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Tenacity

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83 pointsworldvoyageur19 comments

Tangential, but:

> I don’t mean sticking with a failed idea for too long. That is a mistake I see a lot of entrepreneurs make in the Seed and Series A stages. That does nobody any good.

How do you actually know an idea has failed, though? Because I feel assessing this is harder than he makes it sound. If you are building it, unless it's a complete and utter catastrophe that attracts no users and makes no revenue, there's always room to improve it even if you are still living off ramen.

#1 startup advice i found to be true:

"Be successful then you were right"

> How do you actually know an idea has failed, though?

The same way you know if a clinical trial in unsuccessful. You set milestones in advance, and if you don't meet those milestones then you've failed.

I agree it's a tricky question, but there are often clues.

Users complaining a lot is a clue the idea hasn't failed yet; you're making something they want, but it needs improvement. Users silently leaving is a clue the idea failed.

I wrote a response to this because I recently shut down my company, but when I was finished I realized that none of the advice was actionable, and I didn't know of a good framework for this.

I visited a lot of coworking spaces and met people working on things that had been doing so for years with no traction. Some of the people clearly didn't what problem they are trying to solve. Some really solid advice or a framework for when to know your business is toast would be an anti-sv culture thing, but could be extremely useful for helping people get their life back on track.

Here is a simple but opinionated answer:

If you are not growing by C% every month, you're a "dead" startup.

Now, do you want to pivot to being a small business, or traditional enterprise? Are you spending VC money that demands results? Is your business funding your own lifestyle?

Answer those questions and you know what to do next.

> How do you actually know an idea has failed, though?

Damn good question, and I don't think there's an easy answer.

If you listen to almost any successful founders' stories, you'll hear about struggles and 'failures' that they had to work through. A lot of them can talk about how if they hadn't changed something, or if some event or realization hadn't happened, that failure was imminent. Some of them talk about how they did fail, sometimes more than once, then tried something else and succeeded.

Unless you learn through trying that the idea really truly can't work and there's no market whatsoever (which I'd speculate is rare), it's probably up to you to determine what success and failure actually mean, how to measure them, and what to do when they happen.

If you only have a strictly limited time or money budget, then not succeeding within the window is a type of failure, and maybe what most people mean by failure. But that doesn't mean the idea won't ever succeed, it just means it didn't succeed fast enough for your budget. I'm guessing this is the functional definition of failure for most people.

Now the question is why, because it could have been for any number of reasons, market fit, skills, team, execution, timing, anything. This is why the trend in startup thinking is to perform activities that seek to answer questions about your business hypothesis, and find out why you're failing, scientifically, before you fail.

If you can live on ramen forever, and your idea doesn't cost much money to implement, and it makes you happy to keep trying, you might not ever need to declare a failure, you could indeed keep improving it.

RE: FourSquare. Very interesting to me that he doesn't mention that they just changed out the Founder/CEO this week and did a significant down round. I almost feel like the entire article was a camouflaged smoke screen for propping up FourSquare. Just odd.

That was announced after this post.

yes and four squares is in the union square ventures portfolio, he would have knowledge of and may have been part of the decision making process.

Many great companies takes decade or more to build.

A lot of the most valuable companies have their founders/early employees as their CEO vs. someone who join later (usually a professional one): http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_we_prefer_founding_ceos

Though you may argue it is a survivor bias, I believe sticking longer with something that works give an edge vs. leadership changes every few years.

For the past three years the narrative around SoundCloud has been that it was stuck in the mud, that remixes and other derivative content were getting taken down, that labels were forcing artists to take their content off the service. All of which was true, but the real narrative was that SoundCloud was going through a difficult and complicated process of developing a new business model for audio content in partnership with an existing industry that has done things a certain way for a long time.

It's a shame that SoundCloud was forced to yield to the established music industry like this. The world doesn't need yet another way to play "artists as diverse as Avicii, Bob Marley, the Beatles and Justin Bieber" (http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/13/soundcloud-universal-music-...).

No, they were not forced to yield to the establishment, they chose the establishment because it is the path with seemingly less risk. There is a meaningful difference, by using well know and established music it becomes easier to gain the hallowed "traction" VC funded musictech startups want. Soundcloud has little to no interests in focusing on truly independent artist and productions the way Bandcamp has and is doing.

Looks like avc.com is down. Here is a cached version for now

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YSjjxaE...

I think what's interesting about this piece is that it again highlights that many companies are not 'overnight successes' and the true commitment and time it takes from a founder and/or CEO to develop an organization. It gives hope to people who still feel like they're in the trenches and not seeing as many deliverables as they would like.

The author also highlights the importance of a good Board. Often not enough thought goes in to selecting a Board. A Board that believes in the idea and the people, has a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds, and has a relationship with the founder/CEO where there's room for disagreement and discussion can make all the difference.

This is a weak article.

1. Soundcloud: 99% of founders would love to have the level of success that Soundcloud had leading up to these 3 years of "hard work" getting labels onboard.

2. Foursquare: Got so much money and press for almost a decade now. The least they could do would be to go to work and figure out how to honor all the good fortune people bestowed on them.

Again, its not hard to keep working if you have massive traction in terms of users or money (VC or otherwise). What's hard is when you have neither of these things.

This reads as a motivation piece because Foursquare has shat the bed and like anyone, AVC wants to get out of it what he still can.

Myself and a few friends still use swarm a bit. Who still uses foursquare itself?

I use foursquare all the time to find places to eat and drink around NYC. My wife and I have discovered a bunch of cool places to get a drink before dinner, or find breakfast, when we're in an unfamiliar neighborhood. I'm a big fan and hope they succeed.

I recently started using Foursquare a bit after mostly abandoning it for Swarm. It's actually really good. By far the best feature for me is the "trending in your city" bit which is fantastic at letting me know about good newly opened places. If there's a better tool than Foursquare for figuring out what exciting new businesses have opened in your neighborhood I don't know what it is.

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