161–170 of 186 posts
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Ahem... Have you heard of Facebook? Or GMail? Or Hotmail? These are money-losing businesses. As we speak. Real life is much more complicated.
Those are all examples of outliers, not real life.
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Startups often live on the cusp of 'other people think we should quit but we're not going to!' I appreciated these sorts of posts because they are illustrative. The only thing to be bothered by is if you don't find anything to learn from the experience.
I feel like this is a point that is often lost. It's why being an entrepreneur is such a huge risk. You have to be stubborn enough to succeed in a world where the majority of people will tell you you're going to fail, you have to ignore all that. Often times however, you do fail.
Thank you for sharing your experience but to me, the whole post is about how you didn't really listen at all and built something that people didn't want, which ended up failing, yet you still learned a ton . I bet you learned something but did this experience really teach you a LOT? You don't mention any other learning experience in this post (you say you'll write more later) but somehow in the end, this failure was…
I hear what you are saying. I have tons of pages of lessons I learned that I will touch on in later posts. I tried to summarize the whole experience in to one page. My experiences took me to business meeting after business meeting, and opened my eyes to the entire tech / music startup scene. The main lesson I learned was not listening to feedback early on, but I also have insight on co-founder issues, legal issues, b…
"we felt like we had already gone too far to quit" -- the bane of many a startup that should just pack it up / pivot / rethink things the moment this thought crosses their minds. If you're already thinking you've gone too far, you've gone too far.
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So then... is Kickstarter the only true way to validate a startup idea? You throw up a cool pitch with some videos and vague promises, and watch the cash roll in. If the cash does indeed roll in, then it's a good idea! Then you get to work, and hope no one remembers in 6 months that you promised to deliver them some amazing gifts. :-)
PPC + Landing page works wonders. Avoid the confirmation bias of your peers, and target people actively looking for your idea. Build a fake checkout that collects no data, and thank your 'paying' users for signing up to be notified when X goes on sale. (You should also probably tell them that no financial information was actually stored.)
Much better to have PPC + landing page and a "tell me when this is available" signup.
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So, I guess I'll be the wet blanket here. It's pretty clear to me reading this that this person and their partner were nowhere near ready to found a startup. It highlighted the potential benefits for some people of getting a corporate(ish) job, learning about the business world, and learning the trade a little more before trying to starting a company. It's like the demotivator for "Mistakes", this is probably best as…
So what are you suggesting people do? Go get a "corporate-ish" job first? Personally, I agree with the sentiment of others: no one is "ready" you just have to try. Going the corporate route first has a high chance of getting you addicted to a steady income. Once that happens you'll probably never be able to do a startup because you can't take the salary hit.
So my point is this: if someone is not a rockstar and they don't already have these skills, they can learn a huge amount by joining small companies in their C or D rounds (ie, corporate-ish) and practice those skills by applying them in a structure where it's likely they have more experience coworkers to learn from. Then they can found a startup when they have the tools and an idea they're passionate about.
If a person can "get addicted to a steady income" then their financial planning sucks or they aren't committed enough. Better off they don't bother and waste time and capital that could go to people that give a damn.
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The thing is, you cant really ask them for money too early or you'll be hearing NO too often for the wrong reasons... What you should be trying to find out is: 1. if they currently spend their money somewhere else to solve their problem 2. if your product is so much better at solving the problem, that they will want to switch.
Yes you can, you can put up a page that describes the thing, and pretend it exists, and try to get someone to click the "let me put my credit card # in already!" button. One click, a single click will not destroy you brand. And OP would've realized that no matter even with their best shot they couldn't get 10 clicks. 10 disappointed non-customers won't destroy your brand.
As for the advice of getting clicks, strongly product dependent.
Imagine you are a PaaS, say Heroku. It'd be a bit hard to adequately market such a product without convincing docs and people actually playing around with it. That is.. building the product.
And even if you could get some CC conversions, it still wouldn't validate the product because so much of the stick/not stick with it will come down to user experience. Which for a pretty technical product is a bit of an unknown.
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PPC + Landing page works wonders. Avoid the confirmation bias of your peers, and target people actively looking for your idea. Build a fake checkout that collects no data, and thank your 'paying' users for signing up to be notified when X goes on sale. (You should also probably tell them that no financial information was actually stored.)
This is the worst advice I've ever seen on HN. Much better to have PPC + landing page and a "tell me when this is available" signup.