7cupsoftea

I had a couple of good conversations with George. This is great example of how the team informs the product. Great work Artifact team!

Congrats Vlad, Bryant, and Sergie! Very happy for you guys. Well-deserved!

YES!!!! This is exactly the kind of innovation we need. Great work! Let us know if we can help. We are at very beginning stages of supporting people that are re-entering and getting folks lined up with jobs in a safe and supportive way is a big part of that. Again, hats off!

PB was the first investor in 7 Cups. I'm thankful for all of the ways that he helped us. He is very good at motivating founders. I can't all the way understand how he does it, but it is remarkable. I think a big part of it is helping people face reality directly. i.e., he alludes to this in the interview when he says most people are good at finding obstacles (i.e., excuses) and that he doesn't fund them. He is good at keeping you honest so that you do not delude yourself into making fake progress or going down wrong turns. Another way of saying this is that he helps you minimize denial. Quick story:

I had been working on 7 Cups for about a month prior to getting to YC. I had a home page up, which I was pretty excited about. The core idea of the chat/voice support wasn't yet live. I showed him the website and wanted to show him some of the segments we wanted to focus on (parents of children with disabilities, veterans etc.). He quickly asked - have you got the actual product in front of users yet? I tried to dodge the question, talk more about the site etc. He repeated the question. I had to honestly answer that no we hadn't yet released it. He was like, okay go do that and report back next week. I was stalling because, on some level, I was afraid that it wouldn't work as well as I hoped. We pushed through, launched it, and learned a ton in that next week. For example, we learned that voice was too intimate and people preferred messaging.

And that basic cycle happened over and over again. Like there might be things that sound right or are even partially right, but if they are not the most direct thing that is going to help you learn and make a product people want, then it is probably not a good use of your time.

Just want to chime in here and share that I'm a very happy customer. Ryan, Dillon, and Chad are some super smart guys who deeply understand SEO. I use RankScience for 7 Cups and Edvance360 and I've seen a huge ROI. They always find time to meet with me and my other team members. The advice and feedback they provide is worth the cost of the service alone. Highly, highly, highly recommended!

SEO and I highly recommend Ryan Bednar at www.rankscience.com. They are in YC right now and doing a pretty amazing job.

Just a quick note to say congrats to Garry and Alexis. Garry helped us out a ton at 7 cups. He said a startup is like a magnet. The more users you attract, the more powerful your magnet becomes. Alexis has also always been very encouraging and helpful in figuring out things that are not obvious. I highly recommend Initialized!

Congrats guys! Very happy for you!!

Startups can be super challenging for all of the reasons outlined in that article. We put together this guide to help explain some of the mechanics that make startups so stressful. It is primarily based on Jerry Colonna's work. He is a really good guy who has done some of the deepest thinking in this space. I highly recommend his work. You can find it here: https://www.reboot.io

The guide is here:

http://www.7cups.com/startup-support/

If you have thoughts/ideas on how we can make it better, then please let us know. Thanks!

This is very admirable. Hats off to Mark Zuckerberg. Very well done!

Garry is an incredible person and like most remarkable people he is also deeply humble. This kindness and approachable spirit, I think, allow him to be a great student of founders, startups, and cultures. I've learned quite a bit from Garry about how systems evolve and operate. He is a very rare person and a gift to the startup world.

Thanks Garry for all that you've done for the YC community. I wish you the very best in this next leg of your journey.

We just migrated over to Amplitude and they've been great to work with. With another company we were maxing out our # of events pretty regularly. The solution was to upgrade, but each new tier was significantly more. In a startup, you want to measure more items, not less, so this model makes a lot of sense. Varun and Bryan have been great to work with. I'm also pretty excited to start working with their data science team. Feel free to ask me any questions. I highly recommend these guys!

I like that idea of taking a break every so often. Makes sense. I'm going to try to implement that.

Thanks Twisha :)

Good point - easy to miss a few days and think you are in the clear.

Author here - any coping skills you have used to make startups more emotionally manageable? Any in the article resonate?

Also, we launched www.7cupsoftea.com/startups to help make startups less stressful.

Would love to work with you on this :). If interested, shoot me an email at [email protected].

What a great article! Lots to think about here.

I'll highlight one point that I think is really important: Kill all daemon processes. Psychotherapy is a process that is designed to help quiet these menacing internal voices (harmful parent voices, self-doubt etc.). There are different therapy orientations: cognitive-behavioral therapy, interpersonal therapy, psychodynamic therapy, etc. They approach these outdated programs in different ways. CBT tries to kill them by applying logic (e.g., My startup is going to fail! [what rational evidence do you have for that belief?]) Relational approaches try to better understand the threatening feeling or impulse that triggers the harmful programs. It focuses on the defense used to keep the threatening feeling in check and anxiety at bay (e.g., I'm really afraid of failing [emotion = fear of failing], so I become a driven workaholic to try to avoid this outcome and feel less anxiety [defense]). A relatively recent innovation in the therapy space is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The key insight is that often the attempt to control, diminish, or avoid pain is what keeps you entangled in the pain. Simply making space for the pain, sinking into it, observing it, and feeling it, is what allows it to become disentangled. This, however, is very hard to do, b/c the natural impulse is to avoid pain and the issues that cause pain.

Here is a helpful short video that metaphorically captures the ACT disentanglement process (Demons on a Boat): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-wyaP6xXwE.

Okay, one last point, I'm game for doing my small part to help reach the impossible goal. This is going to be a collaborative project right? : )

Sorry, not trying to be impersonal. It was just the name I signed up with when getting accepted into YC.

I couldn't agree more. She had a couple of great recommendations for us that were really helpful.

Thank you :)