Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
blog.nugget.one
blog.nugget.one
Take Slack as an example. Yes, it was a simple idea with low product surface area and easily protypeable etc etc. But other people had built Slack-like products before that met the all those same criteria and were not successful. The critical factors for Slack were the connections the founders had (or made), the VC money, and perhaps a whole bunch of other things.
As much as we'd like for there to be a nice, neat guides for successful businesses e.g. "build a little snowball", the truth is that the reasons for success are often totally unique, contradictory and unrepeatable.
Step two: build a little snowball
Step three: give your little snowball a little push
Step four: fret about which direction your growing snowball is going
First of all I don't want to talk to "@jjm", I want to talk to John Jameson. Why can't it show me the full, human name?
Second, chat is basically the hello world of push based apps, but any other update, like renaming channels, editing documents etc. aren't real time. I have to close the app and reopen it to see the update. Come on!
Third, the document feature is not multiplayer. You have to lock the document in order to edit it. And for todo lists, you can't even tick off a box without locking the whole document.
Secondarily, the reason for @username is because you basically have to use usernames of some kind to ensure you can directly refer to another user consistently. Users can also setup "highlight words" which will notify them if someone says them in a channel they're in. This could be their name for example, or other things.
Which ones?
Just because something is similar doesn't mean it nails the features people need, however simple they may be.
But none of us actually believed it. We all assumed there had to be some good reason that all the chat programs out there were awful - almost an efficient-markets viewpoint. I think Slack's great innovation was the psychological willingness to actually just write a good chat program. (I have no idea how - or if - they figured out the money-making side of things though).
Yes, but I guess the point is that if you start with a little snowball, at least when you fail in the end, you didn't waste too much effort on it.
That's a hard way to build something and the result is often really hard to sell. This is especially true with software products where additional features never feel as expensive as they actually become.
In the beginning, it's important to be known for one unique, valuable thing that you do very well. That's how people place you in their mental maps of the world. The challenge I think, is that focus does take bravery. You'll be barraged with feature ideas from customers, investors, employees, and even yourself.
Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company.
What makes a successful company? "Hustle." What is "hustle"? Why, it just means "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successful." It's a perfectly circular definition.
Proposal: always avoid the word "hustle." Instead, talk about specific actions and decisions that led to success in particular cases.
That is an excellent point and now you have essentially named the title one of one of my new blog posts: "What is Hustle?"
It especially rings true because something we've tried hard to do over the years on TechZing is unpack miracle functions exactly like this.
And, also, survivor bias. Lots of companies hustled and hustled and died.
Elon Musk is a really good example. At one point he couldn't meet cashflow--and then the government contract for SpaceX finally came in.
3 months of delay on that contract and Musk is a goat instead of a hero.
This blog post is a common line of messaging in the "how to succeed in startups" - "see what (hugely successful company X) did? That's what you should do, that's how you succeed!"
Truth is that success comes from a somewhat magical mixture of timing, luck, spotting of opportunity, knowing how to build it, having the resources to build it, meeting just the right people at the right time who will play a role in that success, somehow making the product "slightly more right" instead of "slightly more wrong" and sometimes seeing some incredible new way of viewing the world that others don't. Like a magic spell it's a bit of all these ingredients put together in a recipe that, well, works.
Then the bloggers and venture capitalists come along, timeline what you did and say "ha! there is the recipe for success!".
Odd that the first example appears to be from a basketball write-up, which is exactly where I very frequently hear the term goat/GOAT used in the sense I described.
The acronym dates back to maybe 1992 or thereabouts: http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/07/goat.html
GOAT, the positive acronym, isn't even used in today's sportswriting about basketball (at least without an unpacking explanation). It's more of a slang / online forum term.
However I think that's actually a point in favor of starting small: If you're going to fail? At least fail fast. While you have time to "pivot", or wind down, or whatever makes sense to try instead.
If you're onto something, you can usually tell at a small scale. Sure, sometimes there are network effects and exponential growth. But not hockey sticks. (Source: My own opinion and anecdata.)
It's like when old successful people give "life-affirming" advice like "quit your job, follow your dreams, take risks, LIVE!" Which is great advice if you're already financially secure and you know that doing so didn't result (in your case) in you ending up as some peon working in a fast food joint. Never mind the other 99% of people who did the exact same thing and it didn't work out, because who listens to a failure?
In short, it's not that luck isn't super important, but if you are thinking about luck then you probably won't be ready to capitalize on it.
[0]: http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...
There are times when you wish to do something, and you avoid it because it just feels like you might be pushing it a bit. If you still did it anyway - what you did was hustle. In fact, I would say that if you reflect on your life and think of the times when you didn't take that invitation to an event, or that break to go on a vacation, or introduce yourself to a person who you liked, and then realized that the choice you made was too safe, and your choice (lack of hustle) didn't help you all that much long term anyway, you can see its absence quite plainly.
Having said that, I also agree with you on one front. Instead of using the word hustle, if these articles gave an example, and then maybe made a point about why that is hustle, it would read much better.
- Do something illegal, then lobby for your rights!
- DDOS your competition
- Be evil
- Ignore regulations designed to protect your workforce (often referred to as 'partners', hah!)
- Tell everyone you have a special insight in making successful startups - something to do with 'hustle' and 'product market fit'
- Burn investor money while shouting stuff about self driving cars
- Underpay your staff and/or take a huge cut of their value
- Take massive equity stakes in already existing/launched companies and call it seed funding
- Be Elon Musk
/snark
and over cook them
Maybe you can guess which companies are currently using each strategy. I'll give you one for free; currently Tesla are being very successful with be Elon Musk and burning investor money by talking about self driving cars.
I hope I know you. May I ask - how you know my name? If you have figured out my unusual name from my user name then you are exceptionally smart :-)
- Build something rather generic, mediocre, but serviceable
- Donate a lot to politician campaigns
- Enthusiastically explain how great it would be if people (or a certain segment of people) were required to use a product with certain requirements
- Your product somehow is the only on that matches those requirements
Ideas too big to feasibly execute in typical startup fashion (i.e. incremental funding rounds tied to key metrics) have a snowball's chance in hell of actually succeeding. It doesn't matter if it's the best idea in the world; the ability to adapt to and survive within the existing funding eco system ultimately has more utility because it moves the company forward.
Just curious, why do you hate to admit it? :)
The best I can do is hack together tiny glimpses of the final vision. As a solo founder with no track record, pitching a concept for a product that has high funding requirements with no hope of revenue until late-stage is virtually impossible.
Years ago I reasoned the only way I'd get off the ground is to launch something and get organic traction. Despite my best efforts to delude myself into believing the contrary, that seems to have proven correct.
If anything, thinking too big for your own good is tantamount to a mental prison of sorts. You just become obsessed with an idea that has a significantly lower chance of being realized. Hence why your snowball advice is on point. :)
From all the work you've done on it, if you really think outside the box, is there some single facet that could potentially be turned into do-one-thing-well?
There's three conceptualized facets. Two of them are relatively easy to implement from a technical perspective, but are otherwise rendered very difficult by non-technical considerations. The facet I believe to have the widest appeal is paradoxically far harder to implement than the others in all respects.
I think I'll take your advice and either try simplify an existing facet with laser-focus, or perhaps think far outside of the box and hopefully come up with something that's both stupid-simple yet feasible to implement. Something that gains traction while acting as a proof of concept at the same time.
Thanks for your help, much appreciated.
This means everyone else is too busy with their own ideas anyway and no one is going to jump on board and join you because you won't share your idea.
Read what Derek Divers has to say: https://sivers.org/multiply
Besides, I could use the five dollars. :)
i dont know your situation, but maybe this is a mistake? 25% of something is better than 100% of nothing? just a thought
Regardless, I should have qualified that statement by saying that a sizable team is required at a minimum to ship anything resembling a final product. It's far beyond what a few co-founders could accomplish together.
they solved the hard part but had troubles with the "normal" portal site media-like work - thus the "simple website"
> Is the Google example oversimplified,
> or is my history wrong?
> It's reduced here to a "simple database search"
> but I thought some of Google's novel search technology
> was there from the get-go
Of course there were other pieces of evidence in their secret sauce, and they are ever tweaking it. But I would say that backlinks made the biggest difference. In those days Hotbot and AltaVista returned a cacophony of results based on word matches in the body of the page itself. Google I believe was the first search engine that went by the text in the links of other websites pointing to it. One of Sergey Brin's and Larry Page's professors tells the story of being introduced to their prototype, searching for "Stanford," and for the first time the top result was actually stanford.edu.
A few times people exploited this. For example, someone got a bunch of their friends to link to George Bush with the link labeled "miserable failure," so that when you googled "miserable failure," the top result was George Bush. This is called google bombing.
Another part of their algorithm that proved how far off course most people, including me, thought that the Web should be organized was laid out in Sergey Brin's research pager, "Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web." While everybody, including me, thought that the way to bring order to the chaos of the Web would be to somehow persuade more and more people to write better web pages (semantic HTML, microformats, etc.) Sergey Brin just took what he was given. As an example he talks about finding author-title pairs on the Web. He starts with a seed list of, say, five author-title pairs:
Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn
David Brin, Startide Rising
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors
<LI><B>title</B> by author (
<i>title</i> by author (
author || title (
He uses these patterns to find more pairs, which he uses to find more patterns, and so on (http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/421/1/1999-65.pdf).
They also had to build a crawler, systems to calculate pagerank on relatively huge graphs, and the search engine.
That is years of decidedly non-trival hard work, both academic and engineering - pretty much the opposite of the 'snowball' the author claims it to be.
[1] source: Larry Page, explaining to Nooglers why they shouldn't be afraid to work on ideas that seem crazy or useless at first.
http://thegentlemansarmchair.com/comic/escape-the-9-to-5/
As someone who is currently on the process of trying to find his "Own Little Snowball" and has sent over 500 emails on the last couple of weeks trying to interview people to find that "one-thing" to do well.
I have to say that the whole process of funding an startup has come to be oversimplified by most trying to talk about it, they present it on a nice little set of steps from A to B and from B to C.
But once you get started trying to follow the path, you notice the "magic" happens on what's in between the steps, and that's something nobody talks about.
Just because plenty of companies have done this does not mean it isn't equally valid to build something with a broad set of functionality.
Survivor bias.
It's also painfully true that uncountable companies have built something small that got no bigger. Maybe they would have been better to build out their idea into something more full featured.
There are so many existence proof examples of companies that are precisely the opposite of little snowballs.
Hootsuite, Salesforce, Microsoft, etc.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but the implicit understanding is that this post is aimed at the lone wolf or small teams with no funding.
Sure, you can be a lone wolf or small team and try to build a large complex project. I actually know quite a few folks who've done that. Most failed. Some were sucessfull - https://www.centraldesktop.com - comes to mind.
But, the main point is, it is simply easier on most business vectors to tackle a do-one-thing-well rather than build a big-complex-product.
The reception was somewhat positive but they continued to grow and sell the crap out of Hootsuite and now it's on track to go public. But they started SUPER small.
Then, in 1981, they took the snowball and threw it smack dab into that huge towering snow slab they had noticed called the IBM PC, causing an avalanche of hitherto unknown proportions...the rest is history. :)
Trying to spread the idea that code can exist with a low bug count, and that it's better to write code that way.
I'm thinking about Buffer, Drip, Litmus, Basecamp to name a few.
Sure, some of them did raise money, but that was a long time after they were profitable.