Running Your Company by Patrick Collison

TL;DR

Stripe took 1 year 11 months from first line of code to public launch, but had 100 users pre-launch by gradually expanding and doing hyper-attentive user research (e.g., monitoring every API request, sending emails for every error).

Key insights

• Stripe’s pre-product-market-fit phase lasted ~2 years because of required banking partnerships; they compensated by being extremely disciplined about gradually adding users each month and doing in-per
• Pre-PMF metrics are relatively unhelpful; instead, founders should bias heavily toward high-throughput qualitative feedback (e.g., watching users trip up, reading every error email, public support cha
• The "OODA loop" (Boyd’s concept from fighter pilot design) is a useful model: optimize for the fastest possible responsiveness and iteration to observed user behavior, not for raw product features.