It changes by stage but, at the earliest stages, it probably isn’t going ot be your product.
And even though you can’t build a venture-scale business without going after a venture-scale market, it probably isn’t going to be the market you’re going after either.
It’s you and your co-founder(s).
Your grit. Your creativity. Your capability to run through walls.
That’s what Techstars saw in Burhan Syed, co-founder of Rondah.
He joined me down in Costa Rica a few months ago for a quick chat about how he scrapped his initial “bad” (his words) idea for a $230B market and has now raised $3.5M and is doubling revenue every quarter:
Team Over Product
Two weeks ago I wrote Akhil Reddy from Thera and how, after reviewing 60+ YC applications and going through YC himself, he knows that one thing YC looks for is whether or not the founder has accomplished something hard before.
What was a bit understated there was that the hard or incredible thing that proves a person’s capability doesn’t have to come from a traditional path.
In Burhan’s case, he didn’t go to Stanford or Harvard.
He never fulfilled what he described as his dream of going into investment banking.
Instead, he had to start supporting his three younger sisters and his mom when he was 13 and they were on welfare.
A lot of kids in that situation wouldn’t know what to do.
Others would get pulled into bad situations in an attempt to make money.
In Burhan’s case, he got creative and saw a potential business where no one else was looking.
He started buying broken electronics like PS3 and iPhones, fixing them, and then reselling them.
Not the most scalable business ever, but at 13 when you’re just trying to survive, it was a lifesaver.
He cleared $50,000 in profit by his second year.
Once he made it to college, he’d started a few other businesses where he also found margin in overlooked places.
So when he finally applied to Techstars, he was excited. But the business he was working on at the time, a SaaS platform for nightclubs, was going nowhere.
He describes it as his “first real failure” but he still got in because the MD he was pitching to saw his figure-it-out ability.
A few weeks into Techstars he pivoted to Rondah, an AI receptionist for dental offices, after learning that the average dental office loses out on a significant percentage of incoming calls just due to how busy their receptionists are.
A few months after that, he signed an enterprise client who runs thousands of practices across the country and have been in growth mode from there, uncovering additional value-add revenue streams and expanding their TAM to $230B.
The takeaway for anyone reading this is that what constitutes valid startup experience has a wide net.
And that, ultimately, your success is within your control to a meaningful degree even if, like Burhan, you don’t come from a blue chip background.