Definitely agree on the virtue of doing stuff as manually as possible. Really hard though mentally as you always want to do things the right way. I guess at such an early stage though, the right way is whatever gets you feedback quickest.
The Manual-First Startup
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: The Manual-First Startup
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a good question. If you can create a startup that's profitable day one, that's great. But, there are lots of businesses that need a fixed cost base that only turn profitable after millions of users. But, they turn very profitable with tens of millions of users. If you restrict yourself to just ideas that are profitable day one, that's great though you may miss out on some great ideas.
This is the way I see it: If I have to scale to millions of users then my business plan is not as good as I thought. Why? Because as much as I'd like to think otherwise, tech startups do not produce a tangible product. Unlike automobile manufacturers, or hardware folk, we don't need a lot of money to build something big. All we need are people to write the code. Then we just focus on selling it. For me, a software pr…
I don't think you're wrong. It's a personal choice based on one's perceived strengths. Some people don't think it's a lottery. They think they can replicate success.
Personally, I do think there is skill involved unlike a lottery. But, I still think there's a fair amount of luck, too. In the end, I'm not sure I would start another company that didn't have the option of becoming profitable right away.
Re: The Manual-First Startup
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a good question. If you can create a startup that's profitable day one, that's great. But, there are lots of businesses that need a fixed cost base that only turn profitable after millions of users. But, they turn very profitable with tens of millions of users. If you restrict yourself to just ideas that are profitable day one, that's great though you may miss out on some great ideas.
This is the way I see it: If I have to scale to millions of users then my business plan is not as good as I thought. Why? Because as much as I'd like to think otherwise, tech startups do not produce a tangible product. Unlike automobile manufacturers, or hardware folk, we don't need a lot of money to build something big. All we need are people to write the code. Then we just focus on selling it. For me, a software pr…
OP left a quarter-million a year hedge fund job to swing for the fences. I'd guess his floor for "acceptable" exits is in the multiple millions. Your personal mileage my vary.
http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/08/03/why-i-quit-my-job-to-s...
Re: The Manual-First Startup
#14I'm curious. My understanding of anything-first startups is that you do everything manually to test a market, grow your clientele, and turn a profit. In your post, you mention not being profitable yet, even with the injection of around 7.5 million dollars. As someone who is now used to building businesses that turn a profit before they launch, your situation is interesting. Note that I'm not looking to start a flame…
This business was riding on the wave of Groupon like deal sites. The start-up was not so much about running a profitable business but about capturing the funding possibilities that came up due to the popularity and profitability of Groupon and its numerous clones.
It may seem that way, but we cannot simply say that this is a fact. The founders might have some plans that would turn this market on its head. Though, at the same time, I see where this sort of behaviour comes from. Its the same reasons Dropbox clones got millions of dollars in funding, even though their product is a straight copy (and crummier).
Re: The Manual-First Startup
#15Excellent advice and reminds me of the Human Intervention as a Competitive Advantage article from Derek Sivers: http://sivers.org/hi
Re: The Manual-First Startup
#16Appreciate the post; have my own complex task also involving sorting that I was tempted to spin my wheels on building a tech to accomplish. Think I'll forego, and instead collect data on manual sorting instead.
Re: The Manual-First Startup
#17At first I thought this was going to be like "write the manual first" a la Fred Brooks. But it actually made a great point. Yesterday for the first time I read pg's outstanding growth essay http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html which confirms many of these same excellent ideas.
I thought it was that, too, and it reminded me of Amazon's approach to product management, which is still pretty relevant to this post. Amazon's concept is working backwards, and they start with a press release of the product/initiative. It forces a clear articulation of what it is, how it's different, and who it's for. Internal circulation is used to refine it.
More details: http://www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to-product-dev...
Re: The Manual-First Startup
#18Agree 100%. As an example, when I first created Cocoa Controls, I wrote a little Ruby app that iterated over every single one of GitHub's Objective-C repositories and stuffed them into a database, where I then manually checked each one to see if it was worth including. Literally every repository. By hand. It was a huge amount of effort, but it was also the only way to get the amount of content that I needed to make the site useful enough to get contributors to submit content.
Nowadays, the content volume is more than self-sustaining (I have 46 different repositories in my queue, all submitted by readers), but I still check every submission, clean them up by hand, and manually publish.
Re: The Manual-First Startup
#19I'm curious. My understanding of anything-first startups is that you do everything manually to test a market, grow your clientele, and turn a profit. In your post, you mention not being profitable yet, even with the injection of around 7.5 million dollars. As someone who is now used to building businesses that turn a profit before they launch, your situation is interesting. Note that I'm not looking to start a flame…
As an aside, you say,
"In your post, you mention not being profitable yet, even with the injection of around 7.5 million dollars."
Investor's money has nothing to do with profit. You're profitable when you have customers giving you money, i.e. revenue, in excess of your expenses. The injection of capital is not revenue.
Re: The Manual-First Startup
#20Shameless offtopic plug: avoiding having to write crawlers and scrapers is exactly the problem we at http://import.io hope to solve.