71–80 of 175 posts
I am reading thru this and it is a good, recommended read however I am getting slightly annoyed with academic attitude of the author. Like batman in the cartoon I want to slap him but not for "sloppy market research". But for using the term "market research" at all. (This is essientially the first and maybe the second point reiterated.) Suppose you were a cook with your own restaurant. How do you figure out what work…
Post mordems like this make me sad. Not for the founder's bank account per se, but for the fact that he has all the wrong takeaways from his startup experience. You started off well. You did the market research. Great. You've clearly gotten people interested in the service. Even better. You demonstrated in your post that a clear-headed approach was taken and you objectively determined people would want your product.…
All the marketing in the world won't make any lasting difference if the product doesn't create value for customers. This product didn't.
> I really would have needed a critic who said: > “Look, you have the following problems: > 1. Show me your market research. > 2. You do realize there’s no comprehensive online supermarket in Sweden, right? > 3. What are your assumptions about the customer’s problem? Yeah, after trying, I've found it's very difficult to get people to listen to this kind of advice and give it the weight it deserves. I feel like most w…
For "would-be entrepreneurs", can we substitute "people"? Is it the case that all people are either already self-critical, or immune to external criticism? That strikes me as a pattern i see a lot.
So when you bring up all this other stuff, you're messing with their flow, breaking them out of their comfort zone, killing their buzz. You become that weird guy who's always telling them no, the more you try to impress upon them the need to critically analyze what they're trying to do, and to keep doing it as time goes on and they make limited progress.
There is that rare breed of "person", as you want to put it, that can sustain a critical dialogue about themselves, but these people won't need you to do it for them.
I am reading thru this and it is a good, recommended read however I am getting slightly annoyed with academic attitude of the author. Like batman in the cartoon I want to slap him but not for "sloppy market research". But for using the term "market research" at all. (This is essientially the first and maybe the second point reiterated.) Suppose you were a cook with your own restaurant. How do you figure out what work…
If you don't have a reasonably strong belief that your idea is going to work, why bother testing it at all? At the least, you should probably try it on a tiny scale first (i.e. on yourself or a few friends) before taking investments, hiring employees, etc.
Why take 5 months to make a new site?
Seriously, the author seems completely unaware that his "lessons" could have been avoided if he would have simply looked at the growing body of literature, on-line classes, Startup Weekends, blogs by Eric Ries, Alexander Osterwalder, et al that now exist.
Even in writing these lessons he seems to be unaware of them.
What's missing?
What's an online supermarket?
Not sure if you're serious, but I'll bite. It's a grocery store (typically one of the big 'real world' ones) that also takes complete orders online and delivers them to you. It's a big deal in the UK with most major supermarkets now having an online component.
So this article is saying people can order the ingriedidnts for a single meal and have them delivered that day? That would definitely put him out of business huh?
Sure, "solving a problem" is important. But Nike isn't solving a problem that other shoe companies haven't solved a thousand times over. The reason they're successful is that buying into their brand makes you part of a bigger community, and that community has a positive identity attached to it.
Same thing with a startup like Exposure (https://exposure.co/). Sure, the product is great, but they're also fostering a community and projecting a very specific image. Without that special "something" they'd be no different from Flickr or the countless other photo sharing services out there.
This brings me to Dinnr. Did you try to grow a community of passionate members organically by writing a blog, hosting events, being active on forums like whatever the Hacker News for cooking is?
Or did you just try to "solve a problem"?
>However, 5 months later, after the new website was up and running Why take 5 months to make a new site?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their observation isn't remotely an ad hominem: They are specifically criticizing the message, not the speaker. And their point is valid: There is a wide "startup" belief that you needn't know the market or domain, the customers, etc. You just need to find a domain name and make a web page and customers will come and somehow a business will fall together. Only the overwhelming odds are that it will face likely failur…
Wait, what? I thought I was cynical about startups, but I've never noticed this wide belief that you can get a startup off the ground simply by standing up a web page.
Using mailchimp and wufoo-
https://medium.com/who-what-why/from-a-mailchimp-email-and-w...
Built a Facebook page-