The Long Grind Before You Become an Overnight Success | Hacker News Reader

The Long Grind Before You Become an Overnight Success

viniciusvacanti.com

365 pointsinmygarage80 comments

I think the most important advancements in history were done with a Long Grind before a huge success. Einstein worked away in mediocrity, living what to most people must have looked like a sub-par life on the surface. He toiled away on his own for years, then came his stratospherical rise to the upper echelons of human thought. Kant is another example; he spent 10 years alone in thought, publishing nothing in that time, before coming out with what turned out the be (arguably) the most influential philosophical work ever.

It seems that the hardest part is not losing faith as you're grinding away. However corny/lame it sounds, people who believe in you are the most important thing during the grind. How many people did you guys (yipit) have that had your back as you were working away for 2+ years?

I'm not in the Valley, but I've heard that this might be the best part about the it; you don't get judged for working on some random project full time(like this article says happened in New York).

I would have enjoyed this post a lot more if at the end they had not simply created yet another bloody coupon site.

I can understand going through two and half years of no money, pain and self-doubt if you were working on something world-changing. But just another bloody coupon site...

I don't want to be down on these guys. They sound like really nice guys; intelligent, persistent and bright. But, please, no, not another bloody coupon site

another bloody coupon site

Somewhere out there, there is a scuba diving school / cafe / massage therapy practice which does not have any way to turn money into customers into money into customers. If they had such a thing, it would improve the lives of their customers, allow the business to make payroll, and compensate the owners for the enormous risk, investment, and effort they put into the business. Delivering that -- scalable customer acquisition -- is a sexy, sexy problem. The coupon sites are an implementation detail.

I've got one customer who feeds ten families (and probably expanding soon) in the face of the worst economy his business has ever seen because Groupon Works For Us.

(I didn't downvote you)

I think it's important to make a distinction between businesses that are aesthetically pleasing and appealing to you, and business-in-general that's successful. Lessons from business-in-general can be very useful even if you wouldn't patronize them yourself and it's always nice when people open up about their experience.

Unless a business is actively knowingly hurting people, I think it's good to celebrate business-in-general even if the aesthetics/offers don't appeal to you.

Yup. It's kind of like being a web developer and building a startup. You have to be clear that you're trying to build a business, not a web site.

In business, you don't get points for being creative/sexy and win by getting the most points. You win by simply winning. At business.

Seriously, there is no reason to be so negative towards anybody's startup, no matter how "bloody" you think it is. Be happy for other people.

There not just another run of the mill coupon site. Check out what there actually doing. Aggregating all of that info, much like Hipmunk has done for airlines, and providing only stuff that is interesting/useful for you.

This whole thing about "Hipmunk is sexy! It's named Hipmunk! From guys who made Reddit! A YC company!" needs to stop. Yipit is just as boring as Hipmunk is. Please.

It seems like a lot of normal people (i.e. non-hacker types) thought they added some value to the world.

Tetra Pak (who make milk cartons) are worth billions of dollars. The people who make the toilet paper you wipe your ass with will make more money than most of us can ever aspire to! Boring pays the bills.

Well, at least it's an aggregator ... of all the other bloody coupon sites.

I thought the same. But who am I to judge them for their choices. If they can live with it (maybe even they have really fun working on their coupon aggregator) then why not.

Now I'm not sure about the sustainability of that business model. Investors seem to pump money into it because of Groupon's "success" but I'm skeptical if the group coupon hype will persist for more than the next 2 years.

I'd squeeze all the money I can out of the groupon thing and prepare to start another startup in some time.

I understand what you mean (I myself almost started "another bloody coupon site" but changed course for the same reason you didn't like the end of the post). But obviously what they were doing before wasn't working and they ended up being successful by giving people what they wanted in a way that provided some sort of value. There are so many similar sites out there that I think it's impressive they were successful doing something that is, like we all know, so overdone.

So I guess my point is that sure, we don't need another damn coupon site (we even have plenty of aggregators too) but that's beside the point and I appreciate the words of advice. That was motivating to me.

As a 31 year old with a full-time job to pay the bills and a family to raise, I feel like there is not enough time to act on my ideas so they just continue to collect dust. Stories like this give me motivation but I still haven't found the answer to the question: "how can I focus on my ideas full-time and still pay the bills and support my growing family?". In other words, I don't have the savings for two and half years of hustling on no salary and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I will continue searching for the answer. Thanks for the story!

As someone who is somewhat in your position and I'm now in my third start-up (last two failed miserably but taught me SO much)I think you are asking the wrong question: "how can I focus on my ideas full-time and still pay the bills and support my growing family?"

I think you should focus on picking one of the hundreds of ideas you might have and set a reasonable time-frame and strip your apps functionality to the core.

Once you arrive at that point, just set aside one hour, even half an hour a day to work on your new start-up. Before you know it you have a product and are up and running and at least have the opportunity to see what happens. This gives you the experience and the opportunity to fail many times (if you decide to do it more than once) so you get the hang of it and still be able to support your family.

Don't regret not trying.

Please accept this in a sincere and non-adversarial tone.

You don't need 2.5 years of a salary and full-time. Thinking that you need that is just an excuse. What you need is to set your priorities and be able to find a way to work an hour or two a day. Surely you can do that? If not, surely you can find a few hours on the weekend? Yes, you'll probably have to sacrifice some things. What you'll have to sacrifice depends on your own situation.

I'm not sure where I read this quote but it sticks with me... "those who want to accomplish something will find a way, those who don't really want to will find an excuse"

You take a look at your life, identify that hour here and half-hour there that aren't getting you closer to where you want to be, and use them for nights-and-weekends hacking. Then you start a long slog of little-by-little improvement. Eventually, the business eclipses the day job, and you quit. If you feel like it, you can then start another slog.

I have a very modestly successful small business, built over the last five years and change. At all points over that interval, I had sufficient income to maintain a wife and children to a standard of living commonly accepted among middle class folks where I live.

There are other options, such as "Transition from full-time salaried employment to contracting/consulting/etc, make a lot more money than you do right now, buy time with money."

> At all points over that interval, I had sufficient income to maintain a wife and children to a standard of living commonly accepted among middle class folks where I live.

Except for one little detail: you didn't have a wife and children, and that more than anything made it possible for you to identify that half-hour here and hour there that allowed you to make your move.

Having a wife and children has a huge impact on the amount of time available just to get through the things that have to be done and it is very well possible that at the end of all that you're left with too little time rather than too much.

Do contracting and consulting really pay reliably more than salaried work?

In either case it seems like programmers make enough money to save up living expenses if they only lived like people in blue-collar professions. I saved enough money from my summer coding internship for many months runway easily. ($3000 a month from my internship plus a $3000 stipend; both after taxes; $1000 a month estimated burn rate based on $750 a month for rent and utilities and ~$5 daily food budget by buying all of my food from the dollar store.)

When consulting doesn't pay it gives you time to work on your project.

All that really matters is how much you get paid per hour right? If high paying hours were easier to come by through salaried work, you could just work at a job with a salary for a year and then quit.

I have some good news and I have some bad news for you. The good news is it is possible to be some type of success while raising your family. Lots of people do it all the time. The bad news? The success will be limited compared to that person who just focuses on their work. True, that person has other problems to face which may destroy it and they are a rare breed of people but they must make a sacrifice in order to obtain it.

Why is this? Simple math. 24 Hours In A Day x 365.25 Days in a Year x 75 or so years in life = 657,450 hours in life. That's it. You maybe lucky and get more but chances are you'll get less than 657,450 hours.

Every time you use an hour for one task, you give up an hour for another task. One hour spent on your family means one hour lost working on your project. Then again, if your lucky, you may find inspiration in that one hour with your family that may help your idea but that diminishes if your work dwindles into areas which have very little to do with human interaction (e.g. Highly Abstract Math or Physics or Chemistry).

Just my two cents.

"success will be limited compared to that person who just focuses on their work"

Exactly. A person pursuing a career that is well laid out (such as medical school and then practicing as a physician) knows what they have to do to succeed. As an entrepreneur there is no road map. You have to have plenty of irons in the fire and will end up wasting time on things that won't pan out. You have to be selfish and put the success of the venture above everything else.

This is the correct answer. Sure you can work smarter; sure, you can come up with superior ideas; but time is almost always the limiting factor in execution.

It's unpopular to rally against the cheerleading "you can do it!" crowd here, but the reality is that you've made a choice to have a family, and that choice carries some consequences with it. Some people who have families choose to pursue their work above all else anyway, but this approach often carries the cost of divorce, resentful children, and some degree of social ostracism.

I'm in this position but I'm not going to let it stop me. The best lesson I've learned from HN is that I don't have to do it all myself (even as a solo founder). I need to learn how to outsource intelligently. Not there yet, but the wheels are slowly turning....

"degree of social ostracism"

because people understand when someone works for someone and has to work but they don't understand when someone works for themselves and chooses to work.

or because if you've already started a family you are generally expected to spend a certain amount of time looking after them/enjoying their company. People get socially ostracised/divorces/estranged children for working too hard at the office too.

Kids grow up really fast, and there are no do-overs.

So true. And I can say without a shred of doubt that I wouldn't trade what I have with my kids for ten facebooks.

I'm in a similar position to you, although I'm almost nine years down the line. I've spent most of my thirties raising a family and climbing the corporate tech ladder, doing jobs which didn't really interest me but paid reasonably well. I too have seen opportunities and ideas go to waste because I didn't think there was time to concentrate on them as well as home life etc. What didn't click was that I was spending so many hours at work that home life was suffering anyway. I'm now doing what I can on my own ventures and cutting back on extra obligations for my (full time) job. Previously I'd be the first guy to roll up my sleeves and pull a 24 hour session at work to fix an issue. Not now (although needs must on occasion).

Having an understanding partner can help. My wife is supportive of my efforts as we both realise that despite being financially comfortable at the moment, we will never be rich and I will never be completely satisfied carrying on in my current or similar roles. And who knows what will happen in the next 30 years? I may spend most of those out of work, unable to get a job due to my age. A fear of regretting never even having tried is a big motivator for me.

As others have said here, there is time to be found. Cut down on the TV. Don't work such long hours for other people. Get up an hour earlier than everyone else, especially at weekends. What I've found is that simply by doing 'stuff', I've become more efficient and more productive with the time I have. Ideas seem to be flowing more easily now as well. You can do it. Good luck.

Sometimes you have to burn all the ships (it is said that Cortés burned all his fleet before launching an attack on the Aztec to keep his men from retreating).

I burned all my ships 5 years ago when I decided to quit a fairly successful career as a network engineer for "bigco". I also moved to another city, (literally) burned my rolodex and told everyone I was starting a venture.

I'm still not an "overnight success" but I can tell you one thing: when you can't go back, you have to worry only about the best way of moving forward. In 6 months I was already ramen profitable.

Nothing against your method (it's what I did) but with a family things might look different.

I'm perfectly fine living from pizza and internet for 2 years. But if I had a wife (+ kid) I guess I wouldn't be too comfortable with that lifestyle.

I hear ya! I have lots of ideas that are collecting dust. I found that having a partner helps. Not only to bounce around ideas and build the product with but also for mutual dependence. Just like the author stated he didn't want to give up because of his loyalty to his co-founder, I find the same loyalty to my co-founder is what keeps me working nights and weekends... even when I'm exhausted from working all day and putting my 4 kids to sleep in the evenings. It's definitely difficult but rewarding.

Mine is to do freelance job in between to support myself in building my own ideas. If you are good and find the appropriate clients, freelancing can give you a good amount of money to have some runway before getting anther contract.

Any suggestions on how to find the "appropriate clients"?

This post reminds me of a philosophy held by Seymour Schulich, Canadian businessman and philanthropist. His philosophy:

"Your twenties are not a time to make money, they are a time to build your foundation; your thirties are when you make money."

The exact ages are peripheral, but the idea is sound: incur personal strength and experience and external success will (be more likely to) follow.

Mark Suster's post about a time to learn and a time to earn hints at this same idea: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-for...

Making money building your foundation is usually better than not making money doing so.

"... In all honesty, I probably would have given up earlier. The only reason why I didn’t was out of loyalty to my co-founder, Jim, who had also quit his finance job. He had passed up many amazing job opportunities to work alongside me and I wasn’t going to quit on him. ..."

Interesting observation. The advantage of having multiple founders is shown here where "accountability to comrades", "bonding", and "mutual surveillance" [0] means the founders stuck at the task long after a solo founder might quit in despair.

[0] David Grossman, P21, "Defeating the Enemy’s Will: The Psychological Foundations of Maneuver Warfare" ~ http://killology.com/defeating_the_enemys_will.pdf

This is a pretty good case against the notion that "ideas don't matter". They absolutely matter; how else can 3 days so drastically change the prospects of a company?

I had the opposite reaction.

>I’m convinced that if we had the idea for a daily deal aggregator back in 2007 or 2008 or even 2009, we wouldn’t have gotten traction because we would have messed it up.

>But, after two and half years of failing and learning, we knew exactly what to do

The idea didn't matter as much as the many other components.

I've actually come to believe that, with what I know now, I could have gotten traction with a few of my earlier ideas. Impossible to know for sure.

Of course ideas matter, just not all of them.

Would you have bought that idea for $1 million?

No one says ideas don't matter. Without a good idea even the best execution will yield nothing. Ideas alone are just not that much worth. (Other way round this is true too.)

I'm sure that if 100 teams would have tried to execute this specific idea many of them would have failed.

Don't be just the idea guy and don't be just the execution guy. Try to be both :)

This reminds me of an example used by Stephen Covey to illustrate the principle of "begin with the end in mind"[1]:

  Many people climb the ladder of success only to find
  the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

Like you say, it's not an either/or question, you need both. That said, I believe that execution is the more difficult of the two in most circumstances.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effe...

"No one says ideas don't matter." This is patently false. People say "Ideas are nothing, execution is everything" all. the. time. and it's just as wrong every time they do.

What they really mean by that, is ideas are on the critical 1%. You can mess up a lot on the execution, and still have a viable business; but if you're building the wrong thing, no amount of execution will save you.

But! In terms of energy spent, ideation consumes less, than a percent of the total investment: hence, a guy with an idea (even if it's the right one) can't claim to have invested much effort into the business as the one researching / custdeving / building it.

Time and time again people jump to the defense of people saying "ideas don't matter" by saying that's not what they really mean. If not, why not just say that, instead of such hyperbole that certainly gets misinterpreted.

The reason is because the world is full of people who believe they have a billion dollar idea, and all they need is to "find an engineer to build it". By contrast, there is not a single engineer running around offering to pay $10,000 for a killer idea so they can use it to execute their way to a billion-dollar business.

Thats true, but there are also surely people executing on poorly thought through or uninspiring ideas since they've been told to not go through the various thought exercises one should go though before settling on an idea for a new venture.

If you lack the common sense to realize that in order to sell something people need to be willing to buy it, then all the startup wisdom in the world won't help you.

They don't matter because having one at the right time in the right place is entirely out of your control. It is much better to build a system capable of handling an idea then to spend a lot of time waiting on the 'right' idea.

Very good post, I especially liked that they built the winning minimum available product so fast: It would have been most likely impossible without all the learning and failed attempts. Unfortunately, some things you can only learn by doing.

WSJ has taken to calling them a research firm "According to estimates from research firm Yipit Data" in an article about groupon

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190426550457656...

Mostly the lesson I'm getting from this post is not to quit your day job until you have some evidence of traction.

Okay, how do I tell the kind of long grind that leads to overnight success from the kind of long grind that leads to nothing?

And that's the difficult thing. It's inspiring to hear about how a team's long-running lack of constructive feedback finally led to success, but what about the 20 other teams who have gone 3 years and still haven't found it? Don't get me wrong, I like reading stories like this, but there is a lot more at play.

The hardest question which I battle with is knowing when is the right time to fold and start afresh. PG's 'Relentlessly Resourceful' post ties in very well this - http://paulgraham.com/relres.html

Great story, very inspiring!

I agree. I remember reading Seth Godin's book "The Dip" and the same conundrum is presented: when do you push through the dip and when do you quit?

He says you should quit when you're in a cul-de-sac or heading towards a dead end, both ultimately ending unfavourably. A dip, on the other hand, has a low point that feels like a dead end but inevitably gets better the longer you persist.

A good, short read that gives some suggestions to deciphering which is which if you're interested.

This is really inspirational for people who are working at it, hard, but don't get traction immediately, and all the while are reading about others whose businesses just skyrocketed right away.

It's not always a launch to the moon, sometimes you have to orbit for a while.

How do you guys make money from being in the deal aggregating business.

affiliate revenue, advertising revenue, data licensing revenue

Your 'about' says that you learned Django and Python, is that what you are using for Yipit? What does your technology stack look like?

The stack is all Python (2.7) using Django (1.3) on Ubuntu (11.04) and it works great. Python is fantastically easy to program and Django does plenty of heavy lifting. We use the ORM in about 95% of the queries and raw SQL in the other 5% (The Django ORM doesn't handle all m2m queries very well).

We use Celery for asynchronous processing and everything is running on Amazon Web Services. We use ec2, RDS, S3, SQS, CloudFront, Route53, and ELB so we are heavily invested on that front.

Yeah. I built the first version using Django but my code has been re-written by our engineers. I'll have our CTO chime-in on the stack.

Really inspiring article. It's great to attach positives to what you're doing not only to keep your morale up, but also to remind yourself that if what you're working on now doesn't pan out, it's not the end. Crazy to learn, though, that they managed to turn around their business in a matter of three days. Impressive that they kept with it and had the focus to transition to another idea (and make it successful).

Nice post! I've just had a failing experience but that also served to teach me some of the problems and difficulties involved in creating a startup. I'm happy you guys made it and I'm gonna keep trying till I find my place there too.

As cheesy as it may sound I find this song helps me keep in mind that I should expect things to take a lot of time and effort.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1iR2Wi3u5o

Great post Vin! A great story and inspiration for everyone who is grinding hard in the startup life. We all need a little reminder that its a slogfest before you make it.

I remember a very nice 2d chart of success vs time with an exponential curve, with a vertical line near the high rise, showing what people see vs what really happens.

Can anyone find it?

What is the differences, advantages that you guys (Yipit) have over other competitors (e.g 8coupons.com)?

Awesome post. I really liked the instructions about getting inital press.

I'am sure it will help me along the way. Thanks.

One can not plant a seed and expect fruit the next day.

Just a question about Yipit... don't they need millions of visitors to be successful?

100K visitors/month sounds nice, but they're in the deal aggregating business, so the margins are even less than if they were a deal site. They don't make money off every single user, and when they do... they make a tiny percentage as affiliate commission. Am I missing something here? I know regular old-fashioned coupon sites(like CouponCabin) that make good profit, but they have visitors in the millions, and their margin is much more.

Yipit also sells that aggregated data to various institutions (http://yipit.com/data/). Their pricing plans [0] suggest they make a non-trivial amount of revenue from selling this data.

[0] http://yipit.com/data/pricing/

EDIT: See vacanti's reply down there.

The people willing to pay $10k/month for data are hedgefunds planning to trade shares of Groupon. With the Groupon IPO postponed, it may be hard to retain and attract new subscribers.

Sure, that $10k figure is steep. However, I'm sure there are non-trivial amount of daily deal execs, VCs, and tech analysts who would gladly pay $2k/month to understand the competitive daily deal space.

What about Groupon paying 10k/month for data on what other deal sites are doing? How much interest there is in, say, food+bar deals would seem to be fairly valuable to their sales force...

Yeah, you're missing something. It's 2011, and we're in the middle of a huge bubble. The only thing that matters to most new startups is "getting funded". Making money is merely a sideshow to the main event, which is growing traffic and conducting round after round of follow-on financing.

After I read this article, I was wondering why something that took 3 days to build needs $6million in investment?

Thank you for the answer.

If only we'd gone through something like this before and knew better than to make the same mistakes all over again.

This Time It's Different(tm)

So, so true. And so horribly sad.

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