I think I've asked this question but I found myself a cofounder with 2 others that prioritized too highly IMO coffee meetings with "investors", no name board advisors, expensive conferences, and basically everything on that list. My approach was to gently voice my concern and but also let them do it in the hopes they'd see how useless it was. The other thing that didn't help was I was the "technical cofounder" and the attitude essentially was I didn't "get" business, and sometimes I wondered if they were right.
Interestingly both were woman, and I don't recall too much of #3. They definitely participated in women in tech type groups but I thought it was no different than any other useless networking others that aren't focused would do.
This will be definitely something I probe for in the future. Anyone looking for a cofounder? (I'm serious, and I have a cool little project we could do to see if we can build something people want together)
The networking is the personal insurance policy by your cofounders against startup failure. The people connections built during networking events will land these cofounders leadership/management positions at other companies if and when startup fails instead of being unemployable or starting at the bottom. The founders, typically technical co-founders, that don't network has no such insurance in place and tend to go back to work for someone else as software engineer rather than upper level technical management positions like VP Engineering.
The tricky thing about this is that networking is often the right move if you're playing to do well rather than to win. If you're looking for a mid- to upper-management role at an established company, networking is great. If you're going into an established, competitive market with no intentions of "winning" the market (and becoming a monopoly), then networking can get you customers, it can get you distribution partners, and it can get you funding. Just not lots of all of the above, and you will have to fight hard for each.
Most business founders come from an environment where this is what has worked for them their whole career. That's how you get a job on the business side of things, and it's how you do your job on the business end of an established company.
The take-away, I think, is to know which game you're playing and make your moves accordingly. Being a great research engineer is one game; being an engineer at a startup is another, and moving up the ranks in a big company is another one entirely. Doing sales for a big company is a different game from doing customer development for your own startup, which is different from doing business development for either. Building a lifestyle business in a competitive niche is very different from doing hard tech research, which is very different from solving a problem that seems crazy in an area nobody else will go near. If you apply the rules of one game to the situations of another, you're unlikely to get good results.
(A corollary of this is to make sure that all your startups' other decisions are lined up with the game it is playing. I've seen a number of startups with ideas & personal goals that are clearly in the "lifestyle business" camp, but then they make decisions about markets, fundraising & hiring that put them in the "we're gonna be Google" camp, and unsurprisingly this tends to end poorly.)
So true. This was probably one of the biggest mistakes I made with my first startup. I was in a city outside of silicon valley, so there was a lot of pressure to have a lot of meetings and go talk at local conferences. I also thought that conferences in my market would be a good sales channel. In reality, it didn't. Most people at conferences just want to be entertained or distracted from their daily jobs - not a great mindset to try and sell them something.
I also had no idea how incredibly distracting meetings with potential, and even current, investors can be. Lesson learned was to only talk to potential investors when you are specifically fundraising, and keep time with current investors to regularly paced meetings and updates, unless a immediate situation requires otherwise.
This one hit so close to home for me too. Your comment is what I would have written except my cofounder was a non-technical guy. In the future I am going to voice my concerns a little more forcefully.
Twice in the past, I have been "the guy" that one of the investors brought in to walk around and do a look-see. Among my recommendations, one of them, both times, was to fire every top level manager that wasn't you. There is no reason that current and potential future investors can not be kept in the loop with a one-page email once a week or once a month.
Despite my personal record for failing to do so 5 times out of 10, the core recipe is not that hard: build a product that solve a problem that people would be willing to pay to have solved and get them to hit the "buy" button.
IF you have something of value, all that social stuff can help monetize it. First, you need to build a thing. If you have no thing, all that stuff is either hot air or basically con artistry.
Women in business face special challenges. Failing to deal with them at all can be catastrophic. But getting too focused on that piece can also be problematic. It can be challenging to figure out which is which.
Thankfully, with the exception of PR, I loathe all the things in #2. I'll do them when I have to, but that's it.
Of course, it's REALLY hard to do PR when you don't have a product people love, really easy once you've got that. Keeping it fresh and top of mind is a challenge for many founders though.
I haven't had a ton of experience in startups...once I had to work out of a startup space. And it amazed me the number of conversations I would hear between aspiring entrepreneurs and random strangers that were variations of, "Please tell me if you think this is a good idea".
Everyone knows what it's like to want something. I didn't really hear about Tinder until after it blew up into something huge, but its proposition always made sense to me: Do you want to get laid? Do you often base your decision on the looks of a potential mate? Would you be OK with requesting consensual sex without having to fill out a form?. Yes to all of that. I can't think of anything I regularly use and/or pay for that I can't sum up as a one-sentence "want", whether it's Google, Twitter, Netflix, Facebook, Uber...of course being the first to recognize the desire does not lead to a desirable product -- there's scaling and marketing and implementation and luck, of course.
But that means the entrepreneur who is trawling around to learn what others want is even deeper in the hole. Is there something in startup culture that heavily cautions against pursuing something that you know _you_ want, because selfish concerns do not often scale (even though they've scaled in plenty of cases if you look at surviving startups, though that's obviously survivor bias).
This is a great talk. While most of Jessica's advice is spot on for many startups, there are some special cases, namely enterprise software.
Once an enterprise software startup has built its product, or even 70% of its product, you have to go to conferences. Conferences are where you meet your users, and enterprise software users and buyers are a hard group to target otherwise. Marketing and top-of-the-funnel sales happen there. Conferences are also the places you gather intel about the rest of the industry to get a read on where it's moving and if you're aligned with it. So the question for enterprise software startups is: How do you select the most important conferences and pay as little as possible to attend?
It would be wonderful if these sorts of articles (which efficiently generalize advice based on thousands of data points) could back their assertions up with a few telling case studies. It's often too easy to nod sagely at advice like "don't loose focus" but not actually recognize the pathology in ourselves in our day to day lives.
"build stuff and talk to users" is so simple but great advice.
For my first successful startup I did the marketing and build and my partner focused on the users. And we crushed the incumbent in under 2 years completely bootstrapped and they tried to buy us.
Now I have a new startup where I'm handling the build and the customers and another partner is focused on the marketing.
It's a subscription business and talking with users helps retention, acquisition via word of mouth and also product development. Do it even if you'd rather be spending that time building!
Jessica asserts that conventions are too distracting and you shouldn't go to them.
I don't completely agree with that. Depending on what type of business you're making, the best way to get work done is to go to conventions, because that's the only time you can easily meet with a bunch of people that are related to your industry and make new partnerships, check out new hardware/software solutions to save time or money, possibly hunt for some new talent to join the company, discuss business propositions, etc, can all be possible in much shorter period of time than doing the same outside the convention.
Even just having the opportunity to meet someone face to face that you've been doing business with for the past several months can be useful.
That being said, you don't need to go to a lot of them. Attend only one or two of the most productive ones per year (most productive ones are not always the largest), and you should get a lot done without spending too much time at them.
Also don't go if you're strapped for cash, as they're often expensive (depending on the industry). They're not absolutely necessary, and they can be a waste of time if you don't utilize them properly. But they can be helpful tools.
I think there's two domains in this case, one being "macro luck", the other "micro luck".
The rise of the PC, or the fall of the horse buggy are in the former category. They can be influenced, but individual contributions are often insignificant, and predicting their course is very hard.
Then there's "micro luck". Things like hiring a great engineer, finding the right investor, or including the right feature or line of copy fall into this category.
With these smaller random, but not fully random events you gain the ability to influence the outcome significantly. Want to find great engineers? Move to Silicon Valley, join your LUG, get wasted at DEFCON, these all significantly increase your chances of succeeding at that particular subtask. You get to make significantly more educated guesses at what works and what doesn't.
I think this is an important distinction, after which it becomes good practice to follow the advice in the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebur
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
I'm not particularly religious, but that has always seemed like good sense to me.
In a recent YC Podcast, the guest talked about luck (sorry I can't remember who it was). The interviewer asked about how much of their success can be attributed to luck. The guest agreed that, yes, there was some luck involved but luck is like collecting lottery tickets. You can take actions with your startup to increase the chances of succeeding, just like buying more lottery tickets increases your odds (by a tiny margin). You can't just start a business and wait for it to succeed or not, you have to take action and put in effort.
Of course you can still fail- success or failure in most things in life almost always has at least an element of luck. There are things you can control and things you can't- the best you can do is optimize the things that are under your control, hope for the best, and brace for the worst.
Maybe that's all you need, maybe not. But it'll put you in the best position to take advantage of good luck, and survive bad luck. Or, perhaps you'll be one of the lucky ones who don't need luck at all, in which case those skills had better be sharp!
If it's true that luck is important, shouldn't it be 'smart' to try many 'fail fast' things so there's room in a career to fail 20-30 times and have a more reasonable shot at success?
As a bootstrapper of broadstreetads.com (about to pass the four year mark), I can genuinely say that focusing on building what your customers truly need and measuring growth are two critical pieces of advice that do not get emphasized enough.
I love to shut myself in and write code, don't get me wrong. But consistently tracking sales growth, setting goals, and hitting goals (i.e., execution) is what separates the wannabes from the dids.
I also think it's super important to make something you can sell in addition to making something people want. Frankly, there are so many things people want but not every founder has resources or is well-equipped to sell it.
Your goal as a founder is to maximize chances of __your__ success. Having the right founder-market fit goes a long way.
Definitely agree. It's easy to think of a cool "new social sharing blah" idea -- but guess what? If you're a new founder, without a large persuasive network to get word out to free users -- you're going to have a very hard time.
On the other hand, if you build something useful, and can start racking up subscriptions by doing some footwork (talking to users, giving out free accounts, etc), then you've got a much better chance.
Focusing on growth and revenue sounds like the right thing to do for a p2p dog walking marketplace, or a SaaS enterprise meal planning app, but what about the startups solving big problems? Is month over month user growth relevant to a nuclear fusion or jet airplane startup?
You just have to spend a lot longer in phase 1 (or pre phase 1) where you're trying to make something people want. Once you've built that tech you still want to sell it and to have growth right?
Woah, I've been struggling with the idea of “going to conferences” (on the list of distractions).
I have personal projects that I want to finish (not a startup), and the conferences I enjoy tend to feature people showing off their own projects. Whenever I‘m at one, I think, “I’d rather be on stage, sharing something I put months (or years) of love into, than be one of the 100-1000 people in the audience watching.”
Of course, going to a conference can be inspiring, or introduce me to people or ideas that’ll shape my future work, so they’re not all bad. I’m interested in how other HN folks approach this conflict.
Semi-related, I experienced something interesting at a hacking conference a few years ago. Mid-conference, feeling inspired, I hid in the volunteer lounge for almost a whole day and worked on a reverse engineering project that I’d been fighting to understand for over a year. I solved it! Being there, and aware of all of the people and activity around me, but actively ignoring it, gave me focus and motivation. That was fascinating, and I’ve considered doing the same thing again (or finding a really interesting conference and not buying a ticket, so that I could work while I know I’m missing it).
Could someone help me understand her list under Point 2, Stay Focused? She writes:
>One of the most conspicuous patterns we’ve seen among the thousand startups we’ve funded is that the most successful founders are always totally focused on their product and their users. To the point of being fanatical. The best founders don’t have time to get caught up in other things.
>Here’s a list of things that I see easily distract founders. These are like the startup equivalent of wolves in sheeps’ clothing.
[she includes 8 points, of which I quote 4 below - I am quoting selectively.]
> - “Grabbing coffee” with investors
> - Networking
> - Doing a “partnership,” thinking it will get you more users
> - Going to conferences
Now, I need help understnanding this. She has listed some of the items that separate people building startups in unfundable locations where there are 0 startups, and startups building in the Bay Area.
If you don't need to do these things, why did YC shut down it's Boston program and make everyone do it in the Bay Area?
If you don't need to do these things, why can't you build a startup from anywhere in the world as long as you speak good English and have no costs?
Aren't these things literally the things that make startups fundable, financiable, possible to grow into huge businesses?
I and anyone else on HN who has been in the Bay Area and in startup-dead locations knows the huge difference. She seemed to quote some of it under 'distractions'.
Can someone help me understand why they aren't, in fact, part of focus?
as a 26yr old female Electrical Engineer getting involved with entrepreneurship and doing my own software startup, I agree there is too much controversy, talk and fear surrounding being a female in tech.
Don't get me wrong, it is isolating in general but after working for two startups, one bought out by a foreign company and another now has billions in funding, doing software analytics on the trading floor through summer internships in college, and going to a predominately male college for engineering, 70% males overall, and 99% male in my major, I can say I have a diversity of experience even within the tech field and also years of experience working at single companies before moving on, I can say a few things that I think echo what she is saying
1. Most of the people speaking the most about female controversey are not coders, or engineers or in the nitty gritty of tech. While I appreciate their empathy and willingness to latch onto a cause and speak for us, they often get it wrong, and recently have done so much so that they scare the MAJORITY of men to feeling uncomfortable talking about it. What do I mean? onto point #2
1a. Sorry, before I go to Point 2, another way journalists or people wanting to speak out on our behalf (female women in tech) get it wrong is by assuming we want to change the culture to be this outgoing, social fashion forward world. Actually, alot of us are introverted geeks and like doing the same thing other male engineers do. I definitely think wheather you were or are a cheerleader sorority girl who likes to bake and throw parties or an introverted star wars nerd and each one is an engineer, either should feel equally comfortable at a new tech company and not isolated by the culture, but anecdotally I happen to be an extreme introvert, and the excessive socializing and advice or notion that if we have an environment where we can all be super girly like omg together is the vibe I get from alot of female focused events in tech. It's actually overwhelming and makes me feel more out of place than not. Listen to us, not imposing your idea of how we might feel onto us. Get a good profile of what females are saying who are IN tech, and if there is a difference between that and the ones who are latching onto the idea of it or operating in auxiliary roles surrounding tech. These women are just as important, and are are still subject to sexism working around male dominated industries, but if you want more women IN tech, instead of talking about tech but not in it, listen to the women IN it, you might be surprised.
EXAMPLE
Here is one example where both genders are contributing to the problem but making it harder for women IN tech. my friend is a Biomed Engineer who prototyped and developed her hardware. Keeping her anonymous on here, but she went to a big tech conference in the bay area and was approached by three men asking if she was a "showgirl" at the conference as a starter to the conversation. Of all the things you could possibly say right? How offensive to a female engineer with over 30 pending patents running a multi million dollar company and two engineering degrees under her belt. Welp, those guys are in the wrong, but also why are there showgirls at tech conferences. because hot girls attract geeks to the boothe. But MEN hired these showgirls, and WOMEN are actually fufilling those roles. So both parties are at fault.
Who suffers?
The people who suffer are the ACTUAL female engineers who would love to go to a conference and not have it be assumed they are there in an auxiliary tech role until proven otherwise.
once my friend described who she was, both of the guys felt really bad, even embarassed and apologized profusely. They ended up being cool guys she is still friends with. they learned a lesson, but they have also been heavily conditioned by males and females who are both willing particpants in establishing a stereotype that is demeaning to women actually in tech.
2. Most men I've met and worked with in tech are absolutely fine. It is that in general outlier cases good and back stick out in our heads. If there are 200 employees at a company and only 2 females in my department of 40, probably over a 6 months period the chances are I'm going to be made to feel uncomfortable whether intentionally or not by one person atleast. I'm not saying it's acceptable or ok, or that steps shouldn't be taken to fix it, I'm saying 19/20 guys I work with in a random sampling are just fine, and don't make being a girl a thing, and treat me just the same, or if anything are excited to see women in tech and go out of their way to make you feel comfortable. It's then in your discretion to stand on your own two feet and not take advantage of that, because some women do, which brings me to...
3. There are some women who abuse their minority status. I'm NOT saying women who have spoken out about being treated poorly are the ones who are abusive, or that they are lying. It is usually ones that have nothing to complain about and the situations are much more nuanced. I'm sorry people will get mad at me about this statement but I feel comfortable saying it as I've observed it and I work in tech and I'm not going to lie to remain politically correct. Both males and females are capable of abusing their position. Not all males do it, not all females do it. So hating men or making them terrified of saying the wrong thing if anything is just going to make you feel more isolated.
There are also women who still have queen B syndrome and like being the only female around, and actively bully other women. This is so obnoxious. However, in my varied experience in tech, I can say one key indicator of a real female engineer, is that most of us would LOVE a female friend because we don't have many. Females that view male dominated workplaces as a fun new playground because of all the men, are constantly having coworker boyfriends, and view other women as competition, instead of empathizing with them, have probably not experienced the long term years of being in college engineering classes and doing their homework and not having female friends, and the desire to be treated as an equal instead of put on a pedastool or having to prove themselves. Real females doing real work in tech know what it's like to be isolated, and when we get together as females, we are all super super grateful for it, and we all feel uncomfortable going to glitzy girl focused events where we are bombarded by girls not in tech telling us how things should be. This has been my experience.
4. While some of us can't choose who we work for and with, if you are a female IN Tech, not marketing or some soft auxiliary department of a developed company, but you code or prototype electronics or hardware or engineer something, then you are valuable enough that you can move onto thousands of other companies if you don't find one with a culture that fits your comfort zone. Not just because you are a talented brilliant ambitious female, but because you are a talented brilliant ambitious engineer, and they are in great need in any gender, but being a female is always a great added diversity and step into equality for EVERYONE, not just females. AGAIN, it's not ok women should ever have to feel uncomfortable but we live in the real world and not everything is fair, not just for women, but for alot of situations and people in general.
CLOSING COMMENTS
In life in general, forget being a women or startups, a good rule of thumb, and one I took way too long to learn myself in my personal and professional life, if you don't like how you are being treated, then start hanging around different people.
I have plenty of male engineer friends who are low key, we geek out together, order pizza, watch tv, code, switch knowledge, music and talk about latest tech stuff, and its totally chill. What and who makes you feel comfortable but also gets you excited about learning and obtaining your goals? hang around them and your work life and personal life will be better. It's the same as if you want to stop drinking but your friends only method or venue for socializing is drinking, well it's not going to be super fun for you, so hang out with people who gel with your same lifestyle.
I definitely have my frustrations, but my successes and friends male and female far outweigh my desire to spend most of my time feeling negatively. This is coming from a girl who has been through some troubling times with male coworkers. It's not that is hasnt been harder, its just that I have so many things I want to do, I'd rather "show them" by being successful and acheiving my goals than fighting a legal battle. I am glad some women have chosen the legal path, but I actually would be upset if someone chastized me for not spending all my time in court. There are lots of way to bring tech forward with everyone, not just articles and legal battles. Sometimes, just being a good role model, the girl you wish you had to hang with 5 years ago when you had no female friends, goes alot farther in the world of tech females who actually need a friend, not just people reading the hottest news. Any new girl I meet in my company or department or otherwise who is an engineer or software developer, I atleast attempt to make friends and go out to lunch or a grab a drink with them , let them know I'm available to chat or otherwise, and every time I've been endlessly thanked saying I'm the only female friend they have. Well, now I have like 5 awesome female engineer friends and we all are friends as a group now, it's not much, its not enough, but its more than we ever had and it's all we have time for, because you know, we are also coding, starting companies and doing all the same things males do so we are not over here just being social butterflies. As cliche as it sounds, and something I never would have believed about myself years ago when I was feeling isolated, is that I focused on being the change I wanted to see in the world, and the role model I wish I had when I was fresh out of college, instead of fighting legal battles. Sometimes thats the right thing to do, sometimes my path is a good one too, and I don't regret it.
I've had to abandoned some groups, and in one case a company because I was around egotistical chovenistic males who challenged me on everything and even worse it was all subconscious sexism so it was not even easy to address. no its not ok, but I decided to instead of fighting for it for years and years, to move onto something better for me, and now I can spend the majority of my time coding and working on my goals, instead of fighting against people. It was the best decision I've ever made, I'm able to be alot more technically advanced, and by holding my head high and deciding I could do better, instead of tearing other people down.
Atleast three of those guys have come to me years later to apologize (with no prodding on my part), tell me I was a good player on the team, and I know from females who joined that same team later, they are treated very well. Those guys straightened up because sometimes the most powerful thing you can do, is know you deserve better, walk away and discover a place that fosters your worth. If you have real tech skills, this will always be an option for you as a woman, or a man. It's ok to stand up and "fight" and it all depends on your situation. I should have had more support in mine, but honestly I think I made the right choice by just moving onto something better.
FINAL NOTE
She is right, don't be scared. JUST DO IT. If you can actually code or prototype, then do it. Perform, let your product speak for itself and noone can argue with you. That is the cool thing about coding or being an engineer, if it works and people are paying for it, who cares if youre a girl, or a transgender, or have purple hair, wear tennis shoes to work, or if you are a hippopotamus. It's not going to be easy, it's going to be WORTH it, and there may be some extra barriers, but how rewarding for you to be a trailblazer.
I never thought of myself that way until people started calling me a trailblazer or a "badass" years out of college and now that I think about it, hey yeh, I've been through some pretty hard times but damn this is cool, minority or not, I love what I do and nothing is going to stop me. In fact, I had no idea when I first went into this that anyone would want to stop me, or feel threatened by me, and honestly, that is the hard part.
THE HARD PART
The hard part is realizing that some people are actually not supportive of you, subconsciously or not, alot of the anger on your part comes from the confusion surrounding the challenge of understanding this concept, because if youre an awesome person who doesnt need to tear other people down to have success, this isn't going to be intuitive for you to understand other people are actually that lame. Once you realize yes these warped people in self denial who project their own insecurities onto you DO exist, and probably always will in some form or fashion, then you can be like "oh, no I'm better than that sorry". Sometimes again, legal is a good way, sometimes not.
Just do you and find that confidence. if you don't have it, dig deeper, if youre reading this youre already way ahead of the game and have nothing to feel insecure about. Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond and how you let it effect your opinion of yourself or your subconscious belief about your capabilities.
Have that attitude, and support other girls around you, focus on your work and not people, and youll be amazed. In the words of Dr. Suess "oh the places youll go.."
>anecdotally I happen to be an extreme introvert, and the excessive socializing and advice or notion that if we have an environment where we can all be super girly like omg together is the vibe I get from alot of female focused events in tech. It's actually overwhelming and makes me feel more out of place than not.
I'm just one more anecdote and a bit of a living edge case, but this has been painfully true for me as well. I deliberately avoid women in tech events/blogs/etc now because of how uncomfortable they tend to make me. Hearing "tech" talks about how it's important for women to get hired because we're just like, so in touch with our feelings and therefore we make great UX--incredibly demoralizing and othering for me.
> But MEN hired these showgirls, and WOMEN are actually fufilling [sic] those roles. So both parties are at fault.
There was a pretty good article written by a woman who was hired as a dancer to attend a convention who was lectured by one of the female attendees. Her point was that she had a right to make a living too, and it's just as destructive to bash a woman who works for a conference floor, as it is to assume a woman who attends a conference is there as a "showgirl."
Not everyone can be an engineer, and not all jobs make ends-meet, so throwing women who are working tradeshows under the bus is just another form of sexism.
> "notion that if we have an environment where we can all be super girly like omg together"
My wife normally works remotely, but meets with her team in person twice a year. Last time, at the first whole-team dinner, she announced she was pregnant... and the other women on the team fawned and fussed over her the rest of the week. Which was super duper uncomfortable for her, as one of the most extreme introverts I know.
She's not interested in being "girly". She's interested in being who she is -- technical, brilliant, competitive, powerful, and into My Little Ponies because it's a great show, not because it's girly.
I agree with others that this is a great write-up on the situation that could be revised into a great, blog post or something. One specific thing that jumps out at me is that both you and Jessica write that there's problems but people often write about the wrong ones. Usually due to no industry experience at that level or some bias.
Do you have links to any write-ups that you find more accurate?
> So while I’ll tell you that it is going to be harder for you as a woman,
I read this phrase a few times. I'm genuinely curious - and didn't really see it in the article - what are the reasons for which Jessica is referring?
Edit - downvoted for asking a genuine question...? Did it ever occur to anyone that I may be asking to see how I could help, seeing as I'm involved with a few startups?
Some:
* "networking events" with alcohol become minefields
* investors will literally try to get you to sleep with them for an investment
* people will not take your technical team seriously (so you look riskier)
* conferences are prisons of harassment
* selling to customers takes longer because (again) people don't take you as seriously
That's literally off the top of my head from things I've literally seen first hand.
Can we stop pretending the real world isn't full of douchebags?
"The best metric to choose is good old fashioned revenue."
The best metric to choose is good old fashioned profit.
I appreciate that growth can be hindered by making a profit, but isn't that what matters in the end? Amazon, Twitter, Box and many other public tech companies went public without turning a profit so it seems I'm wrong.
> The best metric to choose is good old fashioned profit
I agree that ultimately, the only measure is profit for a company you are building to operate. The only caveat being that in the early stages, it may require more investment, and you don't want to sacrifice good investment to higher profit when it could mean the ultimate decline of the company (and profit). This is why there could be a period of time where the revenue measure is simplest and meaningful.
With regard to at least Amazon, I think they are focused on the long game and profitability. Twitter and others I don't follow, but I would agree that from the outside, many seem not to focus on building sustainable, profitable business without continued funding or expectation of being sold.
I would say that revenue and marginal marginal contribution are the most important. It is OK to be unprofitable of you can fix it by growing and diluting fixed costs.
Early on profit will be negative by definition. (Otherwise they wouldn't need to raise money) This is advice for hypergrowth startups, not stable companies.
Measuring the right things is very important too. I was at a company that lived and died on user counts. We grew 30X in users over my year there, but no revenue so we ultimately died. (And costs were out of control too, and we lost focus, so much of this article hits home)
I love how Pat Flynn talked about building a market map in his recent book Will It Fly. I think this method is very helpful in finding out if what your doing is something people want.
Derek Sivers of CDBaby has this same mindset. He has always worked off the pull method rather than the push method for what he creates.
Ash Maurya in his book running lean gives you a nice script for customer development interviews. I have tried this with a previous startup idea, and they saved me from going down the road of working on something people did not want. They are probably a bit more involved than Pat's method, but it is something else to consider.
Kudos -- really interesting, thoughtful and useful summary. However (yes, there's always a however), I'm always surprised and baffled why these kinds of lists rarely attribute startup failures to non/mis-management of the development process. I worked for a couple of successful startups and have consulted for the last six years (performance stuff) and am dumbfounded by the amount of time developers waste on "crap" -- trivial bugs, insignificant performance issues, "enterprise" build/QA automation, etc. At one startup, THE key developer went off for six months rewriting the comm stack for a performance problem that didn't exist -- all the while destabilizing and slowing down the product. At my last "real" job, every time I went to the coffee room, I would ask a developer what they were working on and 90% of the time it was "bugs." That's fine if you're working at IBM on DB2 but NOT if your funding dries up in 12 months. IMHO, it is RARE to find a manager/VP who will pull a developer back out of the weeds. I often see an endless series of stand-ups where the status is "fixed a bug" or "recoded an inefficient loop" or "wrote a Java wrapper for the Jenkins garbage collector." It SOUNDS like progress but six months later POCs are crashing and burning because 2/3 of the core features are still missing. Maybe I've had a totally weird career but how come no one talks about this?
Not sure I agree about advisors. Getting smart people who have experience in places the team is lacking seems pretty critical to me. Perhaps it’s different at YC where you have advisors built into the program and getting ‘boards of advisors’ is extraneous, but for other teams without those resources behind them this seems like bad advice. Find people who’ve done it before and learn from them.
[+] [-] djb_hackernews|9 years ago|reply
I think I've asked this question but I found myself a cofounder with 2 others that prioritized too highly IMO coffee meetings with "investors", no name board advisors, expensive conferences, and basically everything on that list. My approach was to gently voice my concern and but also let them do it in the hopes they'd see how useless it was. The other thing that didn't help was I was the "technical cofounder" and the attitude essentially was I didn't "get" business, and sometimes I wondered if they were right.
Interestingly both were woman, and I don't recall too much of #3. They definitely participated in women in tech type groups but I thought it was no different than any other useless networking others that aren't focused would do.
This will be definitely something I probe for in the future. Anyone looking for a cofounder? (I'm serious, and I have a cool little project we could do to see if we can build something people want together)
[+] [-] akg_67|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|9 years ago|reply
Most business founders come from an environment where this is what has worked for them their whole career. That's how you get a job on the business side of things, and it's how you do your job on the business end of an established company.
The take-away, I think, is to know which game you're playing and make your moves accordingly. Being a great research engineer is one game; being an engineer at a startup is another, and moving up the ranks in a big company is another one entirely. Doing sales for a big company is a different game from doing customer development for your own startup, which is different from doing business development for either. Building a lifestyle business in a competitive niche is very different from doing hard tech research, which is very different from solving a problem that seems crazy in an area nobody else will go near. If you apply the rules of one game to the situations of another, you're unlikely to get good results.
(A corollary of this is to make sure that all your startups' other decisions are lined up with the game it is playing. I've seen a number of startups with ideas & personal goals that are clearly in the "lifestyle business" camp, but then they make decisions about markets, fundraising & hiring that put them in the "we're gonna be Google" camp, and unsurprisingly this tends to end poorly.)
[+] [-] ginkgotree|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] palakchokshi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ci5er|9 years ago|reply
Despite my personal record for failing to do so 5 times out of 10, the core recipe is not that hard: build a product that solve a problem that people would be willing to pay to have solved and get them to hit the "buy" button.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Mz|9 years ago|reply
Women in business face special challenges. Failing to deal with them at all can be catastrophic. But getting too focused on that piece can also be problematic. It can be challenging to figure out which is which.
[+] [-] pedalpete|9 years ago|reply
Of course, it's REALLY hard to do PR when you don't have a product people love, really easy once you've got that. Keeping it fresh and top of mind is a challenge for many founders though.
[+] [-] yishanl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|9 years ago|reply
I haven't had a ton of experience in startups...once I had to work out of a startup space. And it amazed me the number of conversations I would hear between aspiring entrepreneurs and random strangers that were variations of, "Please tell me if you think this is a good idea".
Everyone knows what it's like to want something. I didn't really hear about Tinder until after it blew up into something huge, but its proposition always made sense to me: Do you want to get laid? Do you often base your decision on the looks of a potential mate? Would you be OK with requesting consensual sex without having to fill out a form?. Yes to all of that. I can't think of anything I regularly use and/or pay for that I can't sum up as a one-sentence "want", whether it's Google, Twitter, Netflix, Facebook, Uber...of course being the first to recognize the desire does not lead to a desirable product -- there's scaling and marketing and implementation and luck, of course.
But that means the entrepreneur who is trawling around to learn what others want is even deeper in the hole. Is there something in startup culture that heavily cautions against pursuing something that you know _you_ want, because selfish concerns do not often scale (even though they've scaled in plenty of cases if you look at surviving startups, though that's obviously survivor bias).
[+] [-] vonnik|9 years ago|reply
Once an enterprise software startup has built its product, or even 70% of its product, you have to go to conferences. Conferences are where you meet your users, and enterprise software users and buyers are a hard group to target otherwise. Marketing and top-of-the-funnel sales happen there. Conferences are also the places you gather intel about the rest of the industry to get a read on where it's moving and if you're aligned with it. So the question for enterprise software startups is: How do you select the most important conferences and pay as little as possible to attend?
[+] [-] ajessup|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exclusiv|9 years ago|reply
For my first successful startup I did the marketing and build and my partner focused on the users. And we crushed the incumbent in under 2 years completely bootstrapped and they tried to buy us.
Now I have a new startup where I'm handling the build and the customers and another partner is focused on the marketing.
It's a subscription business and talking with users helps retention, acquisition via word of mouth and also product development. Do it even if you'd rather be spending that time building!
[+] [-] cableshaft|9 years ago|reply
I don't completely agree with that. Depending on what type of business you're making, the best way to get work done is to go to conventions, because that's the only time you can easily meet with a bunch of people that are related to your industry and make new partnerships, check out new hardware/software solutions to save time or money, possibly hunt for some new talent to join the company, discuss business propositions, etc, can all be possible in much shorter period of time than doing the same outside the convention.
Even just having the opportunity to meet someone face to face that you've been doing business with for the past several months can be useful.
That being said, you don't need to go to a lot of them. Attend only one or two of the most productive ones per year (most productive ones are not always the largest), and you should get a lot done without spending too much time at them.
Also don't go if you're strapped for cash, as they're often expensive (depending on the industry). They're not absolutely necessary, and they can be a waste of time if you don't utilize them properly. But they can be helpful tools.
[+] [-] pfarnsworth|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 50CNT|9 years ago|reply
The rise of the PC, or the fall of the horse buggy are in the former category. They can be influenced, but individual contributions are often insignificant, and predicting their course is very hard.
Then there's "micro luck". Things like hiring a great engineer, finding the right investor, or including the right feature or line of copy fall into this category.
With these smaller random, but not fully random events you gain the ability to influence the outcome significantly. Want to find great engineers? Move to Silicon Valley, join your LUG, get wasted at DEFCON, these all significantly increase your chances of succeeding at that particular subtask. You get to make significantly more educated guesses at what works and what doesn't.
I think this is an important distinction, after which it becomes good practice to follow the advice in the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebur
I'm not particularly religious, but that has always seemed like good sense to me.[+] [-] giarc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwfunk|9 years ago|reply
Maybe that's all you need, maybe not. But it'll put you in the best position to take advantage of good luck, and survive bad luck. Or, perhaps you'll be one of the lucky ones who don't need luck at all, in which case those skills had better be sharp!
[+] [-] jmathai|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] humanrebar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] katzgrau|9 years ago|reply
I love to shut myself in and write code, don't get me wrong. But consistently tracking sales growth, setting goals, and hitting goals (i.e., execution) is what separates the wannabes from the dids.
[+] [-] zeeshanm|9 years ago|reply
Your goal as a founder is to maximize chances of __your__ success. Having the right founder-market fit goes a long way.
[+] [-] CodyReichert|9 years ago|reply
On the other hand, if you build something useful, and can start racking up subscriptions by doing some footwork (talking to users, giving out free accounts, etc), then you've got a much better chance.
[+] [-] woah|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balls187|9 years ago|reply
For an R&D based startup working on Fusion, that progress would be measured differently.
Many businesses have Key Performance Indicators (KPI's). Startups should be no different.
[+] [-] greendestiny|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adora|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sidnicious|9 years ago|reply
I have personal projects that I want to finish (not a startup), and the conferences I enjoy tend to feature people showing off their own projects. Whenever I‘m at one, I think, “I’d rather be on stage, sharing something I put months (or years) of love into, than be one of the 100-1000 people in the audience watching.”
Of course, going to a conference can be inspiring, or introduce me to people or ideas that’ll shape my future work, so they’re not all bad. I’m interested in how other HN folks approach this conflict.
Semi-related, I experienced something interesting at a hacking conference a few years ago. Mid-conference, feeling inspired, I hid in the volunteer lounge for almost a whole day and worked on a reverse engineering project that I’d been fighting to understand for over a year. I solved it! Being there, and aware of all of the people and activity around me, but actively ignoring it, gave me focus and motivation. That was fascinating, and I’ve considered doing the same thing again (or finding a really interesting conference and not buying a ticket, so that I could work while I know I’m missing it).
[+] [-] logicallee|9 years ago|reply
>One of the most conspicuous patterns we’ve seen among the thousand startups we’ve funded is that the most successful founders are always totally focused on their product and their users. To the point of being fanatical. The best founders don’t have time to get caught up in other things.
>Here’s a list of things that I see easily distract founders. These are like the startup equivalent of wolves in sheeps’ clothing.
[she includes 8 points, of which I quote 4 below - I am quoting selectively.]
> - “Grabbing coffee” with investors
> - Networking
> - Doing a “partnership,” thinking it will get you more users
> - Going to conferences
Now, I need help understnanding this. She has listed some of the items that separate people building startups in unfundable locations where there are 0 startups, and startups building in the Bay Area.
If you don't need to do these things, why did YC shut down it's Boston program and make everyone do it in the Bay Area?
If you don't need to do these things, why can't you build a startup from anywhere in the world as long as you speak good English and have no costs?
Aren't these things literally the things that make startups fundable, financiable, possible to grow into huge businesses?
I and anyone else on HN who has been in the Bay Area and in startup-dead locations knows the huge difference. She seemed to quote some of it under 'distractions'.
Can someone help me understand why they aren't, in fact, part of focus?
[+] [-] usmeteora|9 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong, it is isolating in general but after working for two startups, one bought out by a foreign company and another now has billions in funding, doing software analytics on the trading floor through summer internships in college, and going to a predominately male college for engineering, 70% males overall, and 99% male in my major, I can say I have a diversity of experience even within the tech field and also years of experience working at single companies before moving on, I can say a few things that I think echo what she is saying
1. Most of the people speaking the most about female controversey are not coders, or engineers or in the nitty gritty of tech. While I appreciate their empathy and willingness to latch onto a cause and speak for us, they often get it wrong, and recently have done so much so that they scare the MAJORITY of men to feeling uncomfortable talking about it. What do I mean? onto point #2
1a. Sorry, before I go to Point 2, another way journalists or people wanting to speak out on our behalf (female women in tech) get it wrong is by assuming we want to change the culture to be this outgoing, social fashion forward world. Actually, alot of us are introverted geeks and like doing the same thing other male engineers do. I definitely think wheather you were or are a cheerleader sorority girl who likes to bake and throw parties or an introverted star wars nerd and each one is an engineer, either should feel equally comfortable at a new tech company and not isolated by the culture, but anecdotally I happen to be an extreme introvert, and the excessive socializing and advice or notion that if we have an environment where we can all be super girly like omg together is the vibe I get from alot of female focused events in tech. It's actually overwhelming and makes me feel more out of place than not. Listen to us, not imposing your idea of how we might feel onto us. Get a good profile of what females are saying who are IN tech, and if there is a difference between that and the ones who are latching onto the idea of it or operating in auxiliary roles surrounding tech. These women are just as important, and are are still subject to sexism working around male dominated industries, but if you want more women IN tech, instead of talking about tech but not in it, listen to the women IN it, you might be surprised.
EXAMPLE
Here is one example where both genders are contributing to the problem but making it harder for women IN tech. my friend is a Biomed Engineer who prototyped and developed her hardware. Keeping her anonymous on here, but she went to a big tech conference in the bay area and was approached by three men asking if she was a "showgirl" at the conference as a starter to the conversation. Of all the things you could possibly say right? How offensive to a female engineer with over 30 pending patents running a multi million dollar company and two engineering degrees under her belt. Welp, those guys are in the wrong, but also why are there showgirls at tech conferences. because hot girls attract geeks to the boothe. But MEN hired these showgirls, and WOMEN are actually fufilling those roles. So both parties are at fault.
Who suffers? The people who suffer are the ACTUAL female engineers who would love to go to a conference and not have it be assumed they are there in an auxiliary tech role until proven otherwise.
once my friend described who she was, both of the guys felt really bad, even embarassed and apologized profusely. They ended up being cool guys she is still friends with. they learned a lesson, but they have also been heavily conditioned by males and females who are both willing particpants in establishing a stereotype that is demeaning to women actually in tech.
2. Most men I've met and worked with in tech are absolutely fine. It is that in general outlier cases good and back stick out in our heads. If there are 200 employees at a company and only 2 females in my department of 40, probably over a 6 months period the chances are I'm going to be made to feel uncomfortable whether intentionally or not by one person atleast. I'm not saying it's acceptable or ok, or that steps shouldn't be taken to fix it, I'm saying 19/20 guys I work with in a random sampling are just fine, and don't make being a girl a thing, and treat me just the same, or if anything are excited to see women in tech and go out of their way to make you feel comfortable. It's then in your discretion to stand on your own two feet and not take advantage of that, because some women do, which brings me to...
3. There are some women who abuse their minority status. I'm NOT saying women who have spoken out about being treated poorly are the ones who are abusive, or that they are lying. It is usually ones that have nothing to complain about and the situations are much more nuanced. I'm sorry people will get mad at me about this statement but I feel comfortable saying it as I've observed it and I work in tech and I'm not going to lie to remain politically correct. Both males and females are capable of abusing their position. Not all males do it, not all females do it. So hating men or making them terrified of saying the wrong thing if anything is just going to make you feel more isolated.
There are also women who still have queen B syndrome and like being the only female around, and actively bully other women. This is so obnoxious. However, in my varied experience in tech, I can say one key indicator of a real female engineer, is that most of us would LOVE a female friend because we don't have many. Females that view male dominated workplaces as a fun new playground because of all the men, are constantly having coworker boyfriends, and view other women as competition, instead of empathizing with them, have probably not experienced the long term years of being in college engineering classes and doing their homework and not having female friends, and the desire to be treated as an equal instead of put on a pedastool or having to prove themselves. Real females doing real work in tech know what it's like to be isolated, and when we get together as females, we are all super super grateful for it, and we all feel uncomfortable going to glitzy girl focused events where we are bombarded by girls not in tech telling us how things should be. This has been my experience.
4. While some of us can't choose who we work for and with, if you are a female IN Tech, not marketing or some soft auxiliary department of a developed company, but you code or prototype electronics or hardware or engineer something, then you are valuable enough that you can move onto thousands of other companies if you don't find one with a culture that fits your comfort zone. Not just because you are a talented brilliant ambitious female, but because you are a talented brilliant ambitious engineer, and they are in great need in any gender, but being a female is always a great added diversity and step into equality for EVERYONE, not just females. AGAIN, it's not ok women should ever have to feel uncomfortable but we live in the real world and not everything is fair, not just for women, but for alot of situations and people in general.
CLOSING COMMENTS
In life in general, forget being a women or startups, a good rule of thumb, and one I took way too long to learn myself in my personal and professional life, if you don't like how you are being treated, then start hanging around different people.
I have plenty of male engineer friends who are low key, we geek out together, order pizza, watch tv, code, switch knowledge, music and talk about latest tech stuff, and its totally chill. What and who makes you feel comfortable but also gets you excited about learning and obtaining your goals? hang around them and your work life and personal life will be better. It's the same as if you want to stop drinking but your friends only method or venue for socializing is drinking, well it's not going to be super fun for you, so hang out with people who gel with your same lifestyle.
I definitely have my frustrations, but my successes and friends male and female far outweigh my desire to spend most of my time feeling negatively. This is coming from a girl who has been through some troubling times with male coworkers. It's not that is hasnt been harder, its just that I have so many things I want to do, I'd rather "show them" by being successful and acheiving my goals than fighting a legal battle. I am glad some women have chosen the legal path, but I actually would be upset if someone chastized me for not spending all my time in court. There are lots of way to bring tech forward with everyone, not just articles and legal battles. Sometimes, just being a good role model, the girl you wish you had to hang with 5 years ago when you had no female friends, goes alot farther in the world of tech females who actually need a friend, not just people reading the hottest news. Any new girl I meet in my company or department or otherwise who is an engineer or software developer, I atleast attempt to make friends and go out to lunch or a grab a drink with them , let them know I'm available to chat or otherwise, and every time I've been endlessly thanked saying I'm the only female friend they have. Well, now I have like 5 awesome female engineer friends and we all are friends as a group now, it's not much, its not enough, but its more than we ever had and it's all we have time for, because you know, we are also coding, starting companies and doing all the same things males do so we are not over here just being social butterflies. As cliche as it sounds, and something I never would have believed about myself years ago when I was feeling isolated, is that I focused on being the change I wanted to see in the world, and the role model I wish I had when I was fresh out of college, instead of fighting legal battles. Sometimes thats the right thing to do, sometimes my path is a good one too, and I don't regret it.
I've had to abandoned some groups, and in one case a company because I was around egotistical chovenistic males who challenged me on everything and even worse it was all subconscious sexism so it was not even easy to address. no its not ok, but I decided to instead of fighting for it for years and years, to move onto something better for me, and now I can spend the majority of my time coding and working on my goals, instead of fighting against people. It was the best decision I've ever made, I'm able to be alot more technically advanced, and by holding my head high and deciding I could do better, instead of tearing other people down.
Atleast three of those guys have come to me years later to apologize (with no prodding on my part), tell me I was a good player on the team, and I know from females who joined that same team later, they are treated very well. Those guys straightened up because sometimes the most powerful thing you can do, is know you deserve better, walk away and discover a place that fosters your worth. If you have real tech skills, this will always be an option for you as a woman, or a man. It's ok to stand up and "fight" and it all depends on your situation. I should have had more support in mine, but honestly I think I made the right choice by just moving onto something better.
FINAL NOTE
She is right, don't be scared. JUST DO IT. If you can actually code or prototype, then do it. Perform, let your product speak for itself and noone can argue with you. That is the cool thing about coding or being an engineer, if it works and people are paying for it, who cares if youre a girl, or a transgender, or have purple hair, wear tennis shoes to work, or if you are a hippopotamus. It's not going to be easy, it's going to be WORTH it, and there may be some extra barriers, but how rewarding for you to be a trailblazer.
I never thought of myself that way until people started calling me a trailblazer or a "badass" years out of college and now that I think about it, hey yeh, I've been through some pretty hard times but damn this is cool, minority or not, I love what I do and nothing is going to stop me. In fact, I had no idea when I first went into this that anyone would want to stop me, or feel threatened by me, and honestly, that is the hard part.
THE HARD PART
The hard part is realizing that some people are actually not supportive of you, subconsciously or not, alot of the anger on your part comes from the confusion surrounding the challenge of understanding this concept, because if youre an awesome person who doesnt need to tear other people down to have success, this isn't going to be intuitive for you to understand other people are actually that lame. Once you realize yes these warped people in self denial who project their own insecurities onto you DO exist, and probably always will in some form or fashion, then you can be like "oh, no I'm better than that sorry". Sometimes again, legal is a good way, sometimes not.
Just do you and find that confidence. if you don't have it, dig deeper, if youre reading this youre already way ahead of the game and have nothing to feel insecure about. Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond and how you let it effect your opinion of yourself or your subconscious belief about your capabilities.
Have that attitude, and support other girls around you, focus on your work and not people, and youll be amazed. In the words of Dr. Suess "oh the places youll go.."
[+] [-] mklim|9 years ago|reply
I'm just one more anecdote and a bit of a living edge case, but this has been painfully true for me as well. I deliberately avoid women in tech events/blogs/etc now because of how uncomfortable they tend to make me. Hearing "tech" talks about how it's important for women to get hired because we're just like, so in touch with our feelings and therefore we make great UX--incredibly demoralizing and othering for me.
[+] [-] balls187|9 years ago|reply
> But MEN hired these showgirls, and WOMEN are actually fufilling [sic] those roles. So both parties are at fault.
There was a pretty good article written by a woman who was hired as a dancer to attend a convention who was lectured by one of the female attendees. Her point was that she had a right to make a living too, and it's just as destructive to bash a woman who works for a conference floor, as it is to assume a woman who attends a conference is there as a "showgirl."
Not everyone can be an engineer, and not all jobs make ends-meet, so throwing women who are working tradeshows under the bus is just another form of sexism.
edit to add:
https://makirollschopshop.com/2016/03/21/a-dancers-thoughts-...
[+] [-] lotharbot|9 years ago|reply
My wife normally works remotely, but meets with her team in person twice a year. Last time, at the first whole-team dinner, she announced she was pregnant... and the other women on the team fawned and fussed over her the rest of the week. Which was super duper uncomfortable for her, as one of the most extreme introverts I know.
She's not interested in being "girly". She's interested in being who she is -- technical, brilliant, competitive, powerful, and into My Little Ponies because it's a great show, not because it's girly.
[+] [-] 20years|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drumdance|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|9 years ago|reply
Do you have links to any write-ups that you find more accurate?
[+] [-] zxcvvcxz|9 years ago|reply
I read this phrase a few times. I'm genuinely curious - and didn't really see it in the article - what are the reasons for which Jessica is referring?
Edit - downvoted for asking a genuine question...? Did it ever occur to anyone that I may be asking to see how I could help, seeing as I'm involved with a few startups?
[+] [-] sachinag|9 years ago|reply
That's literally off the top of my head from things I've literally seen first hand.
Can we stop pretending the real world isn't full of douchebags?
[+] [-] kayhi|9 years ago|reply
The best metric to choose is good old fashioned profit.
I appreciate that growth can be hindered by making a profit, but isn't that what matters in the end? Amazon, Twitter, Box and many other public tech companies went public without turning a profit so it seems I'm wrong.
[+] [-] aianus|9 years ago|reply
No, the best metric to choose is 'discounted future profits'. That frequently means the best strategy is 'lose millions now to make billions later'.
[+] [-] kross|9 years ago|reply
I agree that ultimately, the only measure is profit for a company you are building to operate. The only caveat being that in the early stages, it may require more investment, and you don't want to sacrifice good investment to higher profit when it could mean the ultimate decline of the company (and profit). This is why there could be a period of time where the revenue measure is simplest and meaningful.
With regard to at least Amazon, I think they are focused on the long game and profitability. Twitter and others I don't follow, but I would agree that from the outside, many seem not to focus on building sustainable, profitable business without continued funding or expectation of being sold.
[+] [-] verganileonardo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingnothing|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tmaly|9 years ago|reply
I love how Pat Flynn talked about building a market map in his recent book Will It Fly. I think this method is very helpful in finding out if what your doing is something people want.
Derek Sivers of CDBaby has this same mindset. He has always worked off the pull method rather than the push method for what he creates.
Ash Maurya in his book running lean gives you a nice script for customer development interviews. I have tried this with a previous startup idea, and they saved me from going down the road of working on something people did not want. They are probably a bit more involved than Pat's method, but it is something else to consider.
[+] [-] EmbeddedHook|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmike|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poof131|9 years ago|reply