From Zero to a Million: There Are Two Usual Paths for Startups; I Took the Third • Hacker News Board

Re: From Zero to a Million: There Are Two Usual Paths for Startups; I Took the Third

#11

Post by shostack » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 3:59 PM UTC

CamTin wrote: post #10

You list "Migrated the email list from MailChimp to SendinBlue" as a "major accomplishment". This is a minor, even trivial, administrative or technical task. Trumpeting it as if it is one of the biggest things you've managed to achieve makes you sound bush-league.

Without knowing the level of automation and unique data associated with the records stored within the first ESP it is not fair to cast blanket judgement.

Having migrated ESPs and selected/on boarded new ones, vendor lock in can be a major concern and headache. This is due to all of the automations you add, performance data, audience segmentation data, etc. Often, particularly for business users, this can be in a proprietary format locked inside the platform.

If for example, your entire welcome onboarding flow is locked away like this, you need to be very careful not to disrupt a major touch point in your funnel or you risk losing very real dollars.

Email platform transition/setup and management at scale with any complexity is one form of hell i hope most people never get subjected to.

Re: From Zero to a Million: There Are Two Usual Paths for Startups; I Took the Third

#12

Post by CamTin » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 4:05 PM UTC

shostack wrote: post #11

CamTin wrote: post #10

You list "Migrated the email list from MailChimp to SendinBlue" as a "major accomplishment". This is a minor, even trivial, administrative or technical task. Trumpeting it as if it is one of the biggest things you've managed to achieve makes you sound bush-league.

Without knowing the level of automation and unique data associated with the records stored within the first ESP it is not fair to cast blanket judgement. Having migrated ESPs and selected/on boarded new ones, vendor lock in can be a major concern and headache. This is due to all of the automations you add, performance data, audience segmentation data, etc. Often, particularly for business users, this can be in a prop…

I'm not saying it wasn't a pain in the ass, just that intermingling what amount to administrative tasks with major business objectives under the header "major accomplishments" isn't great for your image.

It's like a major public company mentioning the fact that IT finally got everybody in the company on the same build of Windows 7 in a quarterly report to investors. Yes, it was probably a lot of work, and yet nobody cares, and mentioning it as being a big deal raises doubts about whether you can manage things that are much more difficult, like for example your actual line of business.

Re: From Zero to a Million: There Are Two Usual Paths for Startups; I Took the Third

#13

Post by andriesm » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 8:04 AM UTC

I would say ignore the nay-sayers and the guys slamming you for your "ego" or just giving you attitude - but do extract the actionable feedback, but only apply that which resonates with YOU. (But now at least you have the other bits that don't agree with you somewhere on your periphery of awareness, in case you turn out to just be stubborn and wrong - but there is no one proven way despite protestations in the comments, and even well validated startup mrthods like focusing on "customer interviews")

I can certainly related to your experience, also solving very hard problems, but I would laugh about 11 weeks as painful as "large amounts of sunk time" is.... We are thinking in terms of years not weeks.

Bootstrapping is almost always the best way to start.

Unless you are lucky, most VC only happens after your success is pretty obvious.

Our solution has been to do dev work for money on the side, one of which resulted in a maintenance retainer. It's a pain in the ass, but has allowed us to work on our startup for almost two years, buying us time to pivot aspects of our bring-to-market strategy or what market to apply our idea to.... In other words, do several BIG pivots.

I would also suggest you decide how to weigh your attention between your products or put them in a sequential strategy that makes sense to you... I don't think you can build three services at the same time at the same level of priority.

If you take the long view, keep pivoting, and keep searching for as much real world customer interaction, your chances of converging on something cool is much improved.

We also got nice growth metrics with very little long term activation/use, which drove us back to do more customer development in the real world (and over skype!)

Keep trying things, keep sharing the journey, we all make many mistakes along the way, hopefully they don't sink a business that "could have" worked.

My view is, you should only fail with flawed ideas, not fail winning ideas due to mistaken models of execution.

Keep learning.