During Y Combinator, Paul Graham told us: "When unsure what to do, ask — will this help us grow?"
Our biggest mistake at Hyprnote was trying to decide our trajectory on paper.
What we did wrong
We tried to acquire enterprise customers from day one. My gut said it should be bottoms-up, but we ignored that because the enterprise story sounded more defensible on paper.
The product had too many identities. On-device AI. BYOK. Open source. Dev features. We struggled with "who is this for?" and kept answering with a longer list instead of a shorter one.
Putting growth at the center
We stopped trying to logic our way into a strategy and started measuring what was working.
If the goal is growth, you can't serve everyone. You have to pick a user and build for them specifically. We dropped the enterprise-first mindset. We chose to serve individual users — people like me who care about ownership, who want their files and data under their own control.
During the pivot, we set aside all the existing feedback. Started with a clean slate. The philosophy became ownership: you own your files, your data, how the AI works.
Why this took almost a year
Consolidating identity is slow. We had to rebuild the product around this philosophy. We cut features that didn't fit. We said no to customers who wanted something else. Every cut felt like giving something up, even when it was clearly the right call.
The hardest part was ignoring feedback from users who weren't our target. They had legitimate requests. They just weren't the people we were building for anymore.
What happened after
We're growing 10%+ week over week now.
This didn't happen because we built better features. It happened because we stopped trying to serve everyone and started serving someone specific. The product got sharper. The messaging got clearer. People who were the right fit started finding us.
Growth as a decision filter
PG meant something specific — using growth as a tiebreaker for hard decisions.
When you're unsure whether to build a feature or pursue a customer segment, ask: will this help us grow? Most debates inside startups happen because there's no shared framework for making the call. Growth gives you that framework.
Most startups die because they build for imaginary customers. They optimize for a future that never arrives. We almost did that — building for enterprise customers we didn't have instead of individual users who were already showing up.
The filter has limits, but it ended more arguments for us than any strategy document ever did.
