Startups in 13 Sentences

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apaulgraham.com+%22most...

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apaulgraham.com+%22prob...

etc

I don't believe this sort of comment is helpful. For one thing, "X works" and "Y can work, too" are not two bits of advice which are in opposition to each other, and shouldn't be treated as such. (Even when X = "Startups should have multiple founders" and Y = "Actually, you can get by with one person if...")

For another thing, evaluating expertise by weight of incomparable circumstances is not logical. If it were, we'd all be taking advice from McDonalds on how to sell software, as the sum total of all customers of every startup company which has ever been mentioned on this site would not equal the number of cups of coffee McDonalds sold worldwide yesterday. Now there are many things to learn from McDonalds, but willy-nilly application of their ideas because they have mass on their side is a bad idea. (The sweet spot for pricing is below $5. Advertising is less about motivating people to buy in the near future than building your brand image for life. Literacy is a nice attribute to have in an employee but is not necessary if you exercise proper management.)

Those 3 are also quite related - while I still had cofounders, we'd kinda prop each other up during the low points, so we didn't get demoralized, so we didn't give up. But when my last remaining cofounder quit, I tried to keep it going for 2 months, but the emotional burden was far too much. I couldn't do it - if you can, good for you, but I think that there's a lot of truth in these rules.

Also - I think there's too much wiggle room in "Understand your users." I don't have it listed in either column for my startup, which tells me that we probably didn't, but most startups won't have the emotional distance to realize that. Even now, I'm not sure whether we did or not: since getting out to Silicon Valley, everyone I've told about my startup says "Oh, that's a cool idea, I wish you'd been able to finish it." Maybe we should've moved out west before quitting. ;-)

Quality is a vector, not a scalar. What's the average of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak? I don't think that's a meaningful question. But the vector sum of their skills was a startup with amazing technical and artistic skill, product focus, business aspirations, charisma, and salesmanship.

And I'd like to help you become ramen profitable, so let me demonstrate what I mean by putting on my Steve Jobs hat [1] and telling you a story.

I'm in the market for something like tarsnap, so i was very excited to hear about it, for the first time, in this random HN comment 23 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458793

...because the product sounds great. I may sign up any day now. But I distinctly remember that, after reading this enthusiastic blurb, I spent several minutes trying to figure out if tarsnap had any kind of decent security model. I remember this because I literally laughed out loud when I finally managed to figure out the answer, after clicking through more than one link and reading a few blog posts -- tarsnap was designed by a cryptographer! Indeed, now (but only now) I learn that it's even better than that: You're the FreeBSD Security Officer, which presumably involves a great deal of practical expertise in reviewing and fixing insecure software.

Why isn't this information on the tarsnap homepage, next to a "buy it now" button?

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[1] It's not nice to go all Steve Jobs on someone without being asked, so I'm deliberately toning down my Jobs impression. This is like a 2 on the Steve Jobs bluntness scale.

Because the tarsnap web site sucks. (Hey, you did ask!)

Until very recently the vast majority of people interested in tarsnap were people who knew who I was, had seen my work on FreeBSD, and read my blog -- so putting information about tarsnap onto my blog was only natural. Now tarsnap is starting to gain recognition as something beyond "that thing which Colin is doing", it's probably time to revisit where and how information about tarsnap is presented.