Why we launched this Substack

A reflection on our startup journey

Apr 16, 2024

Welcome to Scaling Down, a newsletter written by the team at Statsig for engineers and product teams who made the leap from Big Tech to a startup.

Your journey meets our story

Behind every startup, there’s a story to share. For Statsig, our journey started with the belief that every product builder should have access to the same tools that Big Tech uses. Guided by this mission, we left Meta to join the startup scene.

Throughout our career at large tech companies, we relied on best-in-class internal tooling to power our fast-release cycles. But over time, through side projects and coffee chats with founders, we realized that most companies didn’t have access to the same caliber of tools.

This was especially apparent to us when we left to start Statsig. We were forced to build a tech stack and business from the ground up – without the infrastructure we took for granted.

The struggles we faced

We were also surprised by how few resources there were for product builders like us who took the same leap.

Early in our journey, we didn’t anticipate the series of challenges that existed outside of Big Tech. There were a lot of questions we didn’t know we needed to ask. Questions like:

What should your first product growth dash look like?
Where do you launch your product to get your first 100 users?
Should you paywall up front, or offer a free tier?
What technologies are people using nowadays?

Looking back at the early days, our struggles became the lessons we learned, and the advice we can share. (And trust me, we’re still learning more of them every day).

This is why we started writing this Substack: WE ARE on this startup journey, just like you, and we’re figuring things out together.

While we don’t claim to be the experts, we’re here to offer our guidance. From the questions we asked and answered (or those we wished we’d asked) to the product pivots we made, we’re sharing our perspective backed by our experience.

Written for engineers, by engineers

This Substack is the starter guide for engineers and product builders who made the leap from Big Tech to a startup. Whether you’re a solo technical founder, working with the founding team, or thinking of making that leap, this content covers:

Guiding engineering principles from large companies refined for small teams
Practical advice for everyday decisions and situations you may not have encountered while working in large companies
The features and products other Big Tech founders have shipped and what they learned

To kick things off, here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we landed on writing a Substack. Maybe this will inspire you to do the same.

Our journey to a SubStack

Do we publish on Medium or a self-hosted blog?

Deciding where to publish your content is one of the first questions you ask as a startup. And we were no different. Our content journey started in 2021 with a Medium blog.

Medium’s built-in content management system meant we could move fast, ship blogs, and focus on attracting our audience. But this approach came with its share of downsides: We gave up control over the look and feel of the articles for distribution and discovery. Medium already has a strong domain authority which helped our first few posts rank high in search. However, this forced us to make a few tradeoffs.

We learned that our Medium articles were cannibalizing our own site’s SEO and ranking. While our articles were getting a lot of views, which was great for content awareness, this wasn’t great for brand awareness and conversions. Very few users were flowing through to our actual website.

As a result, the user journey abruptly ended on Medium. So we ditched it altogether and started a self-hosted blog.

What value can we add through our content?

While reading other engineering newsletters and listening to podcasts, we realized there was very little content about leaving Big Tech for a startup. Since Statsig’s inception, we couldn’t find resources for product builders who left behind amazing internal tools to build them for others.

So we figured we’d document the learnings from our own journey, as we wish someone had done for us.

Why aren’t we publishing this content on our main blog?

After two years of running our blog (Peak Velocity), we learned that content creep is real. Over time, your blog starts housing content that serves different purposes:

You write for discovery: Content that’s optimized for search and covers a wide range of relevant topics
You write for product promotions: Content that’s product/ company-centric and guides readers to sign up or book a demo
You write for the reader: Content that’s meant to educate the reader instead of driving leads

As more and more articles get published, each one competes for attention. While this might be a good problem to have, from the user's perspective, it makes it difficult to find highly impactful information. Specifically, content that’s meant to serve the reader (without the pitch) gets buried under the rest.

So we decided to separate this content from our blog entirely. This Substack is a space to reflect on what we’ve learned as we’ve “Scaled Down” from Big Tech to building our own startup.

Wrapping up

We made it clear from the beginning that this is not meant to drive leads. We will never charge for this content or gate it behind a form fill. While this content is about our startup experience, it’s not about our company. Instead, this content is meant to help you on your journey. Dive into what’s relevant and use it to take action.

We’re still learning along the way. So if you have any thoughts or there are topics you want us to cover, let us know in the comments below or by filling in the poll.

See you in the next post!

Tore, Founding Engineer at Statsig

Scaling Down