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How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?

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Re: How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?

#31
post #22

That seemed awefully smug and discouraging to me. I've been studying up on other people's successes and failures, and it seems there's no simple pattern that fits all. "You are asserting that, despite the presence of 7 billion other people on the planet, ... you have come up with an idea, a business, a company that none of those other wonderful human beings have thought to invent yet." Tell that to the Chinese immigr…

Hi Phu -- the topic is addressed to internet entrepreneurs, not hard-working small business people. I agree with you. M

Competition != death.

Plenty of companies had the same basic idea as an existing company and still made it big. Sometimes execution really is the most important part ex: Dropbox.

Re: How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?

#32
If you want to know if you're succeeding or failing, you should know what the metrics of success look like for your product. Is it number of users? Amount of revenue? Revenue per user?

How do you measure against those goals?

If you know what success is supposed to look like for you, then it should be easy to tell if you're failing or succeeding.

"Released a product" isn't a metric for success. If you haven't released you can't start measuring.

Re: How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?

#33
"You are asserting that, despite the presence of 7 billion other people on the planet, and a US economy that produces $14 trillion in goods and services each year, and over 100 mm white collar workers in our country, that you, little old you, have come up with an idea, a business, a company that none of those other wonderful human beings have thought to invent yet."

Not really. Most entrepreneurial ventures are not based around ideas that nobody else has done yet. They usually involve a known business model or idea done better, in a different place, or at a more opportune time.

Re: How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?

#35
The worst part about telling someone your new idea is "It's been done already". Anytime someone says that you know to just stop talking to them and walk away. Burger place? It's been done already! Tech blog? Been done already! I have seen more startups using existing ideas become successful than original ideas.

Re: How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?

#36
post #27
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying principle is that you have to understand and control the factors affecting your startup's success. If you're not doing so in a meaningful way, you're exposing yourself to large / unknown risk factors, where "large" means "very likely to lead to your failure". Not having launched the product (esp. in the consumer market) as early as possible is definitely one such factor.

I agree with what you're saying, but I think the original post went much further. Even with respect to what you're saying I think the paradox is that if you discover that people don't like the product you rushed out the door, it might be because you rushed it out the door. And the lessons you learn from customers saying "it doesn't look that valuable" may or may not outweigh the effort it took to launch quickly. Sort…

The original post went much further because that's the message the first-time internet entrepreneurs need. There's a tendency among experienced businesspeople doing their first startup to look to their experience in successful companies and try to analyze that success and bring some of those things to the new company.

The problem is that successful companies have layers upon layers of processes and refinements, all of which (in a healthy company) play some role in their ongoing success. But the marginal benefit of 99.99% of these things is irrelevant to a startup, and the assets that an (internet) startup has to protect are nil at the beginning.

This is one of the reasons very young people are often successful despite inexperience; they can focus on building a compelling product—something they've known very intimately for their whole lives growing up with the internet and mobile phones—rather than the trappings of "business".

To get back to your point:

> if you discover that people don't like the product you rushed out the door, it might be because you rushed it out the door.

If you built the wrong product up front, then it's better to learn that by getting real feedback, rather than laboring on a false premise in secret. I think stealth mode has pretty much been debunked by now. The bottom line is that you can launch a shitty product, and it doesn't matter because know one fucking cares. You may have all these grandiose dreams, but getting attention and traction is a huge ongoing uphill muddy slog. If you have a seed of a good idea, but it's very poorly implemented, at least you will pick up a few very early adopters, and they will be the ones providing the most valuable feedback to make the next refinement and layer on the next batch of slightly-less-early adopters.

Re: How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?

#37
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Phu -- the topic is addressed to internet entrepreneurs, not hard-working small business people. I agree with you. M

Marc, he law of the land here on Hacker News is not to sign your messages. Cheers!

Got it!

x

Re: How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?

#38
post #8

I think that in the beginning you really have to redefine success as: "Am I Making Progress?" After lots and lots of progress and zero results, then you are probably on the verge of failure.

No, no, a hundred times no. "Am I Making Progress?" is the worst question you can ask yourself. It results in answers like: "I've decided on which web framework to use, so yes." "My tests now have 100% code coverage, so yes." "I added a new feature that I think may or may not help 1% of my hypothetical customer base, so yes." As someone who hasn't launched yet, it's easy to wrap yourself in the security blanket of "p…

progress can be further subdivided into 2 distinct types:

- product development progress

- market/customer development progress

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