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Comment by timewarrior | Hacker News Reader

It is great that you got a few which got traction out of 8 tries. This is an incredible success rate.

Most people see much less success. The original suggestion is geared towards first few tries that people make. Once they have made a few attempts, they learn from it and naturally build more scalable products without spending extra effort. You have already read my story about my first try which had a very poor start. My subsequent efforts have scaled in that order without needing a single rewrite.

However, if they spend too long procrastinating, worrying about and investing in scale - they are wasting precious time which would be better spent finding product market fit.

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Thanks, and also thank you for not reading my posts the wrong way. I am in no way having a go at you or refuting what you say. You've built something and got it to a level that many of us can only dream of, and for that you have my admiration and respect.

Like you, each subsequent app that I built contained the lessons learned from the previous efforts - better front end frameworks, better data table normalising, better hosting infrastructure etc.

Part of me always thinks back to the ones that didn't work, and I always ask myself - would they have worked if they had faster page refreshes, or more flexible data entry? Perhaps if I had spent more time in the planning and design before I launched them, they may not have sunk as quickly? Those 1000 users that time who came from my HN post and saw an 'Error 500' page - could a fraction of them been the ones who would have signed up and made us profitable if they didn't see the error page as their first introduction to my app??

For that reason alone, I am always skeptical of any post that promotes 'iterate often and fast' or 'fail quickly' rather than 'spend time on design and a unique experience'...

It's all in good spirit of sharing and learning.

When you are thinking back, also consider the alternative where could you have missed opportunities and product launches because of extra effort spent on scaling upfront.

It's all good learning in the end. It's great to be in your situation. Keep at it and you will see great success in future!

> It is great that you got a few which got traction out of 8 tries. This is an incredible success rate.

That seems fairly reasonable to me.

It all depends on what you call "success". Running a startup from zero to a billion dollar business is an incredible and rare achievement. Running a small site with a few hundreds/thousands users and a decent income is fairly reasonable.

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