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

blog.markgrowth.com

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

#4

Can someone explain? What are the usual paths? What's the third path? Am I missing something, or is this just a clickbait headline?

The author seems a bit confused. I'm guessing the usual paths are to raise finance or bootstrap while his third path seems to be to wander about lost:

"... no conclusions to share with you at this time, as I’m still trying to find my way"

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

#5
Sounds a lot like my first startup out of college:

* Focus split between two products * No real revenue * A blog to catalogue our path to wild success (I think it lived at diariesofastartup.com)

Long story short, it didn't pan out for me (too many cooks, differing levels of commitment, cluelessness) but I've had some good successes since then.

Best of luck - the path does become clearer as you learn the lessons of growing a business.

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

#9

Can someone explain? What are the usual paths? What's the third path? Am I missing something, or is this just a clickbait headline?

A critical reading of the blog post has me thinking that he hasn't invented a new way to do startups, he's just making the common mistake of building product before verifying demand. The obstacles he's running into are the exact obstacles one would expect to run into if you do this.

If you are starting a startup and have no money to burn through validating a business model, your only real way forward is to start with sales. You can sell your idea to potential customers (bootstrapping), or you can sell it to investors.

There's no third way to do this, because those are the only two groups of people that can give you money.

This guy is choosing to bootstrap. A fine path, but it requires you to schlep. You have to talk to a lot of people to validate a business idea. People who are so enthusiastic about the idea suddenly develop cold feet when it comes to buying your product and integrating it into their business / life.

If you are a coder, the natural tendency is to avoid talking to people and instead do what you know: build product. But unless you talk to people you aren't going to know what to build. His entire blog post is just exploring these failure modes, except with added self-importance.

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

#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.
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