Kathryn Minshew at Startup School NY 2014

Minshew says polished success stories can hide long stretches of failed experiments. Her first startup stayed near 3,000 monthly users for eight or nine months, while The Muse took shape through gradual iteration.

After job boards and career quizzes failed to show what different jobs were really like, Minshew and her co-founders built The Muse around career content and workplace profiles. They attracted 20,000 visitors in the first month, then 26,000 and 70,000 in the next two. Early growth came from asking contacts and professional groups for feedback and shares, and using useful career articles to reach a broader audience.

Minshew pitched 150 New York investors and received 148 rejections before Y Combinator accepted the company. When the founders brought YC a plan with seven features, Paul Graham urged them to strip it down and launch. Within 14 days they redesigned profiles, signed five company clients, and launched on TechCrunch.

Minshew says founders should honor commitments, including when circumstances force a difficult conversation. When The Muse could not meet a promised pay increase for its first hire on time, she explained the situation and later made it right. She also describes finding a Forbes contact after several unanswered requests, which brought about 5,000 visitors in the company's first month.

Minshew connects her first startup's failure partly to overlooked differences in founders' values, and says The Muse turned down investors and let people go over ethical concerns. She advises founders to identify the users most likely to return and recommend the product, recruit people by understanding what motivates them beyond pay, and judge progress through user behavior and data instead of other startups' headlines.