It Doesn't Have To Be All Or Nothing With A Startup
37signals.com
37signals.com
I realize that a lot of their philosophy runs counter to the already unconventional wisdom here, but so what.
I also realize that we may soon hit 37signals saturation (much like techcrunch saturation) here, but again, so what.
Many of us are in less than optimal situations (money, time, resources, collaborators, etc.), so this is some of the best advice you can get...
"How about you turn your perceived weakenesses into strengths. Embrace your constraints..."
Excellent!
My own example:
I am frustrated that I don't have enough time to spend writing my own code because I still have several consulting gigs. So, instead of asking, "How can I get more time in my week?" I ask, "How can I use what I learn from my clients to cut through the fog on my own software so that I don't need as much time?" That change in framing has really saved me a lot of time.
Sometimes you just gotta change your view by asking a different question. A 37signals post has once again helped me to think outside the quadralateral. Thanks, DHH.
All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.
I would take the new chips and redesign some computer I'd done before because I'd come up with a clever idea about how I could save 2 more chips. "I'll do it in 42 chips instead of 44 chips." The reason I did that was because I had no money. ... I know how to combine chips together very efficiently to get that goal done.
Thanks, Jessica Livingston.
If it's so easy to just create something with less time, less code, less people, etc... etc..., then there is also less of a barrier to entry, meaning that it should be easier for the competition to show up and grab some of the action. What's their barrier to entry? Popularity due to Rails?
I agree. One of the few consistent challenges I see in startup founders (including speakers at YC dinners) is DISTRIBUTION. They all say, don't underestimate the importance and power of distribution. 37s (with the SvN blog, Rails, Getting Real etc) essentially had "free" distribution...
If you add up all of the time/effort required to develop this passionate following, it'd be way more than 10 hours per week.
Yeah, setting up CVS tunnelling to my client's site is the best thing I ever did ;-)
That's not what I meant (although I suspect you said it in jest).
It has nothing whatsoever to do with using anyone else's property (intellectual or otherwise). It has everything to do with what I learned from the gig.
My most common example is so common and has so much common sense that it's easy to overlook. I call it the "suck test". Every time a client has me change something, I ask if it's because their business has changed since this was written or if it was just written poorly. It's often the latter. Every time I look at something that someone else wrote and say, "Who wrote this &#^$%? It sucks," I add it to my suck list and make sure I never do that.
This one thing has saved me thousands of hours. Stuff I never would have imagined unless I had seen it somewhere else. And there are a lot of other examples, too.
I think that this is what DHH meant when he talked about turning "perceived weakenesses into strengths".
There is the old saying that there is more than one way to skin a cat. One way it to work ever waking hour of your day, but another and just as viable way is to work for 10 hours/week.
This mentality of absolutes in entrepreneurship can be detrimental to ones success and promoting it only devalues the usefulness of communities like YC News.
Timelines are usually manually intensive to make "pretty" and automating that would be nice.
Here's some comments:
- The take a tour image is pixelated and ugly.
- It needs something more compelling, IMO, as a reason to use it. It is a neat widget, but nothing I'd think of using. Maybe there are some cool use cases that would get people excited about it.
- After just a quick glance, it feels like something that might be good as part of something else.
- Clicking and dragging on a timeline (the blog one, for example) is hard because there is too much 'link space' (even where there are no words) as opposed to 'drag space', if that makes sense.
The images are pretty bad, so I will try to do better ones this weekend.
As you and terpua wrote, it would be more useful if one could use it on a blog for visualization of entries, etc., and that is something I want to work on in the near future.
I will post it as an "Ask HN" item soon.
I'm not sure how accessible this advice is to those whose name isn't David and who don't have a tendency to say "woops!" when explaining stuff.
(ie to the non-DHH's amongst us, which I imagine is the majority)
Here's a qualificative for the article: If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time.
And most software projects fail.
Although that isn't any more definitive than anything else, it does give DHH's view some weight, and so far my experience in the industry backs it up.
Come to think of it: BurningDoor, 37Signals; maybe this is just a Chicago thing.
While I'm name dropping, Threadless is another Chicago company.
In every case, the result was software that required a huge amount of effort to do anything with (about as agile as a 16-wheeler with no gas in the tank and 12 flat tires), morale that tailed off as the burnout increased, and failure.
Most of those companies WILL fail, because their product will be poor, even if it's a good idea. Revolution health is a good example; they started out with a good idea and executed badly... now they're going through rounds of layoffs, making very little money, and Google is accomplishing what they've failed to (e.g. online health records).
The opposing philosophy is, "drop everything else and go full speed ahead on your product". Ok, do that. Your likely outcome is still bad. We talk ad nauseum about the successes in our field, but fool ourselves about the failures. The failure model isn't Kiko. It's the 1,000 PHP apps that we've never heard of, because they didn't get off the ground after they used up the runway they got from their founders 3 month sprint.
No matter what you do, the odds are very much against:
* You making enough money with a web app after a 3-month sprint to eat.
* You closing a round of funding of any sort.
On the flip side, if you do your product "part time", the odds are very good you'll still be nurturing your product 3 months from now, or 6 months, or two years. The "lack of focus" hurts your chances, but the sustainability helps your chances.
Also, let's just be clear about something: DHH didn't write the best web framework in the world. Rails is nice, but it isn't a prohibitively awesome technical achievement. If you set the technical bar at "Rails 1.0", most of the programmer posters here can clear it. Find another excuse not to take a swing. =)
> DHH didn't write the best web framework in the world. Rails is nice, but it isn't a prohibitively awesome technical achievement. If you set the technical bar at "Rails 1.0", most of the programmer posters here can clear it.
Rails was perhaps not quite as technically hard as other things, but in terms of putting together the right technology at the right time, it was brilliantly successful, far more than most products anyone here will release. So in terms of shining some light on basecamp, Rails was far more successful than doing something technically great, but obscure.
I think the key point that they make though, is that their success comes more from their decision to play to their strengths and be pragmatic, rather than their talent.
Don't make the mistake of underestimating yourself.
I'm not suggesting that you'll go out and write Rails in 3 weekends. What I am suggesting is that the more I meet "famous" hackers and the more I meet people from this community (online and offline), the more I realize that there's not really all that much that separates us.
Lot's of people here are (obviously) brilliant. And even for those who are a little less brilliant, brilliance is only one part of the equation. Work habits, determination, perseverence, passion, and maybe most of all, belief, are just as important. Don't sell yourself short.
I have no idea if I am as brilliant as DHH. Odds are against me. But he inspires me to achieve things just as cool as his. And I just know that I can. I suspect most people here can too.
I'm attacking the idea that anyone can start a successful startup with 10 hours a week - not the idea that anyone can start a successful startup (although I'd say even there there's a bar, but it's much lower).
DHH, in this article, presents a method that he suggest applies to anybody. I'm just saying it doesn't apply to anybody.
If you weren't working in 1996 (unless you graduated early, you were in high school, swombat) I'll say: do not underestimate how silly things were back then.
The book "Growing a Business", written in the '80ies, about a gardening catalog company of all things, has a lot of the same lessons as "getting real", and to boot comes with its very own ISBN.
Here's my summary of it (but go buy it, it's a good one):
But this looks like an awesome book, and I just bought it. Thanks!
"Odds are you’ll fail. Just as odds are you’ll fail if you take millions of VC money, hire a staff of twenty, and spend 120 hours/week on it."
The take-home point of the essay, ISTM, is that if you only have 10 hours a week for your startup, those 10 hours can still be well spent.
While I've never worked directly with Rails, working with Capistrano is making me use Ruby more and more and I'm starting to think the best qualities of Rails come from Ruby. Ruby seems to offer plenty of opportunity for an experienced developer to map their problem domain directly to language primitives.
Once you get good at doing that you'll be surprised how more efficient you become and how much more time you have for things like creating a business.
At least when you go all in, you get that extra drive to get your project in gear.
And yes the failure/success rate is not talked about, but I would venture a guess that the guys who work on their start ups full time, have a higher success rate(even if its only a few %) than the guys who do it part time between work, going to home depot, and tending to their garden
The fields are littered with the corpses of full-time startups. The world is going to try to kill you in a thousand different ways that you can't predict. Your product plan should focus on building something people will love. Your business plan should focus on keeping yourself alive to build that product. The two things are seperate.
Watch your step!
As is a huge bunch of startup advice purveyed via blogs, articles, books and so on. A lot of it seems to even conflict.
Not that it's necessarily bad, just that after a while I get tired of it and wish that there were more data. I actually think that that's a cool aspect of YC that's perhaps overlooked at times: with all the startups going through there, he's getting the chance to look very closely at a lot of different companies and people.
+1
Nice!