121–130 of 200 posts
"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…
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 su…
P.s. I haven't seen her talk yet.
Yeesh. #2 hits close to home. 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 th…
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 part…
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Read books. They often contain anecdotes like that.
I really enjoyed this one in particular: Founders at Work ( http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/d... ). Hey, look at that! It's by Jessica Livingston!
This said, it's a survey of largely succesful organisations - and focuses in the main on what people did right. This talk was about anti-patterns, that in many cases often led to unsuccessful startups (or at least put unnecessary bumps in the road).
I can completely empathize that it's hard to talk safely about other people's private failures, especially as an investor.
As an engineer, I agree. However, I follow Scott Adams blogging about Trump and I am starting to think different. Currently Trump is trying to sell something nobody wants (himself as president) and he seems to able to change people so they want him. If he really becomes president, I cannot ignore the fact that Adams predicted it over a year before the election.
I find this sad. It tells you something about humanity. Don't build something people need. Build what they want. Make it addictive. We either don't know what we need or if we know it, we still want something different.
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What about those that stuck with an idea and hit gold eventually at some point? What if failing fast is too fast and you don't give an idea enough time to grow? MVPs and failing fast is an idea that started in the past ~7 years, and it works for some people and not for others.
I didn't imply there weren't other ways to make it. But there are only a few ways to hedge as an individual dev. One of them is to shoot with a shotgun. It's more or less what incubators attempt to do, but spread out over times since each of us only has one brain to go around.
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That link is the weakest possible support. The previous poster is correct. Look elsewhere.
Incorrect, the weakest possible support would have been me just backing up the idea with my own words, which is not what happened. If you need further proof then that is your burden, not mine.
* http://grammarist.com/usage/learnings/
* http://www.johnsmurf.com/jargon.htm
* http://www.dailywritingtips.com/what-the-heck-are-learnings/
* http://customerthink.com/16_marketing_terms_to_ban_in_2011/
* http://valleywag.gawker.com/dear-dummies-learnings-is-not-a-...
* http://www.ragan.com/Main/Articles/9_completely_pointless_co...
Learnings is a plural version of a singular noun that does not exist. And there's already a perfectly good word you can use to get at what it attempts to communicate, namely lessons. (You can even call them lessons learned if you absolutely must shoehorn the idea of learning in there.)
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Whenever someone advises "don't do this", it's usually pretty easy to come up with valid reason to do this. Fine. The lesson here is either avoid the sinkhole of conferences/events. Or, if you are so inclined to go, make sure you understand that unless you are extremely focused and efficient, it is likely to be a waste of time for you.
Fair enough. It's also very easy for people to treat what she says as gospel and go "I must not go to a conventions because this very knowledgeable person who has much more experience than I do said they're not useful. So therefore they must not be useful." It goes both ways.
This is basically true for every field ever. Generally recommended practices are most important for beginners. Once you're experienced you can start recognizing when it isn't applicable. Beginners oftentimes aren't experienced enough to apply nuanced advice, and nuanced advice oftentimes is masqueraded as general, rather than nuanced, advice.
Somewhere inbetween people might get lost but I feel like approach this gets the majority of people on the right track.