The atomic record of breakout success

Day 9 of building public

Parker Conrad started Rippling with an offer letter generator.
DoorDash delivered a single Thai food order off a PDF menu.
Tobi Lütke started with one snowboard shop.
Carta started with a single paper stock certificate for twenty bucks a pop.
Plaid started by connecting one bank account.

Why?

They all started with a single problem that was also the tip of the spear for an entire workflow.

Offer letters. Rippling started with an offer letter generator. Why? The offer letter is the first thing an employee signs when they join a company. Nail that one document and you have a foot in the door to the entire HR stack. Onboarding, payroll, benefits, devices, all of it. Start at the signature and you earn the right to everything that comes after it.

One order off a PDF. DoorDash’s first version was a landing page with a few PDF menus and a phone number that rang their personal cells. Their first order (Thai if you are interested) came a few hours later. One of the founders picked up and dropped it off himself. That single order off a single PDF was the entry point to every kind of online delivery. The one workflow taught them everything. The restaurant side, the driver side, the customer side. They earned all of it by running the smallest possible version first.

One bank connection. Plaid set out to build a consumer budgeting app and kept hitting the same wall. They could not connect to anyone’s bank. So they realized the connection was the actual product. You cannot send, spend, borrow, or invest in any app until your account is linked. That one step is the front door to all of fintech. Plaid built the front door and became the rails underneath Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase.

Cap tables. Carta ran the same play on equity, and it shows you how to generalize the move. Henry Ward started Carta, then called eShares, by digitizing a single paper stock certificate for twenty bucks a pop. Boring. But the cap table is the atom of who owns a company. Capture how shares get issued and you own the ownership record itself. From that one record Carta built 409A valuations, then fund administration, then a private stock market. Liquidity was always the goal. The cap table just had to come first.

All of these founders went to the simplest possible unit of the most critical entry workflow. Small enough to test in a short, cheap way. Upstream enough to hand them unprecedented access to every downstream workflow.

They went as far upstream as they could, to the very first step, built there, and grew from there.

So if you are thinking about starting something new, ask yourself: what is the very first action {x person} takes when doing {y thing}? Find the record that gets created the moment the thing is born. Own how it gets made. Build the rest on top.

Here are a few “atoms” that I could think of off the top of my head.

School applications. Every single student has to fill out an application to enroll in a K-12 district. The student record is also the atom of the Student Information System. Build a better tool for enrolling students and you can potentially build a compound product to take down PowerSchool.

Patient intake. The first thing that happens in healthcare is not a diagnosis. It is a clipboard. Every patient fills out an intake form before they are ever seen. That intake is the atom of the medical record, and the medical record is the thing every other system in the building bends around. Own how a patient gets entered and you have a wedge at the one place the entire EHR is built on. That is the soft underbelly of a company like Epic.

Email address. At the core of capitalism is selling a product to a customer. In our digital landscape the first opt-in a customer makes with you is an email signup. Almost every interaction from there on out starts with the email. So if you want to build the next gen marketing automation platform, think from first principles about how you capture that email in the first place. The website. I think this is what Bryant Chou is doing at Ploy, and it’s why I am so bullish on it.

Please comment or reply back with any other atomic examples you have!

-Ben