How to Set Goals Before Product-Market Fit

Do you need to grow 7% week over week? Dalton and Michael discuss how founders should set goals for pre-product market fit startups. The classic YC advice of growing 7% every week works but you can't cheat the data. Discussion includes: making products people actually love, why founders shouldn't worry about graphs in the very early days, why founders tend to cheat the data, how Paul Buchheit built Gmail very slowly over months to focus on the users loving it, why you should focus on love not like, not focusing on investors, how Stripe built slowly, why focusing on investors is habit forming, doing research on your favorite companies, building enduring companies, why customers loved Whatnot DoorDash & Twitch, and why you need to get to 100 customers that love you before you graduate to graphs. Dalton + Michael is brought to you by @Standard_Cap. Standard Capital is the AI-native Series A fund. Learn more at standardcap.com – About Dalton: Dalton Caldwell is Co-Founder and Partner of Standard Capital. He spent 12 years at Y Combinator, where he served as Managing Partner, worked across 25 YC batches, and advised more than 1,000 startups. His investments include Whatnot, Brex, GitLab, PostHog, Stock Space, Rappi, Razorpay, and Oklo. Before becoming an investor, Dalton founded imeem and App.net. About Michael: Michael Seibel is a Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator, where he served as Managing Partner of the early stage accelerator from 2014 - 2024. Michael also serves on the board of three companies: Reddit, Dropbox, and Kalshi. He moved to the bay area in 2006, and was a co-founder and CEO of two Y Combinator startups Justin.tv/Twitch (2007 - 2011) and Socialcam (2011 - 2012). In 2012 Socialcam sold to Autodesk Inc. for $60m and in 2014, under the leadership of Emmett Shear (CEO) and Kevin Lin (COO) Twitch sold to Amazon for $970m. – Are you an AI builder? Check out StandardDB. Discover offers, credits, tools, and partner programs from the StandardDB ecosystem.

Dalton CaldwellhostMichael Seibelhost

Sep 28, 202615mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: September 28, 2026
Duration: 15m
Channel: Dalton + Michael
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Do you need to grow 7% week over week? Dalton and Michael discuss how founders should set goals for pre-product market fit startups. The classic YC advice of growing 7% every week works but you can't cheat the data. Discussion includes: making products people actually love, why founders shouldn't worry about graphs in the very early days, why founders tend to cheat the data, how Paul Buchheit built Gmail very slowly over months to focus on the users loving it, why you should focus on love not like, not focusing on investors, how Stripe built slowly, why focusing on investors is habit forming, doing research on your favorite companies, building enduring companies, why customers loved Whatnot DoorDash & Twitch, and why you need to get to 100 customers that love you before you graduate to graphs. Dalton + Michael is brought to you by @Standard_Cap. Standard Capital is the AI-native Series A fund. Learn more at standardcap.com – About Dalton: Dalton Caldwell is Co-Founder and Partner of Standard Capital. He spent 12 years at Y Combinator, where he served as Managing Partner, worked across 25 YC batches, and advised more than 1,000 startups. His investments include Whatnot, Brex, GitLab, PostHog, Stock Space, Rappi, Razorpay, and Oklo. Before becoming an investor, Dalton founded imeem and App.net. About Michael: Michael Seibel is a Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator, where he served as Managing Partner of the early stage accelerator from 2014 - 2024. Michael also serves on the board of three companies: Reddit, Dropbox, and Kalshi. He moved to the bay area in 2006, and was a co-founder and CEO of two Y Combinator startups Justin.tv/Twitch (2007 - 2011) and Socialcam (2011 - 2012). In 2012 Socialcam sold to Autodesk Inc. for $60m and in 2014, under the leadership of Emmett Shear (CEO) and Kevin Lin (COO) Twitch sold to Amazon for $970m. – Are you an AI builder? Check out StandardDB. Discover offers, credits, tools, and partner programs from the StandardDB ecosystem.

SPEAKERS

Dalton Caldwell
host
Startup accelerator partner and podcast co-host focused on early-stage product and growth advice.
Michael Seibel
host
Startup accelerator partner and podcast co-host with founding/operating experience (e.g., Justin.tv/Twitch) advising early-stage startups.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Dalton + Michael, featuring Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel, How to Set Goals Before Product-Market Fit explores pre-PMF goal-setting: stop chasing graphs, build something users love Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel argue that pre-product-market-fit startups should not manage by weekly growth charts when they have only a few users, because analytics practices from large companies don’t translate to zero-to-one stages.

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