10 Things to Do After Your First Win—So It’s Not Your Last

Traction too early, too soon changes everything—mostly for the worse. This is the article that slaps you sober. 10 sharp and unsentimental things to do after you “make it,” so your startup doesn’t become a Medium obituary with a cap table. If you don’t fight like hell to stay paranoid, ugly, and dangerous, you’ll be forgotten before your next deploy finishes indexing.

I used to think startups die when nothing’s working. Bad product, out of cash, incompetent team.

Then I started a company.

One day we got traction. A few press hits. DMs full of “we should talk,” Sigma-face investors doing the lean-forward “I like what you’re building” thing. Just enough validation to knock us out of panic mode.

That’s when things went sideways. I won’t waste time with the play-by-play, but we almost faded into startup ...