Michael Seibel: Build for One Person
YC Partner Michael Seibel is advising founders to build for the one person who needs their product so badly they'll use it even if it's "ugly, slow, and buggy." In a recent talk on planning an MVP, he stressed focusing on a single, acute use case to find a power user from day one, rather than building for everyone.
To find that first user, founders are advised to look for "expressed needs" in online watering holes where potential customers already gather. This includes niche subreddits, Slack channels, Facebook groups, and industry-specific forums where people are actively asking for solutions to the problem you're solving. The key is to engage authentically by contributing to discussions rather than just promoting a product. For B2B startups, cold outreach via personalized emails and LinkedIn messages is a primary channel. YC Partner Dalton Caldwell highlights the founders of Zip, who successfully got early beta testers by directly messaging hundreds of people on LinkedIn and asking for advice about how they were using procurement products. The most effective cold emails focus on the prospect's problem, specifically how it impacts their Time, Image, or Money (TIM). YC General Partner Ankit Gupta suggests a counterintuitive rule for finding early believers: charge them from the start. The goal isn't revenue but rather higher quality feedback, as paying users are more invested in a solution and provide sharper insights than free users. Michael Seibel echoes this, stating that a customer's willingness to pay is a strong indicator of how intensely they experience the problem. Building a pipeline for these conversations requires significant, deliberate effort. Dalton Caldwell recommends that 20-30% of a founder's calendar should be blocked off for customer calls and meetings. These "discovery calls" are not pitches but interviews designed to understand a prospect's pain points and goals through open-ended questions. It's also a numbers game. YC Partner Kat Mañalac often tells founders to add a zero to the number of potential customers they plan to contact. She references a talk by Gustaf Alströmer, former Head of Growth at Airbnb, who explained that even with a 50% open rate, an outreach campaign to 500 potential customers might only result in two closed deals. Ultimately, this intense focus on the first few users is a startup's biggest advantage over large companies. YC partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell emphasize that genuinely caring about your customers is a superpower. Creating a personal connection and demonstrating that you want to solve their specific problems builds loyalty and provides invaluable feedback that shapes the product's evolution.
