51–60 of 380 posts
Ouch, number 2 employee at Pinterest - a $10 billion company that’s about to go public this year. He probably would have been worth an easy 100-200 million.
Pinterest is a malignant tumor on the face of the Web that exists to trick people who are trying to search for images. Being rich off that would be worse that toiling in obscurity.
Ouch, number 2 employee at Pinterest - a $10 billion company that’s about to go public this year. He probably would have been worth an easy 100-200 million.
Pinterest is a malignant tumor on the face of the Web that exists to trick people who are trying to search for images. Being rich off that would be worse that toiling in obscurity.
Hey, #1 on Hacker News! I don't think that's happened since...I launched Gumroad back in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 Thanks HN for being a part of my journey!
Really love this post. My favorite line is: > Every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag. I think that's pretty insightful. 20% growth is great for a normal business, of course; for a VC-backed startup it can show some warning signs about future hard decisions you might have to face. I think there's certainly lots of discussion that has been had — and should be had — about "should I or shouldn't…
Actually 20% per year would be great for most businesses, which just shows what an outlier VC backed businesses have become.
Really love this post. My favorite line is: > Every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag. I think that's pretty insightful. 20% growth is great for a normal business, of course; for a VC-backed startup it can show some warning signs about future hard decisions you might have to face. I think there's certainly lots of discussion that has been had — and should be had — about "should I or shouldn't…
Then:
> For the type of business we were trying to build, every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag.
According to what metric? This isn't meant to be snarky, but that type of growth rounds out to about 900% over the course of a year. Even if it meant that they'd grow 20% in the first month and had profits plateau immediately (i.e. 20% -> 16% -> 14% -> 12.5%), that's still 240% growth over the first year. What kind of business expects 900% to be the minimum growth over the first year?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, I was braced for more failed-but-really-succeeded porn. This is a great read, and clearly from the heart.
> was braced for more failed-but-really-succeeded porn. Isn't that what this is though? Sure he failed to build a billion dollar business, but his business is still way more successful than most. Lots of people would certainly kill to attain this level of failure. I certainly recognise failure is a very personal thing, but from the outside looking in this looks like a success overall, even though I'm sure it was comp…
Hey, #1 on Hacker News! I don't think that's happened since...I launched Gumroad back in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 Thanks HN for being a part of my journey!
Working on things you enjoy, making a positive impact on people's lives, and raising a new generation to carry on where you left off, that is success.
Stay focused there and you might accidentally accumulate so much wealth you have to work at putting it to use helping people like Bill does!
Hey, #1 on Hacker News! I don't think that's happened since...I launched Gumroad back in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 Thanks HN for being a part of my journey!
I hadn't heard of Gumroad before -- it actually looks like a really good product, and one that I would have occasion to recommend to people. To what do you attribute the challenges? Were you building a product there wasn't a market for, what you were delivering wasn't what people wanted? Or, a marketting failure, inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs? Or, what…
Just from visiting the landing page for gumroad.com, I wasn't clear about what the company did. Some questions that came to my mind:
By e-commerce, is it like shopify or like stripe? By audience-building software, is that SEO, marketing, or analytics?
Just writing the feedback I like to get from others. The features page answered most of my questions in general(I think its an online store platform for digital goods?).
Seems to me like the author's failure taught them a valuable lesson about what they actually valued vs. what they thought they valued.
I would like to see more tech companies like Gumroad; that is companies whose focus is not on IPO and quick aquisition, but instead, on the quality of their product/service and the prosperity of the customers/users.
I am not sure whether he's really serious or this is a long false modesty article about himself