Forward

By Mathilde Collin

As a founder, it can feel like you always need more of something. More users. More revenue. More engineers. More salespeople. More funding. More time. But there’s one thing you can be sure you’ll never run out of: advice.

当作为创始人，你总是觉得你需要「更多的东西」。更多用户，更多收入，更多工程师，更多销售人员，更多的资金，更多时间。但有一件事你可以肯定永远不会用完：建议。

Every startup has the luxury of learning from the mistakes and successes of the ones that came before it, and the easy access we have to these learnings is unprecedented. Experienced startup leaders generously share their stories in the hopes of pushing the industry forward. From company blogs, to tech news outlets, to online communities, to hardback books, there is more publicly available advice on how to run a startup than you could possibly digest. And that’s not even counting what you can learn from one-on-one meetings, small gatherings or events.

每个创业公司都有从学习错误和成功经验的奢侈品，我们对这些学习的轻松访问是前所未有的。有经验的创业公司领导慷慨分享他们的故事，希望推动行业发展。从公司博客，技术新闻网站，到在线社区到精装书，还有更多的公开提供的建议，如何运行一个创业公司，你可以消化。这甚至不算你从一对一的会议，小型聚会或活动中学到的东西。

Advice from other founders, investors and tech leaders has been invaluable to me in my career so far. eir stories and learnings have helped me skip over hurdles where they stumbled and guided me through my own obstacles along the way. Intercom itself has been a source of both inspiration and concrete guidance: a company we aspire to be like that shares its learnings with the world. A chat with the Intercom team about SaaS pricing directly inspired the iterative strategy we use at Front today,driven by getting as much feedback and data from customers as possible. Turning a startup into a success is famously di cult, and I think founders seek out so much guidance because they believe it will solve this problem (I certainly have). But it’s important to remember that you have another incredible resource to draw from: your customers. As your company grows, what determines success is whether you build close relationships with your customers, understand their problems and solve them.

到目前为止，其他创始人，投资者和技术领导者的建议对我而言至关重要。它们故事和学习帮助我跳过障碍，他们偶然发现，并指导我通过自己的障碍。Intercom本身一直是灵感和具体指导的源泉：一个我们渴望成为与世界共享其学习的公司。与Intercom团队就SaaS定价进行的聊天直接启发了我们在Front Front使用的迭代策略，这是通过尽可能多的反馈和来自客户的数据推动的。将创业成功成功是令人讨厌的，我认为创始人寻求这么多的指导，因为他们相信会解决这个问题（我当然有）。但重要的是要记住，您有另一个不可思议的资源来源于：您的客户。随着公司的发展，决定成功的关键在于是否与客户建立密切的关系，了解他们的问题并解决问题。

No one knows your customers, product, team and market like you do. You can build the most operationally sound company in the world, but if you’re not building a product your customers want they’ll nd an alternative. Focus on your vision, talk to your customers, gure out what they need and build that.

没有人像你一样了解你的客户，产品，团队和市场。您可以在世界上建立最具运营效益的公司，但如果您不构建您的客户想要的产品，那么他们会找到一个替代方案。专注于您的愿景，与您的客户交谈，确定他们需要什么并构建它。

The best content for growing startups doesn’t prescribe what to do in in exible terms. It gives examples of what’s worked for other companies in their experience and gives you the tools to adapt those learnings for your business. at’s the kind of advice I like to read and the kind of advice you’ll nd in this book.

不断增长的创业公司的最佳文章并没有规定如何以灵活的方式做什么。它举例说明了其他公司在其经验中有效的工作，并为您提供了适应您业务的这些学习的工具。这是我喜欢阅读的那种建议，以及你在本书中提出的建议。

Mathilde Collin is the CEO and co-founder of Front, the simplest way for teams to manage email.