dereking's comments

wow amazing story, thanks for all the detail. Very enjoyable to read. Quick question, whats most influential book you read? (in terms of decisions or directions you took with CloudFlare)

Early stage?

Seconded

Sorry to hear that man, I hope things will pickup for you mate.

Thanks buddy great advice!

How did you go about gathering customers? Also, what are the 3 main lessons you learned from the other failed startups?

what type of startup is it? SaaS?

How big is your team?

What stage are you in? early days?

tru dat :)

You touched on another opened wound - "falling in love with the idea over time"

For me I experienced the opposite. A while back we were working on and idea which we believed to have a lot of potential and opportunities to do something of actual positive impact in society.

Long story short, as time went on, I personally started feeling like it was not that great of an idea, like if it would be awesome someone would have done it by now, etc. For other circumstances the team drifted apart geographically and the startup slowly reached development stagnation.

Not that long after, 2-3 very similar ideas emerged in the market - one of them from a startup's partnership with PayPal.

Needless to say, I both felt sad and happy. The first is pretty self explanatory, while the second felt like a nice validation pat on the back.

But I digress...

Thanks for the comment, really insightful.

Good point - my same process of thought https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9080740

I do very much agree with "you are less likely to understand the problem". That being said however, the contrary also appears true - I doubt the founders of Uber knew much about the taxi industry for example, but yes, they experienced the problem.

"... or knowledge of any secrets"

Did you read Zero to One? :)

"you may be less likely to believe in your idea when times get tough, because it is not deeply rooted in your experiences."

This is by far the point that resonates most with me from all the comments. Fair dos - point taken.

Very true, I have always had the same perception maybe even treated it as an undisputed cliché in every startup pitch.

But as time goes on, I seem to be getting more cynical to the perception and start believing a lot of the ideas are just more successful because of the 'market analysis' done before hand (with the exception of trend-makers, for example AirBnB)

Look at Blippar for instance, the startup that triggered this realization when I heard about it.

Augmented Reality has existed for quite some time, there have been countless applications, from real estate to navigation, yet many of similar start-ups have faded as time went on, but they on the other hand have remained due to targeting a cash rich market (Advertising) even though it solves no problem.

I know the above statement is quite simplistic, and surely it does not make the Blippar team justice for all the effort, strategies, etc that they employed. However, the idea of (what I perceive to be artificial) and yet has been so successful in such a short period of time is a bit of an eye opener.

> Both are very likely to fail

Applies if the execution and luck of the founders is rather poor - something that will normally be true in all cases.

My question focuses on the likelihood of success based solely on the method of idea acquisition.