Emilie Kormienko

Instead of hoping for 2–3 VCs to constitute the round, we inverted the process, starting with private individuals and using their enthusiasm to show VCs what we were worth.

By staying on the bus, you give yourself time to re-work and revise until you produce something unique, inspiring, and great. It’s only by staying on board that mastery reveals itself. Show up enough times to get the average ideas out of the way and every now and then genius will reveal itself.

There’s nothing wrong with spelling things out in detail for people if your product needs to be complex, but remember that the longer the onboarding process, the more necessary it will be to show new users some form of progress throughout it.

The entire ecosystem of filmmaking blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels was recycling news and churning out half-baked content at a remarkable pace. From my perch atop the ecosystem, I could watch a story break, then spread from one aggregator to the next, eventually blanketing our entire corner of the internet in a thick smog of mediocrity.

The development of the internet economies in the West spliced this inherent relationship of commerce and socialization and resulted in a bifurcation of eCommerce and social networks into two different verticals.

More effort is wasted doing things that don't matter than is wasted doing things inefficiently. And if that is the case, elimination is a more useful skill than optimization. I am reminded of the famous Peter Drucker quote, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Onboarding doesn’t end after the user’s first interaction with the product. On the contrary, onboarding is ongoing: as users continue to engage with your product, they’ll discover more features and learn about new updates.

If an opportunity is exciting enough to drop whatever you're doing right now, then it's a yes. If it's not, then perhaps you should think twice.