Every Piece of Startup Advice is a Lie

I can't think of any startup that's failed from over-emphasizing both of these points together, but I can think of a few that died from following each of them in isolation. For example:

The startup I left in September has now been around for 7 years. They're profitable (obviously; otherwise they wouldn't still be around), but don't have product-market fit: they have fewer than a dozen customers and need to go through a laborious and often fruitless sales process for each new customer. IMHO, their problem is that they're too focused on "Don't stop" and not enough on "Build something people want." When one of their product ideas fails in the marketplace, they usually assign an engineer or two to maintain and update it, in the hopes that if they add a few more features or make it a little faster, someone will buy it. As a result, they had something like 7 products when I left, only three of which were bringing in revenue. They might get much farther by concentrating resources on really trying to get a breakthrough with one product than scattering their resources across 7.

It's harder to find examples for companies that made something people want and still failed, but they're out there. AllAdvantage.com comes to mind: they gave away free money, lots and lots of people wanted it, but they still failed because they weren't making more money than they were giving away. Friendster too, sorta: lots of people wanted them, enough that it killed their servers, so nobody could get to them, so everyone went to MySpace. Both of these were at least indirectly because they didn't view the startup as a long haul and work out a sustainable infrastructure.

Nice, I've wanted to write something similar for a while.

However, even the "don't stop" one has the counter example of "fail early" and "know when to give something up and move in a new direction". That doesn't mean stop altogether, of course, but it may mean giving one thing up for another.

I find the advice "make something people want" is not catch-all.

How are you separating want and need?

People want McDonalds or Starbucks. But if they live in a cold state they NEED heat, which will require natural gas, electricity, coal/wood stove, or solar power -- or some other type of fuel (i.e. hydrogen, nuclear, etc.)

Maybe because everybody is only thinking technology applications, it makes sense, but I think the focus on "what people want" is a little misleading.

Think of the products you use and consume daily, and you will see there is a certain quantity that you need but may not want or like, and a certain quantity that you want, but may not need or be able to afford.

Creating something people want, although great advice, is not the end-all and be-all of startup advice.

Ditto for never giving up.

Read this: http://www.theintellectualviewpoint.com/reading/thecommonden...

Sometimes, it's not just never giving up, but it's also doing the RIGHT things.

while making something people want is obviously great advice, sometimes it gets applied in a detrimental way by implying that if you don't have users it's because your product isnt't right and you need to lock yourself away and hack some more features and then you'll have something people want.

In reality your product might be just about good enough but you're not paying enough attention to smart distribution methods and thats the real cause of slow growth.

A more appropriate topic for his article would have been : There is No One True and Only Way. Less controversial but keeps the substance.

This sounds suspiciously like startup advice...

Is this article supposed to be one of those "This statement is false" paradoxes?

Best article on the subject since PG's 'how not to die'.

So is this piece of startup advice a lie?