[james_impliu]

1. Just be yourself, proudly. Some people _will_ hate it, others will love it. Getting product market fit is so damned hard, you are way better off looking for a smaller number of people that love you.

2. I'd shoot for 5 reference customers (paying list price, using it as you'd expect and genuinely delighted). Along the way I'd track who you try to sell to in a spreadsheet (including those that just drag on and never close) and I'd score them across the behaviors/things you would expect your target audience would have in common. This will help you create an Ideal Customer Profile - which you can then target more and more heavily (where you do marketing / what you build next and so on in future). Be _very_ specific not just ie by industry. For example, paypal targeted ebay power sellers in the early days.

3. Absolutely not. I've more than 40K customers at my startup and I live in a village no one has heard of in the UK.

4. Don't worry about scaling up via marketing until you have 5 reference customers (and generally do more of what got you the first 5 as your first step)

5. Read Secrets of Sandhill Road to understand the VC model more deeply. If you bootstrap - you have total control, might make more if you sell (because of how preferred shares work) but it will probably cause you more personal financial stress. Decide what motivates you - lifestyle business or trying to build a $10bn company. VC is an irreversible door, more or less, whereas bootstrapping isn't. I'd default with bootstrapping if unsure.

[avarun]

> Absolutely not. I've more than 40K customers at my startup and I live in a village no one has heard of in the UK.

Haha this made me check your profile — don't know if it's quite fair to say PostHog is proof that you don't need to be in SV to succeed given that you guys went through YC and also started in a remote-first (mid-pandemic) world.

[james_impliu]

ok that is fair - going to SF frequently but not living there is something i should have been clearer on!

my cofounder and i go 3-4 x a year now, for 1 week at a time. it acts like an offsite - get out of usual routine, meet interesting people, do lots of meetings (we'd normally avoid this sort of thing), get ideas and up our ambition, then go home and build stuff for 3 months quietly. repeat!

in the early days, if you fundraise, then at least SF based firms are way better to deal with in general, of course with many exceptions