Whatever thing you are building at Facebook starts out with 10 hurricanes of wind behind it.
Startups begin with all the wind of a baby blowing a raspberry.
if this was article about how to validate a product idea, that fb launches, than it might be helpful and poignant.
but it has no relevance for validating a start-up
It's remarkable how often things still fail miserably despite hurricane-force winds behind them, as with Hobbi and Lasso.
Facebook got their ass royally kicked by Pinterest and TikTok.
July 2nd: "Facebook is shutting down TikTok clone Lasso and Pinterest rival Hobbi"
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/lasso-shut-down-facebook.htm...
Practically anyone can build a racecar, or a startup. The race puts proof to the lie: not everyone can compete, and not everyone wins. The first issue is systemic; the second: hard work, capital, and dumb luck.
Life, like business, hopefully doesn’t have a checkered flag, but it’s a fact of life all the same. All anyone can do is race their best to win, for whatever your own personal winning conditions are. Choose your racing team wisely!
Sure, you don’t know if you don’t go. But you also don’t know if you don’t know to go. Can going be taught? Isn’t that what startups do?
The post was factual, as are all of my posts, in my own overwrought efforts to be satirical, witty, clever, or argumentative, in the spirit of debate of course.
My point is, I guess if I could even find a common thread, is this. Don’t stop racing. It’s what makes you want to be who you’re not. If that doesn’t inspire you, go meet your heroes and their friends and associates and nearby hackers, and get back to me.
Shout out to Noisebridge.
The point is that for most startups, you validate your ideas from your kitchen table, fighting to get a handful of visitors to visit your site.
When facebook launches a product at blasts an infinite firehose of users at the product.
So the facebook experience is utterly different to the startup experience and really its kind of absurd to be sitting in facebook advising startups how to do what they do at facebook, they're such disconnected experiences.
Maybe the topic of the article should have been "how to validate a new product coming out of one of the biggest tech companies that ever existed, advice for other product managers from FAANG".
But the FB brand does not get your app Product Market Fit.
Those people who entered the door because of the ads $ spent, leave and then don't come back.
Never mind that your math doesn't even make sense. Even if only 1% of users retain after a year, 1% of 100m is 1m more than your 90% retention of 0 users.
Just the metrics and analytics that FB can gather on experiments is an insanely huge hill a regular startup can't climb. FB can gather and analise data at a scale, on so many markets and devices and demographics that none other plan tier at 3rd party integrations can hope to match. The SRE support you get, a 30 minute conversation with other great product managers, engineers, designers one meeting invite away, a history of what others have tried and what worked and what didn't, and so much more.
And if you get a VP to support you, even for a bit, we're basically talking about a torrent of money and resources being thrown at your project while you still drawn a 6 figure salary (plus benefits and bonus and stocks!). It's really apples to oranges here.
having experience at FB as a PM is not the only qualifier for starting a start-up. it takes a lot more than that to be successful