Four “rules of the early startup game” that are obvious if you know them, but are expensive if you don’t know them.

From Seed Investment -> Pre-Series A -> Series A -> Series B, there must be 10x growth in key indicators such as sales or active users, or expansion to support this.

Just because time passes and you run out of money does not mean you move on. You need to think about what promises you made during IR and how you attracted investment. If it was a business that couldn't grow, it probably wouldn't have received investment.

If you do not know or do not follow the rule of the game of 10x growth at every stage, CEO, management, employees, investors, and even customers will face difficult moments.

If it is a small market that cannot produce 10x, the team's capabilities cannot produce 10x, or if you want to be self-sufficient instead of 10x, expectations must be clearly adjusted when attracting investment.

There are startups that lose direction after attracting their first or initial investment, as if receiving investment was their only goal.

You will not get lost if you look at the compass called the customer.

Receiving investment is a starting point for expansion, not an end point for proving something. The moment I think I have proven myself through investment, I act as if I know all my customers.

Please meet customers, ask customers, and observe customers.

Data is also a good way to meet customers. However, if there is no data or it is not accumulating quickly enough, please continue to meet in person quickly and consistently.

When a customer uses your product for the first time, say Wow 3 times! Design it to shout:

Wow! appears when you provide an experience that exceeds the customer’s expectations.

If we calculate what a customer's expectations are when using our product and provide them with experiences that exceed those expectations three times in a row, they will become our fans and want to pay for us.

Organizations that do not listen to or observe customers usually end up playing "Resource Tetris" internally, deciding what to do based on internal resource constraints rather than customer impact. In that situation, one of two things usually happens: ruin or disappearance.

There is one common pattern we encounter when we go to help startups that are in a bad situation. The time frame for adding features to the product or delivering changes is too long.

The worst is waterfall. It takes several months for the initial product to be released. You're doing something terribly wrong. They go to places like this and start by changing the DNA so that a small core product can be released in two weeks.

It is an agile sprint, so the product is updated once every two weeks. Two-week iterations are a luxury that can only be enjoyed by large corporations or big tech companies. If you iterate every two weeks, it is like throwing away the early startup weapons of light body and fast speed and going to the battlefield. These companies start by changing their DNA to deploy and release small changes on a daily basis.

“We can’t do that for one reason or another!” In other words, these various reasons are the bottlenecks that block growth and expansion. If those bottlenecks are not addressed, expansion is impossible. It applies to all organizational, systematic, and business expansion.

Unless you plan and execute quickly, learn from failure, and create a virtuous cycle leading to small successes, 10x growth is a long way off.

The secret to being a good team is asking for help. I see many cases of repeating failures that could not have been done because they did not ask for help.

In fact, everyone who has difficulty in quickly creating what the customer wants needs and needs help.

For example, if you only create web services and then need to create a mobile app, you should meet with CEOs or practitioners of startups already known for creating and operating excellent mobile app services and start by explaining the current situation and hearing about how to start and what pitfalls there are in organizational structure and development.

Also, if you are trying to do your first large-scale recruitment, you should start by asking the CEO or an experienced person who has successfully carried out this process how to establish a recruitment strategy appropriate for the situation, write a job description, and design an interview experience.

Everything is the same. Whether you want to increase business visibility, want to increase development productivity, want to be good at user interviews, or want to make data-informed decisions, you need to be able to ask for help and use it well.

However, in startups that do not ask for help, internal non-experts gather together and spend time and energy discussing the best plan within their own small world. The unfortunate thing about this is that there are times when you don't even realize that the results are bad. Someone has already done it. Let's go find it.

For this reason, I believe that receiving investment from a good investment company can determine the success or failure of a startup. If you want to do something well but don't know who to meet and ask for help, if you have received investment from an investment company such as Kakao Ventures, you can start asking for help from the reviewer in charge. The Kakao Ventures reviewers I saw next to me are the best experts in arranging such necessary meetings and assistance.

An organization that cannot ask for help from outside is likely to be unable to ask for the help it needs internally as well. It's important to do what you're good at, but it's more important to do what you have to do well.