Wow. Sounds grandiose but this is an epic piece of writing by one of the smartest guys in the field.
Required reading.
Startup Playbook
41–50 of 243 posts
Re: Startup Playbook
#42My impression is that anything related to YCombinator gets huge upvote bias.
Re: Startup Playbook
#43> Startups are the point in your life when tricks stop working. Awesome thesis, hidden in the middle of the text. In some ways, this is a great single sentence answer to the question, "What is a startup, really?"
http://www.amazon.com/Persecution-Art-Writing-Leo-Strauss/dp...
Ha, it's amazing to see a Leo Strauss reference in a HN thread! I majored in Political Theory at Michigan State, and the department was full of Straussians. Worlds colliding.
Re: Startup Playbook
#44I wish there was a similar level and quality of resources for what I think are called lifestyle businesses. By that, I mean product-based businesses with at most a few million in revenue, a 5ish person team, a solid sustainable market position, and no desire to revolutionize any unicorns. I know a lot of people attempting this and they mostly seem to be flying under the radar, or at least have nowhere near the cachet…
The Basecamp (née 37Signals) folks have been beating this drum for quite some time. DHH posted "Reconsider" to their blog today, actually; it's an entertaining read, if nothing else: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider
Here in Seattle, there's a great community of small software businesses with meaningful profits and impact. We have ties to the broader Seattle startup and technology community, without being a proper subset.
I don't see it as an either-or proposition. Right funding for the right business, as it were.
Re: Startup Playbook
#45"""
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Any mirrors?
Re: Startup Playbook
#46I wish there was a similar level and quality of resources for what I think are called lifestyle businesses. By that, I mean product-based businesses with at most a few million in revenue, a 5ish person team, a solid sustainable market position, and no desire to revolutionize any unicorns. I know a lot of people attempting this and they mostly seem to be flying under the radar, or at least have nowhere near the cachet…
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Re: Startup Playbook
#47I have a really hard time buying a lot of this about how novelty and monopoly are keys to a successful company. If you look at the really successful startups, especially unicorns, almost none of them are actually monopolies or new ideas. The vast, vast majority are old products done right, and almost all of them have very substantial competition. This attitude is, in fact, encompassed in the near footnote-like sectio…
Novel does not mean no competition--there's always competition, even for breakthrough technologies. Even the telephone had to compete with telegraphs or snail mail. The novelty comes in the way an existing need is met. From your list, Uber competes against taxis to transport people short distances. Airbnb competes against hotels to provide short term housing to travelers. Dropbox competed against flash drive to transfer data between machines. These companies have a novel approach to enter and thrive in a competitive market.
A monopoly simply has to have significant influence on supply of a good. In the UK that can be as low as a 30% market share. Qualify a market enough and any company can be a monopoly (I'm sure there's some geography where Lyft or good ol taxis represent a monopoly), so it's important to determine the size and importance of a market (a monopoly over food in a small town is still problematic). So while I cannot say these companies are monopolies--we have the Department of Justice for that--many companies on your list would make a compelling case, were they to abuse their market power.
Re: Startup Playbook
#48""" Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later. """ Any mirrors?
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Re: Startup Playbook
#49I wish there was a similar level and quality of resources for what I think are called lifestyle businesses. By that, I mean product-based businesses with at most a few million in revenue, a 5ish person team, a solid sustainable market position, and no desire to revolutionize any unicorns. I know a lot of people attempting this and they mostly seem to be flying under the radar, or at least have nowhere near the cachet…
By that, I mean product-based businesses with at most a few million in revenue, a 5ish person team, a solid sustainable market position, and no desire to revolutionize any unicorns. I believe this used to just be called "a small business". Not a terribly new idea, but being rediscovered perhaps by tech people?
A small business is fundamentally different from lifestyle tech business or a bootstrap. There could be hundreds and thousands of small businesses, say in a certain FMCG market in different local ares. A tech market with hundreds or thousands product businesses catering to a same target audience, probably, doesn't exist at all. Product companies tend to either grow or whither. Centralization is the norm.
Building a lifestyle business mostly rules out services as most desired lifestyle business model is some sort of passive income scheme. Content oriented monetization models are being slowly, but surely killed by ad blockers. An innovative product tailored to the needs of a small, well defined audience seems to be a best bet for a lifestyle business and that's very different from a classical SME.
Re: Startup Playbook
#50""" Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later. """ Any mirrors?
here is a link to the google cache.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:d0Df-gF...