No Social Life in the Startup Phase?
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
To be successful, focus is the main requirement. Sometimes I hear it described as 'passion', but I'm not sure that that word is very accurate.
What happens is that a man is caught up with an idea and he obsesses about it, he thinks about it, he works on it, he changes it, fixes it, till at long last, he sits back and thinks - this thing bloody works.
Along the way, he's not going out and partying for two days, waking up with a hangover, deciding to take a week off from his business. He does not socialise because he has not solved the problem yet.
The failures are those who are thinking about money or how to get into yc or the big payout. Those ones are focused on the money, but instead of actually understanding that what they are interested in is the money, they pretend like their product is their interest. It's not.
Look at every successful entepreneur. They were driven by an idea on something in particular. They have an idea and they obsess till they get it perfect.
The companies who say 'We did not understand our consumers' were bound to fail from the start. This is because if you are not your own consumer, you cannot create a successful product. You won't have the focus, energy or drive.
When you choose your product, you have to choose one that you would choose to stay at home working on instead of going to a party with hot willing chicks. Even if you knew the product would never bring you any money. Does your current product fulfill this?
This is so important. I wouldn't say it's absolutely necessary to -be- your own consumer, but you better be 1 degree away, max, and that person better not have any reason to hold back when commenting.
Also, the article is not talking about a side effect. It is doubtful the successes of Google and Yahoo and Amazon were ever in danger of being derailed by parties with "hot willing chicks."
If however, you are a software developer, and you are outside trying to act like a businessman, then you will fail because you are not focusing on solving the core problem you set out to solve.
It's NOT possible to play all the roles. There is no super hacker who is also a super business man. There is no basketball star who is also an extremely successful musician. Those things require focus and dedication, and you cannot do both and be equally successful at both.
If you stay at home working on a "PROBLEM", not "PRODUCT" and the solution you come up with is better than every solution out there, and people want to use it, you will be successful because the guys focused on business will search you out.
If the problem you are solving involves search, you need to focus on that. Studying algorithms, AI, all that stuff. If you are spending half your time doing that and the other half looking for venture capital, you are setting yourself up for failure.
If however, you are creating a website for musicians and you are not going to music venues and taking notes, you are also losing.
Understand where your focus should be for the line of business you are in, and ... focus! If you find it hard or boring to spend so much time focusing on it, then that business was never meant for you.
Thinking about your product should be like playing a video game - challenging and fun. If it's not and you prefer to think about money or funding, then you have picked the wrong product.
Contrast that with the Amazon guy trying to solve the problem of how to retail books successfully online. This problem cannot be solved by sitting at a computer - one needs to talk to the logistics industry, publishers and so on.
Focusing on the problem will lead to different social behaviour for both teams.
If a person focuses on the problem and solves the problem, the difficulty in selling the solution becomes trivial. If a fellow creates a digg clone, he has not solved any problem. If a fellow creates a tool to monitor the health of students in boarding schools, he has solved a problem, and will have no difficulty in selling, because boarding schools know they need what he is offering, but never had it before.
It's common sense, but people still don't seem to get it: Focusing on the problem is the only way of solving it.
Money needs to be balanced in the problem-solving equation along with all the other issues. Build something you love, focus on it, do everything for it - and also make sure it puts bread on the table. If you fail to do that last one, you won't be able to spend the time to really focus on the problem.
Daniel