911–920 of 1001 posts
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Who are these “influencers” everyone is talking about? Never once in my lifetime I have ever heard anyone say “building a successful startup is easy!” WTF?
No, of course not. If it were easy, why would it take six payments of $24.95+S/H to teach you how to do it?
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One of the privileges people don't often think about is being able to afford to fail. If you don't risk destitution after your startup fails, you can try and fail many times, learn and try again. It's like continuously rolling two dice, and you only need to get double sixes once, and after that it's private jets until you die. One of the many reasons the rich get richer and the poor, well you know how it goes.
This is one of the underappreciated benefits of the Nordic-style welfare state: everybody can afford to fail. Unfortunately it's rarely discussed in society as such. The political parties that built these welfare states have traditionally been associated with worker unions, and entrepreneurship isn't high on their agenda. The Nordic right-wing parties got ideologically married to Thatcher-style neoliberalism and pref…
It sounds to me like your expectations are way out of whack. I’ve seen friends, acquaintances, and colleagues become entrepreneurs. Without an exception, every one that has a serious social media presence is a fraud. They have a company that is either money losing or fed by their parents. They pretend to be entrepreneur geniuses on social media but really have done nothing but basically be instagram models. The peopl…
Also one needs to keep in mind that many startup "successes" are actually either negative or neutral outcomes. I know several "acquisitions" where the end result was investors making negative returns (receiving back pennies-on-the-dollar, if anything.) Meanwhile, the former CEO gets a cushy job as an advisor at the new place, announcements all over social media, etc. The actual companies barely had any revenue.
Disclaimer; The next section is my personal opinion with statements I cannot back up with anything other than my own experience.
What most startups need is cash flow. The most reliable way to achieve this us to sell hours. It does require you to spend time building someone else’s stuff, but the team will gain experience and you can build up a cash reserve. Then spend your own money buildings your own product. This approach will drastically increase yours chances for success, but possibly reduce the probability of creating “the next Facebook” or whatever. From my experience, you go from 1/20 to 3/4 probably of being able to live off of the company. It’s a grind, but it is much more reliable.
With all this said, you do not need to “give up”, but to change mode. If you are able, let the product live. The more time it gets to exist the more chances it has to meet new customers. Of course, there are costs involved, and it might not be possible to do this.
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For a full picture factor in outgoings for world class health and education per person (and other benefits that are free | much cheaper than US); these are very low cost for individuals and offset higher taxes by offering better value for money.
"World class" health and education brings you some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world[1]. Doubling Canada's rate and adding a bit more really screams world class. You do pay out the ass for it though so good job making someone rich I guess? Shame about all the dead babies though[2]. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health... [1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/ch…
Just to be clear, I was referring to the Nordic countries, Australia, better performing OECD countries, etc and not referring to the US.
Your links bear out my position, that US "free market | low taxes" approach doesn't deliver good outcomes for the masses.
In the end, you just need to place enough bets without going all-in. If you go all in, you always have an extreme event of losing it all and starting from scratch.
90% of the people should not go into startups but just build an SMB. Who cares about $1B outcomes? Get freedom first, then swing for the fences.
EDIT: After reading several comments on bad mental health and going into debt. There is nothing glorifying in poverty and mental illness. Take care of yourself. Knowing when to quit is as important as when to persevere. But I wish everyone a good, calm and balanced life rather than being on both ends of the extreme. Perhaps its time to celebrate mediocrity?
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Absolutely, and this explains largely why most of the massively successful startups we all know comes from the Nordics and not from places with poor social security like the USA
Sarcasm noted. Seriously, though, this is somewhat easy to explain. Much of America does have an amazing "safety net": generational wealth. There's a reason why startups tend to spring from elite schools like Stanford, MIT, Yale, etc. Those kids have the brains, yes, but also the family connections and the parental safety nets and the connections to capital investment. These kids don't have to worry about food securi…
Yeah, and then go on to create things like Theranos, Alameda and FTX... never mind the obscene amount of these kids who end up in banks and hedge funds because of their connections that end up destroying the global economy thorough their grift.
I'm a former boot-strapped founder and a strong believer in entrepreneurialism, but you have to be brain-dead levels of naive to not know the odds are entirely against coming in you but to then think you're on the same playing field as the children of the privileged makes it clear one really doesn't have the slightest skill-set it takes to make it in that World: if your discernment is woefully inadequate to see the reality of being wealthy, how can you ever see, build and ultimately profit from market or paradigm shifts?
> However, if you don't come from one of these blessed demographics in the USA, you have a much harder road. If you didn't go to an "elite" school and don't have a parental safety net it's very difficult... I fall into this category and simply didn't have access to healthcare for five years while I pursued my tiny indie business. It made money, but not enough to buy healthcare for a family, so I had to ditch it.
I think these are the untold stories that really should be more widely known and perhaps even celebrated: when something doesn't reach unicorn level, but still does what it sought out to do but cannot grow/scale in order to justify it's immense effort is more honest and real to the reality of how most small startups go and end up.
Personally speaking my end-goal was to ultimately challenge Federal Law to make hemp legal in order to serve as a much needed cash crop to help offset climate change via carbon sequestration and possibly aid in the decrease use of opioids for pain and provide more usecases for something I feel incredibly passionate about: Bitcoin and Farmers.
After the Farm bill was passed in 2018, nearly 4 years since launch, I realized 'we won' as I saw all the signs in front of my face I saw no point in working 90+ hour work weeks and having no Life what so ever because I dissapointed my partners and family so I just leveraged my acquired skill-set in various private Industries and continued to travel the World for new opportunities.
Ultimately the money I made, in BTC, could have made me a millionaire several times if I never spent it and just held on to it over the years, but as mentioned before I was also not of the privileged class and needed those funds to ever rising rents, food, or the rainy day funds use in between jobs.
I don't regret it, but like JB I had to exit and focus on other priorities when I realized the reality that it was never going to be much more than it was, profitable but not b much, never mind ever being a unicorn.
I've since did corpo life and to be honest, their is a reason former startup founders are preferable over most candidates, the harder part is actually getting your foot in the door to be able to prove why that is.
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One of the privileges people don't often think about is being able to afford to fail. If you don't risk destitution after your startup fails, you can try and fail many times, learn and try again. It's like continuously rolling two dice, and you only need to get double sixes once, and after that it's private jets until you die. One of the many reasons the rich get richer and the poor, well you know how it goes.
Sure, the rich have more advantages than the poor. Always been that way and always will. In our culture there is an immense preoccupation with the unfairness of this but the reality is that if you don't come from wealth and privilege, you need a different playbook. Dwelling on the inequity neuters you. If you want to win you need to figure out what the playbook is and then do the right things. I found a playbook that…
If you are outside of US, your chances of liquidity event decrease even further.
I think people always divide into two camps here, its either hard work or luck but the truth is somewhere in between.
As a normal non-privileged person, I can't afford placing all-in bets. But I can go to a different table with different stakes and different strategy.
This might sound a bit assholish, but I'm writing this to hopefully help others spot a crucial mistake: Did you have anyone on your team with actual skill in sales or marketing? Because from your post it seems you tried the same channels that everyone else does (writing blog, engaging on Twitter, setting up ProductHunt launch) without any specific strategy for how to succeed. And this stuff is hard! There's a reason…