Best ways to kill your startup | Hacker News Reader

Best ways to kill your startup

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89 pointsvinnyglennon42 comments

Posts on creating a successful startup seem to all suffer from a lack of 2nd order thinking. Even some of the posts from PG. I’m sorry, but it is blindingly obvious, IMO, that startups should focus on surviving, whereas someone like Jeff Bezos has to think about how to serve an ace (and can suffer a good deal of failures before it would threaten his company).

The unending stream of platitudes that come with these posts are also quite obvious, but also somewhat useless: don’t hire too fast, but don’t hire too slow; find a market, but don’t copy your competition.

I think PG said in a post once that the YC partners joked that their job was to give founders advice that they would then ignore. So that makes me think that the advice/wisdom people should be dispensing/pursuing is: what can you do to make sure you follow all this good advice in a disciplined way? It seems like a lot of intelligent people fail to do so, why? How can you make yourself the exception?

I don’t necessarily have the answers, but from my limited experience the best advice you can give an aspiring founder is:

1. Don’t found a company. You have a good idea and you think you can execute? Great, go find someone who is very likely already doing it and help them out. You’ll have way more fun and probably make more money.

2. Okay, you absolutely have to do this? The thing you have to really nail to follow all this great advice is culture. I have been at many startups, the ones that suceeded all had one thing in common: a highly functional culture. What does that mean? It doesn’t necessarily mean everyone having warm fuzzies and a Swedish masseuse. It means that information in your organization can move effectively from anywhere in your company to anywhere else and people will feel empowered to act on that information. This is not the default mode for any organization. The default mode for any organization is territorialism/feudalism. Humans have evolved to be zero sum thinkers, they can’t help it. You have to create and organization that fights this constantly.

>> it is blindingly obvious, IMO, that startups should focus on surviving

I don't think it is blindingly obvious. In fact I think the typical beginner entrepreneur really doesn't know where to focus. I've seen a number of people commence business and focus on logo, writing blog posts, legal setup, making a website, and then the whole thing goes kaput months down the track because they didn't have any revenue, when I think they were perfectly capable of earning money from my external viewpoint, but the beginning entrepreneur thinks they should, or is enjoying, playing "business theatre".

And strangely it seems that there's nothing you can do to advise people otherwise during this phase of their personal development.... they are full of confidence and optimism and not open to hearing that they are not doing the right things. People are more likely to listen once they have failed and it has all come crashing down, then they have good reason to start looking for answers.

Essentially, make something people want, don't spend all your money before you have an income, fire weak employees, and find a co-founder you can work with.

I've never started a startup, but I'd be surprised if these nuggets of wisdom are news to anyone.

The tennis analogy was quite clever, but it lead me to expect more incisive advice.

While I agree with another poster that these don’t quite seem like “earned knowledge”. I wouldn’t dismiss these ideas out of hand for their simplicity.

In my personal experience, the most valuable/powerful things are deceptively simple, but very hard to do well, or do consistently.

A few examples that many people struggle with:

- Spend less than you earn

- Exercise regularly

- Prioritize doing things, or spending time with people you love

In my experience, startups are very similar. There are not that many rules you need to follow, but they are often difficult to “execute on”. A couple of examples:

- Find great people you trust and can perform

- Find your market/path to profitability as quickly as possible

I am sure if we spent time, we would find lots of other “simple rules”. But the key point I am making is that simple rules are usually the right things to do, but they are often the hardest to really accomplish.

I've been involved in several startups, a couple winners and a couple losers. Like all things in life I've found that the simplest principles are often the hardest ones to grok.

It's like jumping into a Indy Car, and you think "Just go straight and then turn left". Turns out when you are going 200mph at a concrete wall the simple things become a lot more complex.

A lot of the simple advice needs further unpacking, too. I've seen founders interpret "Make something people want" in all sorts of ways, as belied by their behavior:

- "Make something nobody wants, then keep adding features until something magical happens."

- "Copy another app that people already use, but add 'better' or 'faster' or 'easier' or 'prettier' in my marketing copy."

- "Survey my users and build whatever they tell me, no questions asked."

- "Build features that align with my own personal vision of what the product should look like, then hope that other people want it."

- "Create 1/5th of an ambitious product that people want."

- "Do an excellent job solving a trivial pain point that nobody cares about solving."

- "Make something completely new and unique that the world has never seen before, regardless of whether or not anybody wants it."

>"Build features that align with my own personal vision of what the product should look like, then hope that other people want it."

To be fair this is by far the most common startup advice. Make a product for yourself, because if you've having a problem others likely are too. The only place you fall into a trap here is if you're both unwilling to change the design in the future and you're wrong about the design.

> The only place you fall into a trap here is if you're both unwilling to change the design in the future and you're wrong about the design.

I'd change the "and" to an "or": is if you're unwilling to change the design in the future or you're wrong about the design.

This is because:

1. Even if you're right about the design, and can make people want it, the market (which drives what people want/can be made to want) may change. You will have to change, usually sooner than you think; a great vision doesn't prevent the need for that.

2. If you're wrong about the design or don't have a good sense for "what is needed/works", no number of pivots will save you, because each pivot will likely be to something that people either don't need or doesn't work.

A failure in either is a kiss of death.

Fair enough. I was thinking along the lines of Apple, where Steve Jobs knew exactly what he wanted and was very reluctant to bow to market pressure or critics because his vision was always the right vision. Or Basecamp, refusing to add new features or at least putting new features into spin-off companies to not compromise their initial vision. Either of these companies received a death sentence the day they were created... except they were right, so they succeeded.

Your comment shows its not black and white, there are many shades of grey in between.

Wow that’s a great summary and so true.

Totally agree that the short quippy phrases that people repeat are actually dangerous if that’s all you go by. There’s layers of meaning and they can be interpreted in so many ways as you show.

“If you ain’t first, you’re last.”

Super true.

I wonder if this (more granular) decision making is so unique to circumstances like team, idea, and market... that folks can only give the more generic advice without steering someone down a wrong path.

Particularly when you use terms like "grok" that 99.9% of the population don't understand. You need to build products for the general population, not your tech friends.

That might explain why my bespoke fedora startup failed.

I wonder how many people know/use that word. I hear it a lot in my circles, and not just (nor mostly) from technical people.

Stranger in a Strange Land (where "grok" comes from) is a great book btw for those who haven't read it.

The only place I've encountered that word, is from reading the book, and on online tech forums. No one in my 37 years of life, has ever said that, and I've been in the IT/Web side of things for the last 20.

I recall seeing it on Slashdot back in the day (and guessing its meaning by context), but I first heard it in person from an older physicist, probably the right age to have been reading Heinlein as a youth.

Guess what - that's the advice. There is no epiphany to stumble upon here or anywhere else, no secret that you're going to find on a Saturday. Make something people want. Control spending. Focus on the people you sell to and the people you work with. The end

Even if you did all these things, there is no guarantee that your startup will succeed. You can have a superior product but it's too early or too late. You can have bad luck with publicity or there could be other million reasons out of your control that cause you fail.

It doesn't sound like these are drawn from the author's experience, but rather from other things the author read, which would make it more of a haphazard survey than earned advice.

That article looks like a bot-generated content. There are Facebook bots, Twitter, Amazon bots (like, bots that generate book contents), even Youtube bots with (sometimes super-weird) machine-generated videos.

BTW they do get clicks, so this is not some AI research moonshot, it is more like a little cottage industry popping up.

Hey, I'm the author, and it's not :) But I guess the fact that you think it is is good feedback, so thanks

Hey, FYI: I'm the author. Thanks for the feedback. And you're right, for most part. That's why I mentioned it's with input from 50 entrepreneurs who shared their mistakes and failures. Thanks for keeping others sharp about it, though.

At this point it's hard to tell if these posts are auto-generated or not. On this one, I'm leaning towards yes.

Well put. Perhaps AI is getting closer to passing the Turing test because humans are regressing.

The Turing test is a dialogue. There is already tons of programmatic content on the web and it is indistinguishable from human-written content in the absence of contextual cues.

Would've been cool to use AI to generate this post. If you know of any tools that can do this, let me know.

BTW. I'm the author :)

So if I have an idea that I think people want, how do I figure out whether my assumptions are correct? Short of actually making the thing.

This is some classic advice: you don't know until people buy it, which means you have to make some version of it to find out.

Talk with people to develop the idea as far as you can, but you don't truly know until people pay you. So you have to deliver a product (unless you're lucky enough to get pre-sales but even then you've likely invested something in a prototype) which is that point your stomachs tightens up as it requires some amount of money to develop this product. Aka the moment you find out if you really believe in this idea, enough to risk it.

Whether it's server costs, building a physical prototype, buying a data set, whatever it is.

Someone buys it, cool. Then don't spend anymore money until you've repeated the sale several times to validate you didn't just find this one unique customer.

A few would-be entrepreneurs have asked me for advice (though I'm not sure why) and are looking for that whole reverse prescription to success through how other people did it, which is a fallacy - there's only your path. I've noticed that they were stuck in this idea phase and it always came down to that moment of putting your money where your mouth is. I would just tell them either you believe in your idea enough to pay the $5,000 to fabricate the metal for your prototype, or $500 for the up-to-date information for your real estate developer app, or whatever the thing is that is your next step, or you don't because you don't really believe in the idea enough to take the risk. Which is fine, just recognize that and keep searching.

“prescription to success through how other people did it, which is a fallacy - there's only your path”

I’d like to provide a counter example to this. Reading Eric Ries’ blog in 2009* made a big difference for my company. Changing the way we worked changed our trajectory.

* http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/

I suppose I should say when talking about starting a business from scratch, less so operating one :)

You talk to a bunch of people and ask them if they would be willing to pay right now. Better if you don't mention that it's not available until they agree to pay.

It's sort of a funnel: people you think want it > people who actually want it for free > people who can see themselves wanting it if someone else pays (i.e. future them could pay) > people who are actually willing to pay themselves.

Keep in mind you'll get a lot of false positives. This is one of the biggest mistakes I always did when validating ideas. I would ask people (and myself), would you use or pay for product X? People would say yes, I would develop it, and then no one would use it.

I realized you need to ask a follow-up question. Would you use or pay for product X? If yes, then why are you not using similar services Y and Z that already exist?

If it's truly a good idea, then they already know about Y and Z, because they've been searching for a solution to their problem. They might be paying for one of those existing inferior services too, because they need this problem solved, and they're the only options available. That would be great news. It's bad news when they don't know anything about the existing services.

As a simple example, you could ask pet owners if they would use a social network for pets, where they register their pet, post entertaining photos of their pet, follow other pets, etc. Basically, Facebook where all the profiles and posts are from animals.

You'll get a bunch of yes answers from pet owners, which sounds very promising, and you might start on development. As I said, this is a mistake. If you search on Google, you'll find lots of existing pet social networks. So, ask those same people, if they said yes, why don't they visit Google today, and register on one of those other 10 sites? Why didn't they sign-up on one last month? Usually, once they find out the idea exists (or you develop it), they realize they don't care for, or need the service as much as they originally thought.

As another example, I might want to develop a HN theme with bigger voting icons, larger text and links for improved readability, etc. When I ask myself, I answer yes, it's all positives, and I want and would use this theme. But then I ask, why have I never used any existing HN themes from other users? When did I last search for HN themes, because one probably exists today with some of the features on my list. I then realize that I don't care that much about a theme after all, and I actually prefer running sites as they're originally designed, without third-party themes or add-ons, even if they do add a few beneficial features.

This was a pretty clever idea. I haven't heard about it before. It gets some of the benefits from making an MVP in a really cheap way.

> people who can see themselves wanting it if someone else pays (i.e. future them could pay)

Great way to make this point! So when you ask someone "would you pay for it?" you are really asking "would you use it if someone else paid for it?" Which, really, doesn't tell you very much at all.

^^^^ This funnel is great

First of all, read Lean Startup by Eric Ries. That will get you started if you actually do it.

Secondly, the specific technique that might work in your case is to invest a trivial amount of money using ad words or some other advertising vehicle to produce an ad for your non-existent product. Have a landing page for the ad that describes the product. Harvest email addresses of people who are interested in applying for access to your "beta" on that page. That will help you gauge whether or not people are actively looking for a solution to the problem you think you could solve.

Expect to iterate.

Watch Netflix. :) kidding, I go with actions are louder than words. Make something, send it into the world. The thing need only attract the people you wanna talk to (ie. get money from or proxies).

I don't know why you were downvoted. I am of the same opinion for when it comes to humans, action speaks louder than words.

Note: I'm the author of the piece.

Thanks a lot to the person who decided to share this here. It taught me a lot. HN really hosts a group of experts. The comments here have been super nuanced, showing actual mastery of the content. Really helps me sharpen my writing, so thanks to all for commenting.

I don't get the quintessence of this article. Startup life is hard, a rollercoaster and many factors may it be good or bad will turn your startup into a success or failure. I miss suggestions or ideas how to face these problems and what a founder can do to minimize the risk.

For the author, I would love to read about scenarios where a startup or the author itself overcome or prevent the mentioned problems.

Hey Benjamin,

I'm the author of the article, and love your feedback!

This article was actually a follow-up on a previous article, and wanted to dig deeper on the failures of others. Will dig even deeper to figure out how to overcome and prevent those problems.

Thanks!

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