You don't need much to get started
Don't wait for the perfect name, domain, or logo to launch
Welcome to Scaling Down, a newsletter written by the team at Statsig for engineers and product builders who made the leap from Big Tech to a startup.
Planning vs Starting
When you're just starting your business, the temptation to "begin on the right foot" can be overwhelming. You convince yourself you need the perfect name, the right domain, and the best logo... and before you know it, the list becomes never-ending.
But here's the thing - you don't need any of those items to get started. What you actually need is to relentlessly focus on the core aspect of your business and core competencies as a founder or small team. Lean into your strengths instead of obsessing over what you're missing. Trust me, you can shore up those shortcomings later in simpler ways than you'd expect.
Take Statsig for example. We started with seven engineers and one data scientist – yeah, a pretty large founding team. But outside of our engineering talent, we had zero branding or design chops. All we had was Vijaye's vision and his iPad sketches. But you know what? It didn't matter. We picked a direction and moved forward.
We knew what we needed to build and roughly what it needed to look like. Sure, we still had a lot of things to figure out before launch, but we didn't let that stop us from starting.
Domain names: Just pick one
Domain names are everything. And nothing. Everyone stresses about getting the perfect one - you know, that short, punchy, easy-to-remember name that seems like it'll make or break your company. And of course, it's got to be ".com", right? Or maybe you can get by with ".io"?
We settled on the company name "Statsig" pretty quickly. It was our internal slang at Facebook for "statistically significant" experiment results. It was fitting for an ex-facebook founding team building experimentation and developer tooling. The only problem: statsig.com was taken.
So we went with the next best thing – statsig.io. Yeah, the ".io" trend in SaaS was probably past its peak, but it worked. You can still see some remnants of our “.io” days - our Github is still https://github.com/statsig-io/.
Shortly after we started and had our Series A funding in the bank, Vijaye decided to reach out to the owner of statsig.com to see if we could purchase it. Turns out it belonged to a university professor who used it for "statistical signal processing" – nothing to do with A/B testing at all!
We managed to broker a deal and purchased it for $14 million. An absolute steal compared to OpenAI's chat.com deal...
Just kidding. It actually cost us $18k (plus GoDaddy's 20% fee), and we were pretty pumped about it! Here’s the email Vijaye received:
On a side note. We didn't realize it then, but we would soon learn that this only fueled Vijaye’s domain purchasing addiction which has taken off.
While statsig.com was by far the most expensive domain we’ve purchased, we've since collected over 50 domains. From statsig.net and statssig.com to more creative ones like abtestingframework.com and launchsmartly.com. The last domain I mentioned has come in handy 😅.
But here's the real point: don't get hung up waiting for the perfect domain. You don’t need to worry about being first in an alphabetical listing like amazon.com, and you can still release a product with a URL like chat.openai.com. Only to move to chatgpt.com and ultimately chat.com once you raise your 6.6B funding round. But you’ll never raise that round if you don't just get started.
Design: Done is better than perfect
Since we were only a group of engineers and data scientists, we did what any scrappy startup would do - we paid for our design. Our first logo was outsourced to Fiverr. We hired a few freelance designers to give us different variations based on Vijaye's sketches and our rough descriptions. Here are the four prototypes that didn't make the cut:
Option 1:
Option 2:
Option 3:
Option 4:
And finally, a variant of the winning logo we ultimately reskinned and launched with:
We've also never stopped iterating on our logo - heck, we’re still tweaking it today.
After launching our beta, we finally hired our first real designer. I think our complete lack of design sense actually made the job more appealing - there was a lot of room to grow!
Within a few weeks, we had the whole package: refreshed brand, new logo, proper design system, marketing assets, and much more. But here's the thing - we didn't need any of that to start. We just addressed it when the time was right.
Focus on your strengths
Look, I'm not saying design doesn't matter when starting up. For some startups, it's absolutely critical (and in that case, it's probably a core competency). If you're building the next Canva or Figma, yeah, maybe nail your design first.
But the principle stays the same - lean into whatever you're good at. If design is your core competency, then build a prototype in Figma. Buy a WYSIWYG website editor to make your first landing page. These days, you can patch up your weak spots pretty cheaply, whether that's design or engineering. Later, you can hire the right people and build those shortcomings into a strength over time.
All this to say: just get started.