Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

My 2 cents.

Research before you build anything. If there’s no need for it, don’t build it.

Choose your business partners wisely. Don’t fall into the trap of working with smart assholes, if someone is an asshole - no matter how smart. The asshole-ness will take over no matter what. (That’s just one side of it, many other things to watch for).

Build trust, it takes time and effort to get this one right.

Put your name on your work. One of pg’s essays also mentions how putting your name on your work let’s society reward you. I’ve seen it happen in front of my eyes. The product with a UI that looks bootstrapped together is like magic for your customers. No matter how basic or “ugly” your think your product might be, stand beside it like it’s your first born.

Customer acquisition funnels are multiplicative (E.g. Ad -> Landing page -> Signup -> Trial -> Actual product usage -> Purchase). Double any factor along the way, and the final output doubles. But it also means that if any factor along the way is 0, you get nothing out in the end. That can be incredibly demotivating when you're first starting out, because you don't get any payoff (or money to pay yourself or employees with) until you've made every factor non-zero. It also means that as long as any factor is zero, attempting to optimize any factors downstream from that is basically done in the blind (i.e. improving the product when you still don't have anyone even getting to your landing page).

It's ambiguous, and not that clear-cut.

Expressions like "A 20% increase in sales" are almost never used to describe an 20% increase in the sales department's headcount or budget. Most people would interpret that as a 20% increase in revenue from sales.

"Cost of Sales (COS)" in finance refers to the cost of making a sale, including all the costs required to produce the good or service sold, not just the compensation and other expenses associated with a sales department.

"Sales" as a noun does often refer to teh sales department, but there are times when it absolutely unambiguously means that, times when it almost never is interpreted as that, and times when it could go either way and a word like "revenue" would be clearer, but that doesn't make using the word" sales" to refer to revenue wrong.

Nailed it.

Focusing on sales to solve internal problems is like focusing on work to solve internal problems.

It can work to an extent, but sometimes you need to solve the internal problem before you can get the results you need.

So it's a feedback loop that leads to circular thinking. The problem is when we try to blame the external side of the feedback loop, to avoid seeing that our internal side is the problem.

So in the comment chain we have -

The original comment which said "more sales"; I've never heard someone in business refer to salespersons with the cutesy "sales" so I don't think it's reasonable to think "more sales" refers to people, and if they meant a larger department they would have said "larger department", not "more (department)".

The comment below that also says "sales fixes everything", which, again, same logic as the original (and has the same author as two below where they clearly say "we're talking sales of things").

The comment below that is the only one clearly confusing sales people/department, with sales of things, "I don't think you can solve it with more sales people".

The comment you're directly responding to said "We're not talking about sales people or the department, we're talking about actual sales of things".

And you're saying someone, other than the person being corrected, 'clearly' meant the department or role? Nah.