111–120 of 175 posts
An entrepreneur in New Zealand created such a service in March 2013. It's now worth $27m and is expanding into Australia. http://www.brw.com.au/p/business/mid-market/how_frustrated_c... http://www.myfoodbag.co.nz/
Hi all, I am the author of this post. Thank you very much for your comments, some of which were really thought-provoking. I will address them in a separate blog post when I find the time, probably next weekend. @mbohanes
waving goodbye to my 82 HN points with this one Dude, you're obsessed with being a founder, more than you have vision/plan/reason/skill to actually be one. You have all of the lingo right, all of the right words, hell, your post here even knows how to speak to why you failed in a voice that will get the rest of this community to read it. Your company name even had an "r" at the end with a missing vowel! Reading your…
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…
How are the strategies you listed not market research?
I think OP was simply complaining that the article author approached market research academically, throwing common sense out of the window in the process. Classic outsmarting yourself. You don't need to call it market research for it to be effective (the chef probably doesn't).
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…
> Their observation isn't remotely an ad hominem >> "things no responsible person" Calling someone irresponsible seems pretty ad-hominem.
Saying a position should be rejected because it is presented by someone who is irresponsible is ad hominem.
Ad hominem argument isn't the same thing as a personal attack; its the fallacy of arguing that a position should be rejected because of the personal characteristics of the person presenting it.
Hmm. Was this written in 1999? Or perhaps the notion of the Lean Startup is not understood in London? 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.…
The author mentions that Lean Startup was one of the most important books they read.
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.…
I believe this idea would have worked if you had decent marketing. I'm not convinced. I am surprised to hear it has worked anywhere. I'm not a gourmet cook by any stretch, but I do cook most of my own meals. I would never buy fresh ingredients online. Shopping for the ingredients, perusing the choices and selecting "the best" unblemished fruits, vegetables, and meats is part of the experience of cooking. I don't want…
I don't believe it's coincidental that the delivery service worked in the least densely populated part of Europe.
I can't help but have a very negative reaction to this, not necessarily at the author, but at the startup ecosystem as a whole. These are posted as "lessons" as if they were difficult to learn, when this really should be labeled "things no responsible person would ever not know before even considering raising money." Of course you should be self-critical of your product, of course you should test with real customers,…
I've learned the hard way that it's exactly the lessons that are "obvious" are the ones that I should be paying attention to. If a lesson was both obvious and easy to implement, you probably wouldn't hear the lesson repeated so many times over so many different people.
So whenever I read yet another startup lesson that seems obvious and is frequently repeated, that's a signal for me that that lesson is actually very difficult to implement on the ground, in the moment.
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…
In a startup all these things are up for grabs. You have much more freedom to experiment, but it is orders of magnitude more expensive to test business models then it is to test cookie recipes. One of these takes months or even years to validate, and one of these takes less than an hour.
"The second thing is that I get the feeling that the author simply haven't explored the huge "product space" between takeaway and ready-to-cook prepackaged ingredients with a recipe at all."
This is very true, but that ties into my point: it's much much harder to do this testing than to test a new recipe. Hence many people try to find a cheaper way to validate ideas, which is what market research is all about.
Now whether the OP did market research well is a different matter. In fact he's quite up-front he didn't. But that doesn't mean well conducted market research in not worthwhile.
> b) People are too optimistic about their future behaviour. I read about a focus group once where a company was asking consumers about different color tea kettles. They had tea kettles in a dozen colors and asked people which one they would purchase. The responses were split fairly evenly among all the different colors. At the end of the day, the people who participated in the focus group were allowed to take home o…
Nice story. Do you have the source to read it up?
I can't help but have a very negative reaction to this, not necessarily at the author, but at the startup ecosystem as a whole. These are posted as "lessons" as if they were difficult to learn, when this really should be labeled "things no responsible person would ever not know before even considering raising money." Of course you should be self-critical of your product, of course you should test with real customers,…
When you're in the startup you most often miss the forest for the trees. You're too involved sort of like a peson in an abusive relationship. It sometime takes a neutral third part to make you realise "wow you really have it bad".
I've never read a story about any failure that didn't sound obvious in a after-the-fact analysis. Read up on why Nokia failed against Apple or how the banking system collapsed. When reading any of thee you will always think "huh, what a bunch of dumbasses", we highly over value our own behaviour and pretend that can never be us but it frequently is.