is a waste of time. If I were to redo the company today, I would get on a call with every user who said they were looking for a credit card and only consider it complete once they signed up for the credit card. I was obsessed with top-of-the-funnel growth (total number of users - I was hyper-fixated on what investors were asking me for).

Do whatever it takes to make your customers so happy they'll pay for your software. Build relationships people want to invest in, and churn becomes a non-issue (and, to some degree, self-solving).

Lesson 3: Validate First

It needs to be said: we over-engineered our product at momo. I think it's like the single most common first-time founder mistake and we were part of that group. I always believed we were just one small (okay, in hindsight, maybe not so small, sorry, my dear technical co-founder friend) product update away from finding PMF. I spent hours wordsmithing the perfect 'job-to-be-done' headings for our website and needed to spend more time experimenting with different growth funnels (more on this below). With momo—we were essentially running a restaurant with a locked door while I was figuring out the plating for a dish for months.

With Strac, the team talks to our paying users every single day. We ask what problem they want to be solved, and then we quickly demonstrate how Strac might be able to solve it. This team moves mountains constantly. Continuing the restaurant analogy, with Strac—we announce our restaurant's opening to everyone, invite them in, and then ask them what they are craving most in the world. We never hand them a menu and say here are your only options. Instead, we simply make them that dish, and when enough customers ask for that dish, we add it to the menu.

What I have seen now is that if you build in lockstep with your users and know that they are indeed paying users you will build what will make others willing to pay for your product.

Always remember that perfection is the enemy of progress. The new feature doesn't need to look beautiful or work perfectly. It just has to solve a really hard problem really well (and even better, if it solves the problem so well that others faced with the same problem will ask how the customer is solving that problem).

Lesson 4: Always Celebrate 0 to 1 Moments.

At the very start of my time with Strac, we hosted weekly 'office hours.' We picked one of our core integrations and gave a quick demo; after the first office hours, I was discouraged and angry. The first office hours were a total wash, with only two people attending the webinar. I was angry that the founder of the company made me waste my time on this and that it failed. I spent hours preparing, was not aligned with the purpose or vision, and was stressed out. After office hours, I was just angry and stressed.

Later in the day, I had a post-mortem with the founder, and he was smiling and opened the call with his usual cheerful "Hello, my friend." In my head, I thought, "Are you kidding me? That was embarrassing," but instead, I let out a slightly revealing 'hi' in response. The founder was happy—we hosted a webinar for the first time, learned something, and knew how to do it better next time. No office hours could ever be worse unless we simply didn't show up and take action to correct the things that went wrong.

This serves as an excellent analogy for founding a company—you will often fail, get punched, and have bad days. One of my good founder friends said it best, some days fucking suck, some days are amazing, but in the end, the journey is the blessing. From every experiment, you must learn something. You must run many experiments that you have high conviction in double down on the ones that work. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket and rely solely on it breaking.

With momo, I often felt dejected by my failed experiments and was not excited to try again (because failing sucks). Zero to One moments are the best heuristics for growth and should always be celebrated whether successful or not. Growth is never linear; it simply needs to trend upward. I often beat myself up with every failed experiment and eventually accepted that the company was just a failure because it was the culmination of a lot of failed experiments. What I didn’t realize is that one successful experiment can change the trajectory of your business.

Lesson 5: Asymmetric Upside.

To ever find the one (or many) experiment that changes the trajectory of your business, you must run hundreds of experiments that all have the potential to be massive. Start with things that don’t scale. By running hundreds (and I mean it) of experiments, we are never stuck with just one basket, and we can frequently find common trends of what is working best and then focus on those experiments.

Closing Thoughts

momo was one of the best chapters of my life, and by no means do I think it was a total failure or a waste of time. These lessons might seem obvious to the reader, but they were lessons I needed to live to truly understand. I want to thank every investor and early believer in me and my crazy goals. This is just the beginning for me, and much like the first office hours with Strac, it will only get better from here.