Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
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Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
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Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
#2Nicely written. Although uber and Airbnb are big because of the big VC money that can afford the lawyers and engineers. Not a lot of places around the world where capital + talent is available for snowball ideas.
Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
#3Nicely written. Although uber and Airbnb are big because of the big VC money that can afford the lawyers and engineers. Not a lot of places around the world where capital + talent is available for snowball ideas.
That's one reason a lot of startups end up moving to Silicon Valley.
Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
#4This is somewhat interesting, but relies on the all too common tautological device of "hustle," a quasi-magical activity whose details are usually elided over.
Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company.
What makes a successful company? "Hustle." What is "hustle"? Why, it just means "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successful." It's a perfectly circular definition.
Proposal: always avoid the word "hustle." Instead, talk about specific actions and decisions that led to success in particular cases.
Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
#5This is somewhat interesting, but relies on the all too common tautological device of "hustle," a quasi-magical activity whose details are usually elided over. Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company. What makes a successful company? "Hustle." What is "hustle"? Why, it just means "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successf…
Maybe Hustle is like a heuristic or genetic search. Trying random things picked up from other companies and mutating them and trying again until certain things seem to work based on metrics. Then doing more of those things.
Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
#6As much as I hate to admit it, the author isn't wrong.
Ideas too big to feasibly execute in typical startup fashion (i.e. incremental funding rounds tied to key metrics) have a snowball's chance in hell of actually succeeding. It doesn't matter if it's the best idea in the world; the ability to adapt to and survive within the existing funding eco system ultimately has more utility because it moves the company forward.
Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
#7This is somewhat interesting, but relies on the all too common tautological device of "hustle," a quasi-magical activity whose details are usually elided over. Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company. What makes a successful company? "Hustle." What is "hustle"? Why, it just means "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successf…
OP here.
That is an excellent point and now you have essentially named the title one of one of my new blog posts: "What is Hustle?"
It especially rings true because something we've tried hard to do over the years on TechZing is unpack miracle functions exactly like this.
Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
#8This is somewhat interesting, but relies on the all too common tautological device of "hustle," a quasi-magical activity whose details are usually elided over. Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company. What makes a successful company? "Hustle." What is "hustle"? Why, it just means "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successf…
Interesting. I don't have a problem with it because I usually read it as early stage growth hacking that involves manual, tedious, and hard work: getting the first few users, converting the first few customers etc.
Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
#9This is somewhat interesting, but relies on the all too common tautological device of "hustle," a quasi-magical activity whose details are usually elided over. Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company. What makes a successful company? "Hustle." What is "hustle"? Why, it just means "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successf…
Interesting. I don't have a problem with it because I usually read it as early stage growth hacking that involves manual, tedious, and hard work: getting the first few users, converting the first few customers etc.
Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
#10Nicely written. Although uber and Airbnb are big because of the big VC money that can afford the lawyers and engineers. Not a lot of places around the world where capital + talent is available for snowball ideas.
I don't know about that... There are quite a few little snowball startups that started out as self funded that do pretty well.
I'm thinking about Buffer, Drip, Litmus, Basecamp to name a few.
Sure, some of them did raise money, but that was a long time after they were profitable.