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The golden era of being an open startup is gone

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Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#71

Post by cj »

In general, it doesn’t matter whether you’re open to the public or not.

What matters much more is that you’re open with your own employees.

The “open startup” idea always seemed superficial to me, founders seeking external validation.

Over the long-term, what really matters is keeping your people (employees) happy, and one very easy way to do that is to show that you appreciate and respect them by sharing your company’s key metrics with them.

Not every month will be great, but that’s ok. If you’re running your business responsibly, you’ll be able to say “we didn’t have a great month, but we have 5 years of runway”.

If you hide metrics because your business is unsustainable, then yea, don’t show your metrics to anyone… and if you work for a private tech company with very guarded metrics, it’s safe to assume they are not doing well financially.

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#72

Post by quickthrower2 »

amelius wrote: post #13

I make apps for the App Store, and instead of a startup founder I feel more like an Apple employee, with Apple commanding me around with what I should and cannot do.

You are an Apple customer, in reality. And they have the right to cease business with you at any time.

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#73

Post by piperswe »

serf wrote: post #64
widdershins wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally find the lack of vaporware from Apple refreshing. With Apple, when you hear about the thing you can go out and buy the thing. From too many companies you hear about cool tech, only to find it disappointing or hobbled a year later when they actually get to release.

>I personally find the lack of vaporware from Apple refreshing. They recently nixed their AR products that had been hinted at for forever, and the 'Apple Car' was 'right around the corner' sitting as a boogey-man juxtaposed to Tesla's efforts for years before being cancelled. They're more reliable than most groups, but post-Jobs Apple loves to mention fantasy stuff that consumers will never see, it's part of their hy…

I think there's important distinction here in that neither of those projects have ever been officially mentioned by Apple PR.

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#75

Post by tomcam »

isthisthingon99 wrote: post #28
pcthrowaway wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there a twitter thread about this or something? I'd love to read more. I actually don't think I've heard the name Balsamiq in 10 years

No, I was just obsessed with how he did it, so I swallowed every piece of info I could've until it was clear. It was manufactured, which is the best approach.

What is the product its self just not as popular as he claimed, or what? I actually don’t understand what he got out of the ruse.

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#76

Post by neon_electro »

inasio wrote: post #42

A startup I knew had someone take professional-looking pictures of new employees, and add them to the Who Works Here page, with a nice blurb. After years of employees being poached by Big Tech the Who Works Here page is gone. To me this is also part of the loss of innocence.

The startup I worked for got rid of its Who Works Here page seemingly arbitrarily (at least not for any reason related to poaching), and replaced it with a page focused on executives. Probably not that arbitrary looking back.

They were proud to keep the banner photo of the whole team for years, though, even after more than 50% of the people in said banner photo were gone.

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#77

Post by granshaw »

safety1st wrote: post #22
reidjs wrote: post #2

I don't really agree or maybe I have misunderstood the author's thesis here. Is he saying it's harder to grow a business by building in the open nowadays because so many people have already done it, so now consumers are weary of it? Or is he upset that many of these companies that were once open have stopped being open once they found success? Just because many established companies have stopped doing it, doesn't mea…

This Damon Chen guy seems like a nice guy but like an independent journalist or something. He seems like he could be a great evangelist. He started some websites, wrote about Open Startups, and in this article he mentions he had his own 'revenue bar' on Twitter which went from $0 to $1 but he took it down because the age of Open Startups is over. I look at all this and wonder where the actual dudes going to work at j…

I’m very familiar with this space/movement. Most of these “open startups” are solo bootstrappers who use this audience building often as their main marketing channel

It only works well if you’re selling something useful to the bootstrapper crowd: bootstrapping courses, Twitter tools etc

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#78

Post by tomcam »

pffft8888 wrote: post #26

It’s not being an Open Startup that kills your chances. If you have an insurrmountable business advantage (it’s who you know, not what you know) and you keep the how-to details of your solution hidden behind a generic description where the solution is really hard to pull off well, being open only helps you. Firstly, by using idiots who would steal your idea to create buzz in the market for you as they pitch their sil…

I can’t cite examples, but in my long experience, ever since the Osborne computer was released, it was understood that if you talked about a future product, people would simply stop buying the current product because they were waiting for the replacement.

Re: The golden era of being an open startup is gone

#79

Post by mbesto »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #49
mbesto wrote: post #43

The trend outlined in the article is that startups tend to ditch openness once they mature. I think the explanation is pretty simple - it's no longer a marketing advantage to do so. If your'e selling to a startup audience then being open gets you eyeballs early on in your career. Once you start moving into more mature markets, this becomes less interesting to those audiences so why do it? It's hard enough to be open…

A reason to keep doing it is to maintain the value of openness within the internal culture through praxis. If it was only being done for marketing purposes, then it wasn't ever a value, but a strategy.

Value are marketing.
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