Here are six things that survived contact with reality.
1) Stay privately tiny; peace of mind compounds.
We kept the team under 25 for the first decade and stayed profitable. Default‑alive in practice means: cash‑flow discipline, small hiring batches, asynchronous decision docs, release trains instead of date‑driven crunches, and no quarter‑end sales blitzes to “make the number.” The trade‑off is slower brand expansion; the return is control of the roadmap and fewer meetings about slides.
2) Pick a 20‑year problem and buy the right to obsess.
Most ideas age like milk; mind mapping ages like wine. We test “long‑lived” with simple heuristics: low teaching cost, high switching cost, and deep ties to human workflows (planning, learning, research). In a durable category you can fix paper‑cuts, sharpen defaults, and invest in docs without worrying the category evaporates next quarter.
3) If users don’t pitch you at dinner, you’re already dying.
You can rent attention; you can’t rent advocacy. Our healthiest cohorts come from direct/referral traffic; we try to keep them as the leading sign‑up source. Influencer spikes fade in a day or two; referral users retain and expand better. Optimize for the tell‑a‑friend moment: shareable templates, easy export/embedding, and obvious first wins. Track source mix, 7/30‑day retention by source, and referral rate.
4) Charge before you’re sure; the market teaches faster than models.
We charged early (then moved to subscriptions later). Pricing is a product surface: it selects customers and frames expectations. Our loop is simple: ship a defensible price → watch conversion/retention/refunds → segment plans → adjust with clear, public rules. Grandfather early buyers. Keep free‑tier boundaries crisp.
5) Design hacks the subconscious—ship it, don’t just measure it.
People adopt tools that feel usable before they are usable. Instead of tracking vague design KPIs, we ship features that directly reduce friction. One example: we built a “smart color theme” system that auto‑styles your mind map into clean contrast and hierarchy—especially useful for users who aren’t confident with visual design. It’s simple, visible on day one, and sticky over time.
6) Don’t build from competitor checklists.
Feature parity is cargo‑cult engineering. We keep a Worldview Doc (what problem we solve and how) and a Negative Roadmap (what we won’t do, even if competitors do). Saying “no” prevents the junk‑drawer effect and keeps the interface legible. Different beats bigger. If you must copy anything, copy the constraints others ignore.
None of this is universal law; it’s what kept us small, calm, and alive across cycles. If you want fewer headaches: pick a problem that still matters in 2045, earn dinner‑table advocacy, let pricing be a conversation with users, treat design as cognition, and guard coherence over feature accretion. Happy to share details in the comments—pricing, rewrite, or bootstrapping trade‑offs.
alenguo•6mo ago