Raimie Tang’s Post

In the first company we founded (and exited), we talked to thousands of users. Here at Pivot (YC S22), we just crossed our first 100. We are obsessed about speaking to users. But how do we talk to users effectively? Here are the top 4 tactics that have helped us gain valuable insights: 1/ Spend the first 5 minutes just talking about their lives. Don’t approach user conversations like a sales pitch. I know that it’s tempting to push the call towards your goals, or perhaps you are worried about wasting the other person’s time. But resist that urge! Instead, focus on genuinely getting to know them as if you’re making a new friend. First, this provides valuable context about who they are and what matters to them, helping you better make sense of their insights. Second, this deeper connection fosters genuine care for each user, which is key to building a successful company. 2/ Look for Lightbulb Moments. These rare moments provide unique insights that bring us closer to achieving Product Market Fit. For instance, Brian Chesky went down to Airbnb hosts just to realise that they needed help with photography, and Brian Armstrong phoned up all early Coinbase users just to learn from one guy the importance of a "Buy Bitcoin" button. By staying patient and attentive, a single comment from a user can spark a breakthrough idea. Even if 100 conversations don't yield Lightbulb Moments, the next one just might. It is our job to look out for them. 3/ “Huh! That’s interesting. Tell me more.” This is the go-to statement whenever a user shares something unexpected or unusual. Ask it, then pause and let them respond. While it may catch users off guard initially, it prompts them to reflect on their feelings, often resulting in a more detailed and nuanced explanation. This could just lead to a valuable Lightbulb Moment (as mentioned earlier). 4/ 5 consecutive “whys” when seeking an explanation. The 1st “why” might uncover something interesting, but it’s not until you get to the 5th “why” that you start to unearth their deepest motivations and underlying pain points. These are often things that the user themselves may not even be aware of. This technique helps us move past surface-level feedback to gain deeper insights, guiding our product development and UX from first principles. Ultimately, this helps us create something users truly want. The best founders continue to talk directly to their users even after they've reached $100M+ in ARR. It's crucial that we start making this our superpower today. I’d love to learn about other tactics that have worked for you as well, feel free to drop them in the comments below 👇

2 years ago this exact day, we were just starting our Y Combinator batch. We were pumped, galvanised by the thought of becoming the next Brian Chesky, Drew Houston, or Tony Xu. Here’s the advice I wish I’d given our younger selves when we were just starting out: 1/ It will take longer than you think. Way longer. During our batch, we sat into talks where YC alums were making sure their companies had 7-8 years of runway. We thought they were crazy, but now we understand why. Everyone knows how hard it is to get to Product Market Fit, but the thing is, you’d have to do it over and over again to continue growing despite the competition. Heck, even when you’re seemingly ahead of any competition and preparing for an IPO (Airbnb), there’s still the chance of a Black Swan event (Covid) that could destroy everything that you spent the last decade building. To my younger self: Be prepared to spend decades of your life solving the problems you set out to solve. If you succeed in building a billion dollar company in 7-10 years, great! But if you end up taking 20-30 years, that’s ok too! Just keep moving fast, and don’t ever give up. 2/ Sacrifice. Tons of it. Building a start-up is like raising a baby. We will lose friendships, we will have regrets, we will suffer mentally, physically, and emotionally. Old friends will look at us differently, and when we have problems in our personal lives, we might only have the time and energy to solve them temporarily. I honestly wish I was more prepared for a life like that. To my younger self: Relentlessly prioritise the few people in life that matter, people whom you are willing to make big sacrifices for. Once you identify them, make sure to invest fully into those relationships whenever you can. Don’t wait till tomorrow, because you’ll never know if tomorrow ends up being too late. 3/ Invest in co-founder relationships. Since our batch ended, many of our batch-mates got caught in unfortunate co-founder break-ups that brought them to their lowest points. We talked to a few of them to provide support, but can’t imagine having to go through that ourselves. I’m super thankful to have an amazing co-founder in Arvind Ramesh by my side going through all the ups and downs, as we continue trying to do possibly the hardest thing we’d ever do in our lives. To my younger self: No matter how busy you are, always remember to invest time, energy and effort into co-founder and team relationships. Even 5-minute conversations learning about each others’ personal lives will go a long way in building the trust and understanding you need to eventually succeed. Always treat your co-founder relationship like a precious plant that needs watering. It could still die even if it was once healthy. To all of you founders who are still on the hunt for Product Market Fit, keep going! There’s thousands of us facing the exact same struggles every single day. As lonely as it might feel, you are not alone - we are all in this together. 💪

After being stuck in Pivot Hell for 12+ months, we finally got out. It was a terrible feeling, and we’ll never want to be back in there ever again. Here’s our playbook of how we got out: 1/ Months 0-2: We tried soft pivots, keeping the persona fixed and staying in Crypto. After talking to 100+ people, we realised that Crypto’s value in developed countries was a get-rich promise that we weren’t passionate about. We knew that Crypto has more meaningful value in developing nations, but couldn’t resonate as well. By the end of the 2nd month, we decided to do a hard pivot out of Crypto. 2/ Months 3-6: These were by far the most painful months. Changing the persona doesn’t make things easier! In fact, it got harder. We read all the YC advice there was on pivoting, watched tons of videos, had hundreds of conversations and explored dozens of ideas. Suddenly, everything feels like it could be a good idea, but that good idea could turn into a terrible one after just ONE user conversation. That’s because we didn’t deeply understand any persona. We realised that what we needed was conviction - conviction of the persona and the problem. 3/ Months 7-10: We knew that we had to lock in the persona to build for. Thankfully, we loved speaking to and learning from FP&A folks. They are smart, embrace technology, and are always looking for new ways to do things faster. We immediately booked a flight to SF so we could speak to them in person. Initially, conversations weren’t going anywhere. But by the 10th conversation, patterns started to emerge. And by the 30th conversation, we fully understood the problems they faced every single day. We finally narrowed down a problem that we’d go all-in on solving. 4/ Months 11-12: But even that wasn’t enough! After understanding the persona and problem, the product was the final piece to crack. At this stage, we had to iterate and ship 4 rounds of product, before getting to Pivot. The hardest part here was getting to a product that is fundamentally different or substantially better than the alternatives. We think that Pivot has both. For fellow founders who are currently in Pivot Hell, keep talking to users and love your customers. That’s the secret to figuring it out. 💪 By the way, do give Pivot (YC S22), your AI FP&A Analyst a try. Would love any kind of feedback 😀

👋 Hello LinkedIn fam! We just shipped v2 of Metafi (YC S22). Our embedded crypto wallet is now compatible with #Unity games as well. 🎮 ⭐️ Metafi 2.0 Features 🖥️ Integrate Metafi across multiple platforms - Web, Mobile, PC, Mac & VR 🏆 Allow users to stake tokens to register into in-game contests 💳 Sell on-chain assets to users via Credit Card or Crypto in 1-click ⛽️ Fund gas so your users don't need to pay gas fees 📧 Onboard web2 users easily via Email Login 🛠️ Call generic smart contract functions to build features like the on-chain leaderboard Do check out our Product Hunt launch here: https://lnkd.in/ghV5nJb7 #gamedev #web3 #sdk

We appeared on the New York Times Square billboard! Immensely grateful to Brex and Y Combinator for making it happen 🙏 P.S. We're looking to speak with lead engineers / technical founders of live #web3 games. Do drop a DM/comment if you happen to know someone. Thanks in advance! 🙂 #crypto #gaming

After a wonderful time building dateideas, super excited to share that Arvind Ramesh and I are back with our second company together, Metafi (YC S22)! Metafi is building blockchain infrastructure for #Web3 games. With our SDK, devs can set up an embedded wallet in their game, integrate NFTs, and broadcast multi-chain transactions with just 5-10 lines of code. We’ve launched publicly today, and would appreciate your comments and support in the link below. We are also thrilled to share that we have been accepted into Y Combinator’s S22 batch! It is a privilege and honour to be backed by the top startup accelerator in the world, the same accelerator that created companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Twitch, Coinbase, OpenSea and Doordash to name a few. Special thanks to our group partners: Brad Flora, Harj Taggar, Divya Bhat, Tom Blomfield for all the invaluable advice. You have truly made us far more formidable founders! For that, we are forever grateful. 🙏 We’d also like to thank our angel investors Shaun Chua, Andy Hwang, Steven Mak, Chee Chiu Ng, Neng Giin Yap, Adrian Zhou, Ajay Surana, Ajit Shah, Capt. Mohit Sabharwal for believing in us from the dateideas days, and for choosing to back us in this new venture as well. You are all superb angels whom we've been so fortunate to meet - we’ll work our extreme hardest to not let you down. 💪 Most importantly, I’d like to thank my co-founder and friend, Arvind Ramesh. We’ve come an incredibly long way since meeting online during the pandemic, almost tearing up when we heard the news of being accepted into YC (ok fine, I did actually cry), to being the first and last person we talked to every single day while in SF during the batch. There are bound to be tons of ups and downs, but I’m 100% certain that we will always have each others’ backs no matter what. ❤️ We are back to Day 1 of company building, but super excited for what’s to come! P.S. Check out and support our product hunt launch here! https://lnkd.in/gEggg2Jn

“Don’t be sad that it’s over, smile because it happened.”   After 5 roller-coaster years building dateideas, the time has come to hand over the reins to a new leadership that I’m confident will bring the company to far greater heights. 🚀   When we first started dateideas as young, naive, sophomore students in the dorm rooms of NUS' Eusoff Hall, I never would have expected us to one day become Singapore’s largest community of couples. It still feels so surreal that today, we've grown to become the default go-to platform for date recommendations in Singapore - a vibrant community of 70,000+ users, reaching 500,000+ people every month. I’m just humbled to have played a tiny part in this never-ending journey to Empower Couples’ Relationships. The true superstars are the extraordinary people who have supported us along the way: Thank you Metta Ong, Pattany Kruathorn, Manfred Ho, Chan Tiong Ley and Kok Chung Ong for kickstarting dateideas with me in the very early days. Without you, dateideas would never have existed.   To the many interns who have joined us along the way (some of you tagged here in the photos) - Thank you for everything. Your creativity, passion, and energy are what makes dateideas what it is today.   To our angel investors, staff, mentors and fellow founders from NUS Enterprise, NUS Overseas Colleges, SMU Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship, *SCAPE SG, NTUitive, NUS iDP Accelerator, Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), Makan For Hope by Asia Startup Network and more - thank you for believing in us, and for being patient and understanding towards my development as an entrepreneur. The only way I could return the favour is by working harder and by giving back to other founders in time to come. And I definitely will.   It was always my hope to build a company that will last for decades even after the founders are gone. I’m happy to say that the dateideas story will continue firmly in the hands of Zaidy Farid Tang and the rest of the team. They have my utmost trust and support in bringing dateideas to its newest highs in time to come.   So what’s next for me? 🤔 Along with Arvind Ramesh, we’ve decided to dedicate the next 7 years of our lives solving problems in #Web3. A major shift with lots to learn, but I’m extremely excited nonetheless. Do watch this space as we reveal what's next in due time. Stay tuned!