Here are five of the best tips I learned as a Found member

After more than two years – and nearly 100 sessions – as a TechCrunch team it has recently ended. Found a podcastI’ve learned a lot about how founders approach building their startups.

I’ve heard stories about how startups know when it’s the right time to grow from their product, how startups go about hiring, what made entrepreneurs jump ship, and everything in between.

Although I’m not a startup, some of the lessons and advice I heard at the show stood out more than others. I’ve put together a short and sweet list of five great tips for startups that I heard at the show that are both practical and smart.

Founders must lean on what they are not good at

While many of the founders talked about finding co-founders or early hires who helped fill experience or knowledge gaps, Rippling co-founder and CEO. Parker Conrad he thinks founders should do it differently.

Conrad called the practice of hiring people to fill positions he created not good at, or not willing to do, a scam.

“You have to find things that you hate in a company, and you have to run up to them and hug them and just pick them up and focus on those things, because that’s what’s going to kill you,” Conrad. he said. “These are the things that you may be avoiding because it is difficult for you to think about them. I’ve seen that in myself, it’s the things you hate, like, that’s where you should spend all your time.”

VCs are not always right

While the right venture capitalist can provide the knowledge and guidance necessary for startups, good VCs are hard to find, and even the best VCs don’t have the best advice for every startup.

When Ashley Tyrner, founder and CEO of FarmboxRxa box company for consumers that was supposed to help end food deserts, he put in VCs, they told him to start a company that made food accessories, which was very hot at the time. He is glad that he ignored the advice and bootstrapped instead.

“Every VC we talked to, every one of them that was good to us at the time wanted us to be food,” Tyrner said. “That is not what we intended. We didn’t want to jump on the food bandwagon. Now looking back, I’m glad I never raised any capital and we still haven’t made any capital to date. Most of the food items, you know, are slowly dying.

Instead, within a few years, FarmboxRx was able to connect with insurance companies and begin shipping its own boxes as part of patient care, a revenue stream that Tyner said has benefited the company immensely.

It pays to not be the first

If you read a lot of PR, as I do most days, the common thread is that many companies want to claim that they were “first” to a new technology or market. But is being first the best thing?

Jordan Nathan, founder and CEO of a non-toxic home improvement company CarawayI can’t agree. Nathan told TechCrunch that when he was planning to launch Caraway’s non-toxic cookware, he was initially unhappy that it seemed like it would be the last launch for the growing group, but it worked out. Nathan said that the latter launch allowed the company to find gaps in the market that were left open from previous releases, and allowed Caraway to cater to that audience directly.

“It helped us change our brand, it helped us change our pricing, what pieces we put in,” Nathan said. “And while most of those brands did a lot of things right, we were able to create our own space in the kitchen (to reach consumers) where others weren’t playing.”

Companies should strive to go to market immediately, regardless of their long-term goals

While some startups create apps that can start getting customers, and making money, within a week, the same can’t be said for startups looking to launch high-tech or moonshot companies. But that doesn’t mean tech companies have to wait years to make money.

Joe Wolfel, co-founder and CEO of Deptha company that wants to develop autonomous drones to map the bottom of the ocean, told Found that Terradepth was aiming to set up a revenue stream. Although it still has a ways to go to improve its autonomous drones, the company wants to offer the same services to commercial and government customers for now, manually and through a dashboard, because companies need more information under the sea now.

“One thing you learn quickly in combat is that you can’t run something that isn’t moving,” Wolfel said. “There’s no substitute for learning the basics, right? We’re eating our own dog food every day.”

We heard a different version of the same idea from Paul Hedrickthe founder of the Western wear company Tecovas. Hedrick told Found that he knew he wanted Tecovas to be a direct-to-consumer retailer but he didn’t want to just build a website and wait for sales to come. Because of this, he started selling his shoes out of the back of his truck at farmers markets right away so he could get customer feedback and sales from the start.

Don’t forget to build a company around your product

When startups are just starting out, startups focus on building a product and selling a product – as they should. But startups should make sure they don’t forget to think about building a real company around sales as well.

Gavin UbertiThe founder and CEO of chipmaker Etched, told Anapaza that one of the early problems the company had was that it did not think about implementing employee benefits until it was too late. Uberti said the company only realized it waited too long when one of its employees broke his leg before the company set up health insurance — which was not a quick fix.

Uberti’s story was a good reminder that while startups are trying to move fast and break things, it’s important that they also take care of all the other things necessary to build a long-lasting company that takes care of its employees.