Listening to Stephen’s journey of starting his business helped me gain a tremendous amount of insight into a founder’s mind as we all try to grasp what actually goes on in one. The startup founders we know from the Silicon Valley may be raking in millions of dollars while delivering superb value to customers, FireJet is a business from which Stephen and his co-founder stumbled upon a problem while building a website for a client and started a company. The solution may be simple on the outside, but the journey is never easy. 

Among all the effort they have put in for the company and product, one of the amazing feats was the application to Y Combinator, a US-based startup accelerator. They got through to the interview stage and like many others who failed, they were given the reason why they were not picked. I liken this conversation to one of the best that I’ve put out because of the lessons I took away from Stephen as a startup founder. If you are launching your product or scaling up your team, you must not miss this conversation. Give it a listen, I assure you there will be a ton of interesting information.

Timeline:

[00:00] Why is his company called FireJet?

[02:36] What does FireJet do?

[03:30] How was the idea born?

[05:15] The rise of no-code tools

[07:19] Who are FireJet’s customers?

[08:30] How important are websites to companies these days?

[10:49] What was the MVP like in the early days?

[12:40] It could have been just an API instead of a company

[18:05] His first paying customer

[21:25] His product is entirely reliant on this company

[24:18] Applying to Y Combinator

[25:53] How to apply to Y Combinator

[27:36] Getting rejected multiple times

[28:50] Questions from Y Combinator

[30:31] Why were they actually rejected?

[32:06] A quick YC mock interview

[36:41] The underlying problems of his product

[39:31] The 80/20 rule

[41:41] Experiments from the company

[46:04] How to build a company?

[49:49] In terms of hiring

[52:28] Co-founder partnership

[55:57] What is his daily routine like running a startup?

[58:08] The team is the best product you’ll ever build

[01:01:28] How long is the runway for his company?

[01:02:33] Can AI solve the code quality problem?

[01:03:21] The core feature of his product

[01:09:13] Build things people ask for

[01:10:39] The goal for the company

Sound effects obtained from https://www.zapsplat.com and https://www.epidemicsound.com/