Luck and startups: Our journey
kapwing.com
kapwing.com
It is sad that many founders or business owners tend to gloss over this fact when they go on to write blog posts or write a book or go on the speaking circuit when they have 'made it'. It is easy sometimes to attribute to 'good old fashioned hard work' what can be attributed to pure luck.
Running a successful business is somewhat akin to a lottery.
But the lightning never struck, wrong place wrong time, opportunity never came, you name it.
Gently and quietly they went.
Let's look at one totally random example off the top of my head - Grumpy Cat. Now, GC's owners basically sat there while the owner's brother I believe, posted the cat's picture on social media, which turned into a storm that netted GC's owners multi millions of dollars in marketing deals. Sure there was probably some hard work after the fact in managing those deals, but initially, it was just pure dumb luck of the cat's picture being posted in the right place at the right time to ignite the response of the world. Tons of other cat pictures go unnoticed every day.
I had a client many years ago - a nice chap, but not what I would call a good businessman. He had trouble stringing a coherent sentence together, and had a bad drinking and gambling problem. Only he happened to start an aboriginal art retail business right when 'Crocodile Dundee' came out and Australian Aboriginal Art was the big thing. He basically had a $1M annual turnover business overnight, and had no clue how to manage it. In fact, we were called in to run an audit because some of his employees were embezzling truckloads of money from him right under his nose. He just lucked into a thriving business but not due to any sort of acumen or hard work. Next door to him there was an auto mechanic business I also worked with whose owner (who was in a wheelchair BTW) worked 80+ hours per week to struggle to put food on his family's table. I found it hard to look at these two businesses literally running side by side, and say that it was anything but dumb luck that separated them, regardless of hard work.
sure, luck is a factor in everything but it's not a make or break factor in startups. in startups you make your own luck. you work hard, suffer the small wins and losses, until you get yourself in the right place at the right time. some people find that opportunity early, some later but both get there because they worked at it. even Uber founders had to work hard for it. and don't even get me started on Airbnb's founders
Work hard => success is a simplistic and misleading mythology, not an evidence-based reality. It also leads to toxic relationships with workers, because if a founder or manager believes that more hours = success they'll make some very stupid business decisions and trash the quality of life of some of their employees for no good reason.
If hard work (how is that measured?) isn't a primary factor - and plenty of research suggests it isn't - then the realistic way for founders to increase their chances of success is to understand that factors that actually contribute the most, and maximise those.
There is definitely a case to be made that taking a normal job vs doing a startup wins in terms of opportunity cost. But to compare it to a lottery is obviously an exaggeration.
Just because luck can create some overnight succeeds stories doesn't mean that all successes were purely created by luck. You have to be in a position to benefit from a lucky break in the first place.
[1]I'm not counting cases where people exploited weak randomness in ticket numbers to predict wins
I don't doubt that a version of it goes back much further. It seems like something one might hear in ancient Athens, or from some of the Roman humorists.
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/21/luck-hard-work/
If anything, some copy cats are indeed lucky and take off, leaving most wondering how exactly did they succeed. Of course, these lucky ones later cobble together stuff that makes then a bit different from the competition, possibly eventually acquiring big competitors.
The only thing I agree with is that weak promotion and marketing can harm the success of a good product. That said, it is my firm belief that quality always wins. A really good product will become a sleeper hit sooner or later if it has gathered enough mass.
“Put up as many metal rods as possible” x Time
I made a list of 30 things we need to do to reach 1 million users. I didn’t think we’d ever reach a million users since we were only getting like 100 signups/day.
Today, we have 3.5 million users and getting 3000 signups per day. It took us 12 years to get here but when I look at that list I see that I have tried everything on it but pretty much none of them really worked. I have tried hundreds of other things and found a few things that worked.
So, lightening is a good metaphor.
Also, even though you theoretically are better when throwing #5 (4 shots of experience and learning), it's still random enough that you could score worse than throw #1
It almost seems like a pre-planned acqui-hire play, where they build up a reputation for the entrepreneurs, not the product itself.
We're definitely not a pre-planned acqui-hire play haha. We're completely bootstrapped and just trying to build a website that can pay our bills and make money so we don't have to go back to the corporate grind. We would love to build a reputation for the product but it's hard and takes time. For now, we just wanted to share about our startup experiences along the way!
The video editor itself might not be too relevant for the HN community but I think our startup learning lessons definitely can be.
Seems like most of what they are doing is (self) promotion. Nothing wrong with that; but I think we can distill their advice down to that.
These are becoming spammy.
However have to be very prepared, risk tolerant and actually have something that stands out and attracts customers and you're either quarter or halfway there.
Luck in business is more like societal movements, consequences and jerks that catch people by surprise