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Before You Grow

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Before You Grow

#91

Post by tjholowaychuk »

coffeemug wrote: post #88
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

> don't get funding from clueless VCs Usually if people put money down and there is an entire industry around it, the collective mindset of that industry is close to optimal. They might be wrong on a couple of important issues. They also might be very wrong, but they're still close to optimal by definition because nobody's doing it better. TL;DR: calling entire world-class industries clueless implies naiveté.

Removed my "clueless" generalization. It's anecdotal, but most that I've encountered (relating to SaaS products) don't have much of a technical background at all, just throwing money at buzzwords, meanwhile they think critical services such as logging aren't worth going after, just because it's not trendy. I'm sure it varies from industry to industry.

Re: Before You Grow

#92

Post by nostrademons »

euph0ria wrote: post #87
nostrademons wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "unwilling to engage in conversation, if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why" is your feedback. Dirty secret that startup methodologies usually doesn't tell you: it's mostly trial and error. You observe people, you form a hypothesis about what they want, you put something in front of them, and you see if they want it. If they don't, change something. It's not unusual to require dozens to hundr…

Yes, I understand that it is a tacit feedback, but it is so binary that it is hard to infer something from it besides we need to change. Iteration, it feels like a company could use the run rate iterating and never figure it out?

Most do. That's why most startups fail, after all.

The lesson to take from this is to get your iteration velocity up and your burn rate down. If you can, you also want to be extracting as much information as possible from the failures, so it's not entirely random, but even if you're brilliant and 100% paying attention there will still be a lot of them.

Re: Before You Grow

#93

Post by avelis »

trg2 wrote: post #50
silvaben wrote: post #22

I recently came across an app lets you measure NPS directly on your website - https://www.metriculator.com Seems really nice. I figured it might be useful for folks trying to run an NPS survey after reading Sam's recommendation.

Does a comprehensive list of all of these types of NPS-measuring tools exist?

A Quora post was the best I found so far. https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-online-tools-for-mea...

Re: Before You Grow

#94

Post by LoSboccacc »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

If an idea works but you don't scale it to some sort of monopoly using your tech advantage or lock in systems a competitor with VC money will eventually outprice you out of the market, get an unbreakable hold on the business whole then convert some aspect of it to premium to monetize the now huge user base.

Re: Before You Grow

#95

Post by [deleted] »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #94
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

If an idea works but you don't scale it to some sort of monopoly using your tech advantage or lock in systems a competitor with VC money will eventually outprice you out of the market, get an unbreakable hold on the business whole then convert some aspect of it to premium to monetize the now huge user base.

[deleted]

Re: Before You Grow

#96

Post by beat »

euph0ria wrote: post #87
nostrademons wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "unwilling to engage in conversation, if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why" is your feedback. Dirty secret that startup methodologies usually doesn't tell you: it's mostly trial and error. You observe people, you form a hypothesis about what they want, you put something in front of them, and you see if they want it. If they don't, change something. It's not unusual to require dozens to hundr…

Yes, I understand that it is a tacit feedback, but it is so binary that it is hard to infer something from it besides we need to change. Iteration, it feels like a company could use the run rate iterating and never figure it out?

Most companies actually do burn through the cash trying to figure it out, and fail.

Early on, it's nothing more than an educated guess. Part of the problem here is that if you're actually creating something new, rather than a refinement of an existing product, you're in uncharted territory. Think of Henry Ford's comment about the customers wanting faster horses. That's not what they want. That's just the limits of their imaginations and experience. Great founders should be creating something the customers desperately want and need but couldn't even imagine or articulate. Henry Ford's customers just wanted to get from one place to another, faster than they could at the time, more reliably, and affordably. They wanted faster horses. He gave them mass-production cars that were affordable and easy to maintain.

Re: Before You Grow

#97

Post by schwarrrtz »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #94
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

If an idea works but you don't scale it to some sort of monopoly using your tech advantage or lock in systems a competitor with VC money will eventually outprice you out of the market, get an unbreakable hold on the business whole then convert some aspect of it to premium to monetize the now huge user base.

This is not necessarily true. For example, your market may be too small / niche to attract venture backed companies but large enough to sustain your lifestyle business.

Edit: Foiled by my delay settings! Damn.

Re: Before You Grow

#98

Post by tjholowaychuk »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #94
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

If an idea works but you don't scale it to some sort of monopoly using your tech advantage or lock in systems a competitor with VC money will eventually outprice you out of the market, get an unbreakable hold on the business whole then convert some aspect of it to premium to monetize the now huge user base.

Depends on the product I suppose, if it's niche enough you may not have big competitors at all. I choose to entire a SaaS market that is already monopolized but I'm still paying my bills. That's definitely something to watch out for though, I think it's best to have many smaller products for redundancy, at least that's my plan.

Re: Before You Grow

#99

Post by vsloo »

A lot of this has to do with experience and whether or not you're trying to fulfill expectations (VCs, etc). You really don't know when a product will become loved no matter how much you iterate and it's also impossible to know for sure how long you need to "slog" it out. Some products become loved far earlier than others. The best thing to do as a founder is to drive at your vision hard as quickly as possible, acquire users to test multiple theories and gather feedback, and iterate when there are signs. Even then, not all iterations or pivots are created equal. There are many different ways to grow a business (many of which veer from traditional silicon valley values) and it's up to the founder to stick to his/her own values and to what makes sense at the time. I don't think there's a single founder out there who wants to build just a mediocre product. This is why product-market fit should be the primary focus for any growing business.

Re: Before You Grow

#100

Post by contras1970 »

logicallee wrote: post #25

Comment withdrawn. I've withdrawn this comment, but per site policy / encouragement I'm leaving my original comment below the lines. Pre-edit: --- I liked your comment but you won't believe how I felt about one part: >Iphone app companies do this one neat trick for this. I'm sorry, I just found it very distracting... like you use clickbait title interspersed in your writing. I tried to replicate the effect for you at…

Have an upvote, that cliche was very unpleasant.
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