31–39 of 39 posts
Anyone know of any examples of overnight success or close to it? Edit: Maybe Hot or Not?
It usually takes decades which is why old guys are richer.
You can do it as an exec-employee or founder.
Contentment, comfort, routine, closed mindedness, dogma, not questioning the status quo every day, following established patterns of entrepreneurship because "that's how it's done", these are all your enemies.
Greedy and selfish people seem to do better in business. [Yeah, it's not a feel-good statement, but go out there and count the beans.]
Iterating in cycles less than 2 years with a new company every time is a sure fire recipe for not succeeding outside the Valley. Inside the Valley, you'll probably eventually get your talent acquisition money from Google. You simply don't have time to learn the market, your customers and to surround the business with people who trust it.
It takes time for you to empathize with your customer. In other words, to understand why the hell they'd give you money for your product or service.
As a founder, not fighting tooth and nail to keep as much control of your business as you possibly can is usually a leading indicator of failure. Not saying you must keep control, but there's a level of passivity I've noticed in this that usually indicates an entrepreneur who doesn't have their heart in their business.
Of course overnight success is bull. But the lottery ticket perception outsiders have of tech entrepreneurship is actually good for attracting investors and new blood, some of whom actually become real entrepreneurs. So the myth of overnight success does have it's uses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me "the biggest overnight success award" goes to Andrey Ternovskiy for Chatroulette. The site climbed high in rankings fast, quickly started generating profits, hundreds of clones came to life (of none of course got any traction although everyone was making it better ), you could buy the "roulette script" online and do your own site, and Andrey score a visa to US to work on some other startups, as far as I know. T…
The guy that sells pixels made 1M+ with http://milliondollarhomepage.com/ Basically he sells 1M "pixels" for $1 each to show advertisings. The pixels you buy have an expiration date so he probably sold more than 1M px. I read somewhere that it works pretty well and brings lots of users to advertisers, probably because of the press and the momentum generated around the service.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
whats kind of successful projects he got under his belt? And define success -- monetary, or huge userbase, or both or what?
Mark (along with D'Angelo) developed Synapse (a media player) in high-school that learned what you listened to and created a playlist. They were being offered $1million to $2million for it. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerber...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me "the biggest overnight success award" goes to Andrey Ternovskiy for Chatroulette. The site climbed high in rankings fast, quickly started generating profits, hundreds of clones came to life (of none of course got any traction although everyone was making it better ), you could buy the "roulette script" online and do your own site, and Andrey score a visa to US to work on some other startups, as far as I know. T…
The guy that sells pixels made 1M+ with http://milliondollarhomepage.com/ Basically he sells 1M "pixels" for $1 each to show advertisings. The pixels you buy have an expiration date so he probably sold more than 1M px. I read somewhere that it works pretty well and brings lots of users to advertisers, probably because of the press and the momentum generated around the service.
What I learnt with his project is what it means when your project goes viral. To me noone in sound mind would pay a dollar for pixel, boy, I was wrong.
Now Alex Tew designed this one and its actually pretty cool as well: http://www.waterforward.org/
If only it was as simple as hard work and persistence. Taleb does a great job of covering this in "The Black Swan". You may strike it big. But you may spend your whole life in the antechamber of hope.
Two myths at play: 1. Overnight is never overnight. More probably you just never heard of it before. 2. If you just keep going you will eventually make it. But probably not. ( http://swombat.com/2012/3/10/successful-people ) Believe what you want and act accordingly.
It's not "just keep going and you will eventually make it". It's a question of continuing to learn and make progress towards your goal over a long period of time (in this case, how to build a successful startup). Malcolm Gladwell calls it "deliberate practice". For whatever reason most people can't do it, and that's okay, startups are not for everyone. But if you want to be a Pinterest type success, then that's what…
Gladwell is an excellent storyteller; that is the extent of his talents.
And a goal as vague as "a successful startup" is extremely unlikely to get you anywhere. You need a great deal more specificity and short time periods so you can tell if you're going right or wrong.
[0]http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html...
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1897