Underrated Startup Success Factors | Hacker News Reader

Underrated Startup Success Factors

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218 pointsyinso63 comments

> In contrast, some really talented and hardworking founders just happen to work on the wrong things and don’t attain the same level of success. Some even tried Zuck’s idea but were too early. It often isn’t their fault. The timing just wasn’t right.

How do you plan your company around timing? It seems easy to say "they had good timing" in retrospect.

This sounds like hindsight bias.

It's too easy to blame timing instead of your own mistakes.

For example, with Justin TV/ Twitch TV they were "too early" because 4G internet was not ubiquitous, and most average people could not even consume their streams.

After years of grinding it out, the tech caught up and they were positioned to lead the market.

It's certainly possible to be "too early" or "too late" to market. I think if you have the right people working together you can make it through being "too early". If you're "too late" then you have the opportunity to win with brand appeal or marketing now that the market is familiar with the product or service.

Timing is just a component of luck, no?

I'd agree that it frequently can be. It's not always luck however.

There's another component to it. Actually spotting that the time has arrived for a thing, that a confluence of technologies is ready to make something new possible at a formerly impossible scale (or possible period). That doesn't have to be luck. Paul Allen watched like a hawk what was going on in the very early personal computing market, he was aggressive and relentless in doing so, as well as about prodding Gates about starting a business around it (Gates then played brake to Allen being frequently early with an idea). That Microsoft was one of the first software companies, wasn't luck, they saw the opportunity after watching it for years and then acted. It took a lot of intentional time and effort application for Allen to accumulate the knowledge and skill necessary to see that opportunity coming.

That's the case with Tesla. The iPhone. And so on.

Jobs didn't like the Newton because he believed it was a crap user experience. He was right, the time was wrong for the technology. He did the iPhone because he believed the time was right, that several technologies were ready to come together in a small form factor that could produce a high quality experience. That wasn't luck, it was decades of evolved knowledge and skill looking at a problem / opportunity.

It can be, but there can be a skill component there as well. For example, you can look at current trends and made educated predictions that a new service might be popular at a certain point in the future. Or you can keep up with the news and create products or content that ride on the coattails of current trends. That requires a certain amount of skill in spotting opportunities just before they arise.

On the other hand, luck definitely plays a part none the less. As informed as your preidictions may be, the future is never exactly certain, and a situation which can rationally appear to be a sure in can turn out to go the complete opposite way. Maybe the service you want to replace actually isn't getting shut down when people think it is, and people decide your service isn't useful at that point in time. Or (like with a lot of Reddit alternatives) the mass exodus doesn't happen for whatever reason (maybe because the controversy affected far less people than you imagined it would) and hence the massive boom in users doesn't occur.

It can also be the case that an opportunity is indeed there, but you're not going to be the one to take advantage of it. After all, I'm sure numerous social networks were around in the early days of Facebook, yet it's Facebook that became the household name and made billions of dollars. Perhaps your biggest competitor got a few million dollars in venture capital funding and managed to market themselves far better than you could.

Luck and timing are closely connected, but they're not necessarily so.

IMHO I think that there are some personality types of CEOs (visionary CEOs) who can see which way the future is heading and direct it. But most other people don't listen to or believe them

You plan your company around timing by understanding the market and where it's going.

Timing is a useful abstraction, as long as you don't use it as an excuse. Blaming timing for being wrong is blaming your customers for not wanting the thing you've made. Which is why it's not an excuse you hear from most serious entrepreneurs.

Or, you believe in your product enough to keep pushing forward, while also building out your company to survive the rough times until that happens. That means not blowing through VC money on frivolities, expecting a worst case scenario of struggling for years and years before the world catches on, building tech that can be reused intelligently and hiring people who understand that this is a crawl despite calling your development cycle a sprint.

> That means not blowing through VC money on frivolities

You don't get a vote. The VC wants you to "Go Big or Go Home" NOW, not 5 years from now. The VC would rather you flame out and get off his portfolio than continue to be merely profitable.

This is one of the things that causes founders to hate most VC's.

More often than not the right timing was the right timing only in hindsight, but I think there is merit to the argument of there being right timing sometimes. It is true that Instagram couldn't have happened before cheap smartphones with relatively high quality cameras, for example. It's not the only factor, but it can have a role depending on what you do.

Examples of good timing that I have seen in startups:

- Rise of a new use case (e.g. Checkr doing background checks for fast-growing on-demand companies like Uber and Instacart).

- Legal/regulatory change (e.g. a key patent is about to expire, or a new govt regulation is about to impose more requirements on an industry).

- Technology is finally adequate for doing something useful (e.g. VHS cassettes were replaced by DVDs, which were much cheaper for a company like Netflix to mail. Or maybe some sensor is finally miniaturized enough to be embedded into a constrained space for a good use case).

There's still a lot of luck, but many smart founders think hard about the "why now?" question. If the answer is "this couldn't be done until the last year or two because X, Y, and Z" then that's promising; if the answer is "no one has thought of this before" or "many people have tried this but failed," then that's often a sign of danger.

So much effort is wasted because the "why now" question is not asked with enough serious intent. I can kind of excuse 21 year old founders for ignoring this, but no serious investor should put a dime in until they have a great answer to this question.

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I had a startup idea January 2014. Looked at the market and available tech and decided to wait. Kept it in the back of my mind and would work on it many a weekend/ evening. Finally pulled the trigger a few weeks ago. It's going very well and I'm fairly certain the timing component is perfectly calibrated

Well go on then, what's the startup idea? :)

> How do you plan your company around timing?

Here’s my current example:

1. For the past 2-3 years I’ve been developing a todo app (Matterlist, formerly Tuskarr: http://tuskarr.tilda.ws/, past HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14154378) to replace Wunderlist because I’ve always been unsatisfied with it.

2. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they will retire Wunderlist, likely in 2017.

3. I’m convinced that Wunderlist closure will be the biggest marketing opportunity Matterlist will ever have. The moment Microsoft announces the closure, there will be a lot of people in the world who are looking for a Wunderlist alternative, and there will be press people who will be interested in providing their audience with solutions.

4. Hence my decision to focus the website, SEO, ASO, and all marketing efforts in general on a single idea: “wunderlist replacement” / “wunderlist alternative”.

5. The focus will last for a year or so. This should be enough to establish Matterlist as a Wunderlist replacement in terms of SEO and in the minds of the audience. After that, I can begin gradually focusing away from the idea of “wunderlist alternative”.

So basically, I’m betting the entire farm on a single timed event outside my control.

I wouldn't bet the house on a single horse; f.e. what it Microsoft suggests another todo app? One plan isn't enough IMO; you should have at least 5, or even 10? The odds of one plan failing are a lot bigger than the odds of all of them failing. It's all a numbers game IMO. I prefer to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. One of our more successful blog posts literally took me 2 minutes, while we have others that took over a day and didn't work at all...

I'm afraid spreading out my semantic eggs across multiple baskets won't work for SEO. SEO is a long game, and it involves slowly building up focused external mentions, so I can't really flip-flop on that. On the other hand, I can freely experiment with paid ads and landing pages (they will be excluded from search), and that's where I can throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

> For the past 2-3 years I’ve been developing a todo app (Matterlist, formerly Tuskarr: http://tuskarr.tilda.ws/, past HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14154378) to replace Wunderlist because I’ve always been unsatisfied with it.

Honestly it looks good but it doesn't look to be really any better than anything already out there. Granted I haven't used it yet but judging by your wite's feature list and screenshots it seems like just another, generic ToDo list.

I certainly don't want to discourage you; I honestly haven't found a good ToDo list that does exactly what I want it to do either. But it's such a saturated market I'm convinced you either need to have insane publicity or a new, novel way of dealing with lists to be moderately successful.

> Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they will retire Wunderlist, likely in 2017.

I wouldn't be so sure Microsoft is going to retire Wunderlist in 2017. The only quote I can find from Microsoft regarding the timeline is:

> "incorporated the best of Wunderlist into To-Do."

Considering Wunderlist's insane popularity I honestly doubt they will ever completely shut it down...at least in any short term time frame. Sure they shut down Sunrise roughly a year after purchasing it but that simply displayed data from other services better; Wunderlist has its own cloud storage with a huge amount of data. That's not an easy switch for users.

I wish you luck but I am highly skeptical on their Wunderlist shut down.

> Honestly it looks good but it doesn't look to be really any better than anything already out there. Granted I haven't used it yet but judging by your wite's feature list and screenshots it seems like just another, generic ToDo list.

Hopefully that's because the temporary site I linked above was created literally in a couple of hours. The production homepage will have at least 50% of its real estate devoted to explaining why Matterlist is unique. There will be a block that explains major problems with existing todo lists and how Matterlist addresses them, and each of these problems will have a dedicated linked article explaining it. We do use some unique approaches to todo lists - for example, our approach to recurring tasks where we separate their definition and recurrences.

> I am highly skeptical on their Wunderlist shut down.

Maybe you're right, but I can't discount a complete shutdown. I'm planning to launch before the shutdown anyway (mostly because I need to build up SEO anyway), and I'll prepare some strategy / materials / campaings for the actual closure event, should it happen.

Gotcha. Good luck; I'll certainly take a look when you're done. I'm currently using Todoist for a lack of a better option. I really want something that I can, very easily, move stuff around and not have to ever care about organizing but will still let me file things away.

Example: how I use evernote is I have 3 notebooks: Inbox, Filed and Shared. I put everything into Inbox when I'm on the go then I eventually tag it with all of the tags I think are appropriate and move it into Filed. Shared just contains any notes shared with me or interesting things I've found online. But there isn't really any ToDo type of apps that let's me do anything similar.

> How do you plan your company around timing? It seems easy to say "they had good timing" in retrospect.

You should have a thesis about what's changed in the world/market to make your product compelling now.

> For example, with Justin TV/ Twitch TV they were "too early" because 4G internet was not ubiquitous, and most average people could not even consume their streams.

I don't think people were ready for this either. In the early 2000s, it was still weird to hang out in forums, for example.

It took an evolutionary-styled journey to normalise live video feeds. Instagram rolled out this feature only recently, once their users are used to the idea of sharing and crave for more ways to do so.

But I also wonder if these "too early" failures are actually necessary to prepare the consumer's mind to the idea, so that next time, they're much more open to it. And, it helps that the next iteration is most certainly improved and more considerate of the human psyche..

"Justin TV" sounds like a narcissist experiment. "Instagram Stories"? You're not a 'voyeur' if this is a standard feature and everyone's using it ;)

Interesting but I often wonder how much better VCs are than the rest of the population at determining startup success. In hindsight they can always say "see, those two factors were important, for my X exit. Told you so" but they also pick companies that make zero sense. Like the $400 juicer company (backed by the most respected VCs in town).

Some also claim to have a thesis but will quickly drop it the moment a hot company comes along that violates their thesis and everyone seems to be investing. I'd like to see a VC publicly state a thesis and then invest in only companies that fit it for 10 years and then do better than average.

And how much of it is confirmation bias? If you back a Facebook early in your career, the very best entrepreneurs will gravitate to you and you will have more success.

To be fair, the 2 things that are most often cited (timing and product market fit) are what many VCs do invest in, and they often get called crazy for doing so.

The $400 juicer is a great example: my guess is there were some metrics that led them to believe traction or timing were real, even though on the face of it the idea seems silly.

I pitched Niko (he passed for now, too early) -- and this interview does capture his style pretty well. My cofounder and I found him very smart, but also personable and genuinely interested in what the startup is doing. He asked good questions.

As for the '2 Underrated Success Factors' -- I think when Niko calls it 'timing,' you wouldn't be wrong to call it 'luck' (he hedges a bit in the interview). Any mental model for startup success that doesn't incorporate a huge dollop of luck is probably overfitting. But that's my two cents, not the article or Bonatsos's.

The other relevant parts:

> What are three things that turn you off when entrepreneurs pitch to you.

The first is founders who don’t know their numbers. I am talking about the post early stage company that has launched a product and has users but the founders either don’t know their metrics or are trying to hide something.

The second, also related, would be the founders not having empathy for and understanding their users. As a founder you need to understand the key reasons that are driving adoption of your product, in great depth.

Lastly, I want to invest in people who are learning animals. This is a tough one to assess in the thirty minutes to an hour I have with a founder but it is absolutely critical. I don’t care if you are expert now but I do expect that you will be one in three years.

I think luck and timing make sense from a VC point of view, but when you are on the other side, it feels slightly different: as a founder, you need to have a vision about your future consumers within 5 to 10 years, even before you are laying down the first brick... It needs to be so obvious and in your face that you can sell it effortlessly to others (including VC's and your prospects). You start from a gazillion ideas and hunches, and after a while some will keep emerging until they will evolve into a vision. You pick some of those ideas and try to assess them, to figure out if you are stuck in your own bubble, or are really on to something. To me it's a little bit like Thoughtworks' tech radar: adopt, trial, assess and hold. Once you've made your choice, one of the most important things IME is that you need to be able to adapt that vision based on customer feedback. By the time you're in that phase, it might look like it's sheer luck and timing, but I honestly believe that all the grunt work and preparation you did increase the odds to succeed big-time...

To mw, the most underrated success factors that seemingly nobody talks about (probably because it goes against the motto of "be smart & work hard and you'll be successful" that we all want to believe), are being lucky and existing personal connections/wealth.

The latter reminds me of an example of a London based startup where the CEO wasted millions of dollars on holidays and personal luxuries while trying to market an app with no mainstream audience. But hey, his dad was in the banking industry and could get him millions from investors he knew, so hey a non viable company got funded.

The relevant ethic being that it is ok to give money away as long as you give it to people who already have it.

These do not seem to very underrated. Jessica Livingston lists "luck" (mostly timing) as the #1 factor for becoming a unicorn. Empathy for users is also a frequent one "build something that you know is painful for your users"

I'd love to read about truly underrated aspects, such as:

- tiny differences that make all the difference (like Airbnb professional photographer)

- the mayonnaise effect (like Facebook: start small, whip the hype up, open up little by little)

- connections: different kind of startup founders need to know what kind of people?

- what's different between different successful startups?

"The 2 Underrated Startup Success Factors" sounds as bad as "one weird trick for startup success!" Please edit title?

> YikYak (valued at $500 million).

Oh the irony (they folded in April iirc).

The op here. Thanks HN! I appreciate the traffic and engagement. Let me know how if I can be helpful to you: jkuria gmail. And of course, thanks Niko for agreeing to do an interview with a random stranger who cold emailed!

A couple anecdotes about timing: I remember one of the Unity founders talking about how they essentially built a ship in the desert (a user-friendly game engine for Mac) and then a flood came for them to ride (the iPhone app store and all its games). And in a similar vein, one of the founders of a European ride-sharing service, GoMore (in case you don't know them, it's an actual ride-sharing service, not a taxi-service-disguised-as-a-marketplace like Uber) said that he'd essentially had his company in hibernation for several years when the smartphone revolution happened and suddenly they time was right for them to grow.

Fails to mention Customer Development, a critical first step.

Customer Development (see book by Alvarez) is the boring grunt work that makes it look like you had "timing". Really you are building traction.

Of course are timing and empathy for the user crucial to success, but the most important feature a person can have is being a learning animal (as he names it)! Staying hungry for new things and being bold are, long-term thinking, most rewarding!

My favorite quote: "[timing] could be explained as foresight or genius of the founder to launch the startup at a great moment in time". We should stop attributing others' success to pure luck

Timing and luck.

and measurement.

> timing

> products that seem stupid or annoying at first. In addition, there should be a small group of early adopters who really care about the product

saved you a click

You are offering a great product. I hope you can scale.

I would love a summary of every post but unfortunately we don't allow bots or novelty accounts on here.

Luckily, we have reddit for that.

The app Hews has a feature that shows the post with the text "tl;dr" in it underneath the link. It's quite useful in my experience.

You'd like it in the short term but probably not the long term. It's useful to remember HN isn't just a list of links. It's a conversation. If you set up your list of links to attract a certain audience, those people will eventually dominate the conversation.

From a strategic standpoint, the way to win is to appeal to a bookish audience. It's why HN is better than any subreddit.

(Besides /r/HighQualityGifs.)

http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ (not me)

I'll have to say. It's annoying at first.

Yes, that wasn't a very good article. "Timing." well duh. Might as well have said, "success," or "luck," or "having rich parents." Then the rest of it was a puff piece on how awesome the guy being interviewed was.

I'm going to assume no one really knows, and everyone just pretends to know.

To be fair, its different for every product. If you aren't a social network, I don't see how you could go viral. Search ads wont work if nobody searches for your product, ie if it is something completely new. You can't get users to refer friends if you have no incentive to give.

This is why I pay closer attention to advice that is descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Tell me what your situation is, and what you did that worked, and let me extrapolate. Bonus points for what didn't work.

> To be fair, its different for every product.

Doesn't that mean the entire idea is not generalizable?

I think timing is something you can actually reason about though?

"Lots of people have tried a similar thing before, what's different this time?"

Maybe it's that now there's millions more mobile users. Maybe there's a new regulation that got removed/got put in place. Maybe any of a hundred other things. But timing goes to an actual underlying reason.

I'm kind of pushing this point as it's something I've screwed up a number of times. I'd write off some startup as doomed while really the problem was that I wasn't considering everything.

Sure, I mean Star Wars was/is such a cultural phenomenon because of timing, but it was so much more than that. It was a great story, it blended old style movies with new style movies, it had great music, great special effects, etc. 10 years earlier and it's Buck Rogers, 10 years later and it's Flash Gordon. Lucas went over budget and had to deal with the executives who wanted to bail and pulled it off.

The article just wasn't very insightful, and it was on the top of the list. It's obvious this was a clickbait article to puff the guy they were interviewing. I suspect he is looking for clients and is using HN to get eyeballs and got some people to up vote it. That's more insightful than the article.

I dunno, maybe I'm just grumpy today.

Having started a business without worrying enough about timing, I'd say it's a pretty good article. It's easy to (arrogantly) assume the world will make way for your excellence, regardless of your timing, but it ain't always so.

> In addition, there should be a small group of early adopters who really care about the product

For writers and bloggers, this is often explained as "100 true fans" -- not sure if that particular term is popular in the startup sphere.

Kevin kelly's 1000 true fans

It's really just another way to say "Product Market fit" (rather than just Product), which was already identified by pmarca as what he thinks is the the dominant factor for startup success.

> small group of early adopters who really care

Reminds me of Kevin Kelly idea of 1,000 true fans.

http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

I love sheepdog startups which are like grandma sleeper cars with 1000 hp under the hood. Innovating in an area others dismiss, and killing it.

Got any examples?

iPhone (not really a startup), NEST off the top of my head.

The iPhone wasn't in any way developed "in an area others dismiss". It was a huge market, with huge new competitors entering it (like Google).

It's the lack of mechanical keyboard that really differentiated it. They all had number pads or mechanical keyboards, because everyone dismissed it. Now none of them do. Even Google's early prototypes had mechanical keyboards. When Schmit took took the idea to Google, they switched to screen keyboards.

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