The only question your startup needs to answer: What’s your one thing? | Hacker News Reader

The only question your startup needs to answer: What’s your one thing?

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39 pointsthankuz21 comments

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Obligatory City Slickers reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1uOqRb0HU

Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?

[holds up one finger]

Curly: This.

Mitch: Your finger?

Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean shit.

Mitch: But, what is the "one thing?"

Curly: [smiles] That's what you have to find out.

This is the meaning of life: that everyone has a purpose

I'm personally opposed to this worldview, along with all the praise to "talent". I don't see it as natural, but requiring practice and dedication. From my point of view, "everyone has a purpose" is actually harmful because people will hop on from one thing to another, looking for their "purpose", when they should be making it all along.

But I don't think "everyone can make their own purposes" is as catchy.

A point here that I think gets lost sometimes in the "ship it" mentality is that you can't iterate your way to figuring out your one thing. You need to start with the one thing and then iterate, not vice versa.

Isn't pivoting basically a decision you reach after realizing you need to iterate your "one thing"? I would argue that realizing you can iterate your one thing is as important as the idea of having one thing.

I disagree. Iterating your way to finding your one thing is just experimenting in hopes of landing on something. That's possible, but that's more a science project than starting a company.

What I'm advocating (from experience) is that you should/must settle on a one thing before you start your company. You can then iterate towards figuring out how to make your one thing work, gain traction, etc., but you need to at least know what the one thing you are trying to do is before you start your company.

e.g. just saying "I want to do something in the storage space" isn't enough. You can spend the next 2 years trying a lot of things in the storage space. That's experimenting.

But identifying a specific one thing you want to do in the storage space enables you to start a company. Then, you can iterate towards the solution, but you need to start with a specific problem you want to solve.

I somewhat misread your question, sorry.

"Pivoting" imo means choosing a new one thing.

thankuz: Browsing your profile and submissions I noticed that you are submitting 20 to 30 stories per day. Don't you think that is a bit much, and that this frequency makes it much harder for other interesting stories to get noticed? I would have written you an email, but you haven't got one in your profile.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=thankuz

I've answered this a couple of other times publicly, but feel free to send an email to admin [at] thankuz [dot] com

Too bad you can only vote once, i would put a +20 on this !

That's for me the critical feature #1 in a service : your users use your product for one very clear reason. They come to your app to do specifically this. There might be other features on your app, but there's a main one, clearly defined.

And by using this feature, they get value. It is simple, it is straightforward. Value can be content (Quora answers). Value can be an action or reaction (check-in, "count me in" on a plancast). Value can mean earning or saving dollars.

Love the subject, blogged about it here: http://laurentk.posterous.com/in-search-of-the-perfect-viral...

+1!

The best apps do just one thing very well.

Thanks for the repost on this!

You're welcome. Thoroughly enjoyed it! Happy to say, "I know my startup's one thing". Now, just have to stay laser focused on it.

The key is to stick to it and avoid all distractions.

Exactly! If the G.I. Joes taught me one thing when I was younger, it was "knowing is half the battle." Now that I know, just have to execute, and like you said, stick with it!

Sorry for noise - but the phrase 'laser focus' always bugs me. AIUI, lasers aren't focussed (which I would define as: having non-parallel rays converging on a point), they are collimated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimated_light (i.e. parallel).

Of course I understand the sentiment, and I similarly understand that when people say "exponential" they commonly mean "big" rather then "has rate of growth proportional to current value".

To try and rescue some signal from my noise - sometimes it's possible to "turn off" people with choices of phrase. Particularly technical people of a certain bent. That can be a useful observation for a technical startup founder.

I see your points and they are well received. I am not THAT scientific, it's really just an expression, but to argue your point a bit I pose this:

Rather than thinking of it as a laser being focused on an object or location (cause to converge on or toward a central point) try thinking of it as physical time and effort (focus) in a direct beam like a laser (concentration of attention or physical energy on something).

Really, it all depends on your perspective, and how you define "focus". And, whether or not you take it as an analogy or for face value.

It could be understood as laser-like (i.e. parallel, collimated, non-diverging etc.) focus (i.e. mental focus, attention etc.). In this case the expression is correct: it just means "non-diverging attention" and doesn't say anything untrue about lasers. I'm with you on exponential though.

I love nerds.

Variation on a theme: You can't have three priorities.

corollary: ONE entity cannot have three priorities.

If you have to answer to three departments equally you CAN have three priorities. That's what managers are for, to turn those into 1. Lots of companies still don't seem to get this.

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