Almost exactly one year ago, I quit my job at Retool to start building Momentic.
Having met my co-founder and received an acceptance to YCombinator all in the span of a month or so, I had little time to contemplate what my role would be like for the next year or where this path would lead me.
Fast forward one year...and I still have no idea! But by being thrown into the fire, I have learned a remarkable amount -- not just operating a startup, but founder mentality in general.
As 2024 comes to an end, I thought I'd share some of my biggest takeaways from the last year:
Meeting customers in-person
The fastest product progress I made this year came when I sat down with a customer and watched them use the product, or helped them set Momentic up in their own environment.
There is a kind of visceral pain you feel when you witness a customer getting confused in-person that motivates you to pull an all-nighter that day to fix whatever problems they encountered.
At the same time, there is perhaps no greater feeling than watching a customer experience magical moments in your product and hearing how much you've helped them. During tough weeks, I often found myself coming back to those moments.
I strongly believe being in-person makes a world of difference in this feedback cycle. You can have far more natural conversations with your customers, ask follow-up questions, and understand the context around their use case instead of just hearing about their immediate issues.
Sometimes you just have to show up at someone's door!
Managing my mental
Especially in Momentic's infancy, I had to deal with high amounts of external rejection, context-switching between different priorities, and high-stakes decisions with short deadlines.
Everyone has built-in defense mechanisms, and the one that I settled into was effectively "rolling with the punches": subconsciously, I dulled my ability to feel negative emotions so that I could concentrate on the tasks at hand.
So, whenever the customer asks piled up, an investor declined to put in a check, or a candidate we were excited about failed an interview, I simply brushed it aside and got back to work.
Unfortunately, this mentality shift also began to affect my ability to savor the positive emotions. Over time, I found myself feeling less and less proud about our objectively important wins: our first enterprise customer, our first 100K+ contract, our first hire, etc. I could feel myself getting more and more stressed even as we picked up momentum.
With ample help, I eventually realized I had to actively manage my emotional state to avoid burning out. I began dedicating time to meditation, exercise, and coaching on a weekly basis. And I started reminding myself more often that startups are marathons, not sprints, and it's going to be a hell of a lot easier if I enjoy the journey.
While everyone is different, consciously managing my mental has definitely increased my productivity and happiness. People say that founders often operate in alternate realities, but I've learned it's important to bring yourself down to Earth once in a while.
It really does takes a village
As a software engineer, I could never understand how the recruiting team could take months to fill a critical role on my team. But in the last year, I've come to realize just how much time and effort goes into hiring the right person. Much like sales, it takes weeks to build and warm a candidate pipeline.
Aside from direct outreach to folks within our network, we ultimately found YCombinator's Work at a Startup program to be the most effective channel for us. Perhaps owing to self-selection, we discovered that applicants from YC usually came with startup mentalities and often had founder ambition themselves as well.
I made several mistakes early on: I relied too heavily on in-person coffee chats to screen candidates (these tend to be BS); I neglected to customize technical questions for different engineering roles (turns out algorithms are not very relevant for frontend engineers); and I sometimes lost track of in-progress candidates during busy weeks (delaying our pipeline).
I eventually learned from these mistakes (the hard way) and also began blocking 30 minutes every day for recruiting. Ultimately, after over 100+ hours invested, we managed to hire four talented individuals in 2024 - people I'm proud to work with every day.
Closing
The life of a founder has been far more multifaceted than I ever could have imagined. Although I'd always known on some level that the success of a company hinged on much more than just technical excellence, 2024 showed me exactly how much more.
I'm so grateful to be taking this remarkable journey at this pivotal moment in history, and I can't wait to see what 2025 has in store for Momentic!