The Unhealthy Desire for Prestige
financialsamurai.com
financialsamurai.com
Laughing at how real this is. This is exactly the situation with me and a friend. We both had an idea for different businesses 2 years ago.
He prints business cards, incorporates a business, talks about partnerships, a launch party, worries about getting too big....and has no users.
I quit my job to code away in the morning, reply to user feedback in the afternoon and emulate my competitor's marketing at night. I did this every day....and just passed 100,000 users. Hardly anybody knows what I do.
The difference between us: he works for a big tech company where everyone talks about their app idea™ over lunch and lives in a city where splashing $1000 on bottle service is seen as smart instead of foolish. I don't. Instead I grind for two simple reasons: to be free of a boss and to make something people find valuable.
I love my friend and I'm not knocking his approach, nor saying mine is better. But printing business cards before gaining users is a bizarre way to order one's priorities.
Like business cards, buying a domain name makes it seem like you're doing something, but you're really not. You haven't even started; you're just throwing a small amount of money down the drain and dreaming of some future moneymaker.
I'm sure there are many people who have domain names for 1+ years but haven't worked on the product the whole time. I did that once and then learned my lesson!
If it helps, think of buying (and choosing) the domain name as the reward for making something work :)
----
EDIT: "playing house" is the term that Paul Graham uses for people who go through the motions of starting a business without understanding what they're doing.
I bought my domain name (my user name) relatively early (before I had even learned Node) because as Chinese names often go, vtang was already taken and many easy alternatives as well. I ended up with an "e" at the end for "engineer" but as we all know there is probably a Vincent Tang out there in the world who is also an engineer. Checked all social media and hammered things in asap.
there are different paths to success. one path is through sales, in which a good prototype/demo and pitch can get you early, paying customers.
you print up business cards and product sheets--even before you have a company set up--and hand them out during sales meetings to bring a little bit of legitimacy to your venture, and that's worth the $15-20 (plus design time) it takes.
(funnily enough, I walked out on a fledgling fintech startup with a guy from a similar background to John from the article whose prestige obsession was the opposite: paying for people to write serious amounts of software to create a more mostly-cosmetically modern bespoke internal document management system he was convinced he needed to get the partners he needed to take his ideas for disrupting other aspects of their mostly customer marketing & relationship driven business model seriously. Frustrating when he had connections to potential needed partners anyway and they were more worried about leadgen than anything else, something he knew a fair bit about about and could have focused on instead, but something that might have resulted in falling at the first hurdle...
tbf he paid for it, stuck at it and his business is showing some signs of life these days)
Might you expand on thisa little, in loose terms, please?
What I mean is I spend 1/3 of my day looking at how my competitors got to where they are and try to replicate it. Did they get featured in Lifehacker, are they trying any shady stuff like purchasing positive app store reviews, are their primary channels email or search - this kind of stuff. I try copy their secret sauce and add my own.
There is an interesting theory called "social comparison" [1], which states that one way to define ourselves is to compare us with our peers, either upward or downward. It's pretty on point in my personal opinion, because I do it as well. And when I have mentioned this theory while chatting with friends, they confirmed that they do it, too.
We humans are brittle creatures that pretend to be very strong and independent in order to survive and not be vulnerable.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/social-comparison-...
In my time off, I built a few profitable projects and gave away CEO title to my friends. I write blog posts anonymously so my name is never associated with anything. It was a pretty big mindset shift, but it's been pretty good so far
I'm interested in doing something similar.
> In fact, I don’t think I’ve cared about prestige since 2010
Yeah, right. We're all wired to seek prestige. If we don't get it we wither and sulk. He just figured out that he's unlikely to get it via traditional means, and decided to seek it via an alternative route. Perhaps there are extremely rare mentally atypical people who really don't care about prestige, but it almost certainly isn't you or me or the blogger. Be careful about the lies you tell yourself.
Learn to respect and admire yourself rather than relying on society to gratify your ego. It's a lifelong process not a state to achieve.
Some thoughts:
1)Life is hard and humans respond to that in a variety of ways, like desire for prestige. However prestige is one thing that can be given and received freely as well. Compliments are a great way to build a culture of cost-free prestige. It’s not always about climbing the stack rank.
2) Consumption as prestige is a trap created by marketing, but at the same time a signal that works well in some cultures. Signaling you desire more let’s leaders know you are hungry to grow. You can think of this as unfortunate, but it’s very real.
3) Sometimes it is just nice to have nice things.
I find the desire for external prestige dies when your internal sense of prestige grows. You see many wealthy people become unconcerned with showing off after achieving real goals in the world. That being said they still live in mansions and drive exotic vehicles.
Is that really how it works? If I look at Chinese materialism as prestige, I don't see anybody signaling that they are hungry. I only see people signaling that they have stuff and that somehow having stuff equates happiness and "something good".
Is this from Zero to One?
OK, great. I'm 39, I'm right there with you. But is this advice useful or actionable for people in their 20s?
If everyone thinks it's valuable, then there's insane competition, and you're unlikely to get meaningfully ahead (unless you're simply smarter and work harder than everyone else).
PG wrote several paragraphs about prestige here which still ring true to me:
http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
(Corrolary: it was best to join YC when it wasn't prestigious, e.g. when Reddit or Dropbox did. Now that it's prestigious, it's probably less valuable. Although it could still be valuable compared to the alternatives.)
Customers don't give you money because you joined a good accelerator, so in that sense the "reverence" is useless. It's also a double-edged sword, because you'll attract people who are looking to ride your coattails, as opposed to doing useful work.
Apparently this phenomenon is common enough that PG has a word for it: "playing house". People join YC and play house rather than start companies.
If you are in your 20's the take away might be to focus on keeping your costs low and maximizing savings to reach that point of financial independence earlier.
Absolutely. There are countless people struggling to get into the media in LA or NYC who could walk into a good job at an advertising firm in Cleveland or Tulsa. If you're considering founding a startup, you're probably better off organically growing a B2B product aimed at a relatively obscure market sector than going for the B2C unicorn. If you're looking to buy a house, you can find some real bargains that have ugly exteriors or are in unfashionable suburbs. Vacations in well-known resorts tend to be overpriced and overrated.
http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young.
https://www.amazon.com/Trading-Up-Consumers-Goods-Companies-...
I really liked the parts where they talk about how new luxury items are often based on some technical aspect that makes the new product much better than what was there before.
I remember one point about how the old luxury was based on rarity. People with a nice watch didn't want to see others wearing the same watch. But with high end mountain bikes it is actually very cool to see others on the trail with the same gear.
Why not just take this to the limit and become a Buddhist then?
I'll answer that question: because our desires are possibly adaptive and are what keep us alive. The problem is not prestige, it's holding the wrong things to be prestigious.
(I mean an advertiser or housing builder etc...I don't mean the author of this piece, or for that matter my own comment either!)
I also think that John was a metaphorical figure. I can name a few startups that got financed early and are now attending conferences, hiring and spending a lot of money, without actually doing anything for their business.