Ali Mukhtar’s Post

Story time. When I left Sequoia to start Quilt, my cofounder Michael and I were on a time crunch to pitch and needed to put together the quickest demo possible. The easiest way was to hack together a Chrome Extension plugin over the weekend. Afterwards, we sent a Loom video of the product to a handful of friends and investors. Lo and behold, the Loom ended up getting hundreds of views. We started hearing about competitors, which is not surprising — generative AI for RFP automation was already a well-known concept. The funny part was, the competitors were all building Chrome Extensions too (an odd choice for an RFP automation product)! We started locking down our product: We made sure every potential customer signed an NDA after the first meeting. We hid our product behind a wall. We banned signups from emails that seemed suspicious. When we soft-launched in March, we noticed something. We weren’t running into any of those competitors in deals. All customers cared about was how our product solved their problems. None of the paranoia ended up mattering. The moral of the story? Focus on your customers. Nothing else matters. The startup tech scene is a small place and many people will end up converging to the same ideas, often through pure chance. The only thing that matters is building what your customers want and out-executing the competition.

90% of founders don’t have a product problem—they have a distribution problem. The startup graveyard is full of great products that were this close to taking off but never figured out how to grow. but on the other hand if you are a founder and are reading this - Just fix your shitty features pls or hire someone to aggregate the data, analyse it with the team and provide insights on possible sprintsz but fix your shitty features plz.

99% of decisions are two-way doors: - They're reversible - You'll likely change them soon anyway Yet many founders and startup employees get paralyzed trying to make everything perfect. Better to ship something and learn from it than spend months theorizing. Speed of iteration > perfection of execution Make the decision. Learn from the results. Adjust accordingly. Progress beats perfection.

One thing that I've come to believe is valuable early on at an early stage startup is measuring the right metrics. Even if you don't have MQL's, define them, measure them week over week. It'll make you start wanting to improve that number. Even if you don't have any active opportunities in deal cycles, measure them week over week. It'll make you want to improve that number. What I've seen happen when I open my mind to a new area of measurement or metric is that becomes something that improves over time. "What get's measured, gets accomplished"

Last week we onboarded 100 users to the MNLY platform. Each step in the customer journey is now being battle tested in a live environment. The week was filed with a ton of unforeseen issues. However that's why we are running beta, to ensure these issues are ironed out before the public market can get their hands on our product. Here's some takeaways from a week of behind the scenes chaos: 1. ALWAYS battle test your product before going live. 2. There will always be unforeseen issues. 3. Your ideal customer journey is defined by your customers. 4. Timelines are never exactly how you planned. 5. Customers never behave as you expect them to, so over communicate the process initially. 6. ALWAYS hire top down even as a start up. Find ways to acquire the talent you need from the start. The journey has been grueling yet rewarding in every way. Without the struggle there would be no value in the process. If you're new to the startup world. Keep going. Take the lessons and use that experience to drive your vision forward. You only fail if you give up.

Somebody please pinch me - we just hit 100 daily active users on Noicely! Took us a while to get here but this graph gives me hope 🤭 Although I have to admit, I’m still very cautious with this newfound optimism. We’ve already been burnt once—brutally—back when we launched our beta version and no one in our target market seemed to care. Those early days were tough. We poured our hearts into the product, only to realize that our assumptions were way off. We say we did a "pivot" after that, but let’s be real: that's just a fancy word for failed startup. That "pivot" we did was a wake-up call for us. It forced us to listen more closely to our users, to question our own biases, and to iterate faster and smarter. We've done a lot of experiments since then but the validation we have been getting lately feels good. Demos are being scheduled, new companies are getting onboarded and we even got a couple of referrals! There's still so much we need to figure out but every user who finds value in Noicely is a step closer to where we want to be. Here's to the highs and lows, the pivots and the progress. Cheers Team WrdHrd 🥂

Unknown Unknowns Part I: Why are these the scariest of the three challenges you will encounter in your hard tech business or startup? "They are not intuitive, and you really don't find out until you are in the middle of it. That's what we want to help people avoid." - Kevin Fahey, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Market Operandi In Part II, Dr. Fahey will discuss how leaders in hard tech and deep tech companies can start to anticipate what is coming 6 months down the road.

🚀 Want to thrive in an early-stage startup? Master the art of getting things done. 💡 The secret weapon? Your ability to find answers swiftly online. I used to have a rule with my teams: If someone asks a question and we can find the answer online within 5 minutes, they lose a joker. 2 jokers per week. Imagine transforming roadblocks into stepping stones just by becoming an online research ninja. -> Start by mastering the power of a well-timed Google search (or AI prompting) 👉 What’s your go-to strategy for tackling challenges head-on? Share below!

Unless you are an early adopter, you will discover what we are building in Q4 2025 (approx). As the stealth startup moves forward, I'm starting to engage with investors and potential customers but before doing so, we did some homework in the last couple of weeks: - foundational ML models have been developed and validated, - CTO did preliminary interviews - the team is shaping! - 2 more go-to-market partners joined, - 1 distributor in negotiation, - early conversations with a bunch of (huge) enterprises, - interviews with almost 20+ operators, decision-makers, and execs. Now it is time to bring this beast to the market.

After 10 years of running datarockets  and speaking to hundreds of founders I’ve started experiencing what I call the ‘doctor syndrome’. When I talk to a new founder about their startup, I can already see potential causes for that startup’s death. - Wanting to build a product that does everything and not focusing on a single problem for your core customers - Not validating the product vision but pushing forward and spending months building something your customers might not even want when it’s ready - Over-indexing product features over distribution - building great products is no longer the main challenge, it’s finding your core set of customers It can be hard to muster up motivation when first time founders insist on walking down these paths, but everyday we fight the good fight.